and that they are “universal” and not peculiar to the individual. Archetypes are archaic universal images that have existed in the mind since remotest times, but which come alive, and seem to take on a life of their own when a person responds to their presence within himself. They may take an individual form, depending on an individual’s response to any one of them. But popular myths, as in fairy stories, and the experience of certain universal motifs, as in dreams, show that these archetypal figures are universal in Nature. And therefore show that these archetypes are a potential universal heritage for us all. This is so regardless of whether we are aware of their presence in our souls, or not; and regardless of whether we have in any way responded to this potential heritage in our unconscious, or have left their presence undiscovered. Jung says the concept of archetype was considered by Plato, occurs in Philo, and Irenaeus, and is compatible with Augustine’s thought. It has an ancient history.
I say Jung was a universal genius in science, rather like Isaac Newton, because he was able to blend his deep study of alchemy, which the modern man tends to regard as the fantastic and ridiculous meanderings of the pre-chemists, and his profound knowledge of Greek and Latin thinkers, and of the symbolism of the Fathers of the early Church, with his professional knowledge gained from treating his mental patients, into a comprehensible structure. Because of his incredibly wide learning, he was able to co-ordinate the thinking of the last two thousand years of Western thought on the subject, and to produce ideas which are consistent with it. Indeed he was able to go a little further, and to some extent link his ideas with Chinese thought, due to his friendship with Wilhelm, one of the first scholars of Chinese folk lore. Jung may also be the last universal genius in medical psychology, because who nowadays will take the trouble to master the esoteric scholarship of the alchemists, which of course stemmed from within the psyche rather than from the laboratory, now that he knows that their so-called science fits in with Jung’s ideas on the structure of the human psyche?
It is true that Professor Stout, professor of logic at St. Andrews University, made a valuable contribution to understanding of the human mind in his Gifford Lectures of 1919/21. In these he argued, to my mind convincingly, that mind and matter were indivisible; so that it was no good looking for the relationship of mind to matter, because they were a unity. Where you have matter, there is always a mental or spiritual element; a view which mountaineers would heartily endorse so far as mountains are concerned. And where you have mind, you normally have matter in this mortal world, although in a very complicated configuration. His lectures were before the publication of Jung’s first substantial book, Psychological Types in about 1922; and Stout was of course a philosopher studying other philosophers, notably Descartes and Leibniz, and he had no clinical experience.