round 500 B.C. Socrates and some of his fellow Greeks created the reasoning soul of man. He was charged with "impiety to the Gods and for usurping the youth of Athens" and made to drink hemlock. The conflict had begun.

To day when people in Western society look towards other peoples with whom we share the planet we seem to see them from two opposing perspectives. We see them as not being as competent as ourselves at explaining the material world and we look down on them, or we see them as somehow being more connected to some inner core of their being and we look up to them. We seem to have lost our own soul. Or is it two souls?

In view of the turmoil we still live amongst, could it be that those first important questions on the nature of our soul were the wrong questions? That our developed arrogance at having seemed to asked the right material questions prevents us from going back to question fundamental ideas of our own soul?

ur first question seems to have been "What is our soul and what does it mean to ourselves?" The many fatalists in our society leave it to those they think are better suited for the job and clamour to do it as if their lives depended upon it. Those earthly caretakers that write their job descriptions in real life. It should come as no great surprise therefore when from time to time we catch glimpses of another soul of our own making that conflict with this collective description. Should our first question have been "What is my soul and what does it mean to me? They are a completely different range of questions and answers that create a completely different perspective of our own spiritual and intellectual nature. Our collective soul has gone the way of most ideologically conceived collectives in history. It has fragmented in a way similar to the fault lines that cause earth quakes. Intellectual and spiritual fractures, that are not only not similar but opposite, are earthquakes in the soul just waiting to happen.

If modern psychotherapists can be believed the split does exist and can be treated. Karl Jung describes modern western man with a soul split into two parts.

"Psychotherapists treat neurosis as an inner cleavage. Everything that makes the cleavage worse makes the patient worse. Everything that makes the cleavage better makes the patient Better".

The questions we pose and seek to answer are the questions any scientist or men of commonsense may ask. (But strangely enough never seem to have bothered). Was there a time in western civilisation when men didn't seem to have two souls in conflict? Where did the souls come from, who created them and why? We need to go back in time, to the beginning of the problem.

But we need to go back not only to seek a new perspective of our own souls but with fresh perspective of our own attitude to history. The time may come when we should give history a respectable burial but this is not that time. This is the time to hold her close as we would one of our own and not to see her as the dusty subject of dusty clerks.

ack to 600 B.C. The time when man the thinking animal became man a thinking being. The time when he first applied abstract thinking to the material world and to his own being. To the times of Socrates who was midwife at the birth of mankind's newest soul. "God is reason and I am a reasoning soul" he declared and urged the youth of Athens to build and "to care for their souls".

The shabbily dressed, bare footed, poverty stricken, slave, artisan and stone mason introduced the youth to their own souls using the dialectic (verbal argument) and the accumulated wisdom of his cultural ancestors. "Education is a flame," he declared. And they loved him for it, clamoured for his attention and went on to create the most amazing period of human civilisation. And they were only a few thousand in number. A population equivalent to the size of a very small town today! Between them they had created a "population of geniuses". And it had nothing to do with our modern notions of intelligence, I.Q. or ever genius. It had something to do with what our modern psychologists uninspiring call "emotional intelligence" but have never succeeded in explaining or understanding.

n the Preface of the book the author challenges the reader. There is a line that runs through all men that separates reason from imagination. He who sacrifices one for the other when they conflict separates the man who is his own man from the man who is another mans man. He who understands the line separates the wise from the foolish. He who challenges the line separates the creators of civilisation from the destroyers. Are you an intellectual warrior or an intellectual wimp? There is no middle road.

The hero of the book is the common man. The man who with his secular soul created civilisation and then just stood by and watched the magpies of history claim all the credit. I began by tracing the origins of the two souls. I described the secular soul and it's morality and left the creators of the metaphysical soul to describe their collective soul and morality. I compared them. They were almost unbelievably different. I traced the souls through history-learned about their character and the men who made them. I discovered the importance of what Socrates said of wisdom "I am wise in knowing I do not know," and of the secular wisdom of Jesus, the carpenter, and asked why should God have chosen a carpenter and not a king, an aristocrat, an academic, a politician or an earthly judge to do his bidding, if it was bidding he was about? Was God to be allowed to contribute to the argument and did he chose wisely? Of course he chose wisely: What God would chose his son to be brought up by a group of men who never had one creative reasoned idea of their own, or their cultural ancestors existence: filled a bag of coal, baked a loaf of bread or sawn a piece of wood and sat around all day in unproductive idleness with their dreams?

Jesus when asked about taking an oath said "Let your yes be yes and your no be no" and went on to tell them to swear neither by God or heaven. (Curious isn't it Christians are made to swear on the Bible in court to-day! And God help these who don't because no one else will.)

oth Socrates and Jesus rebuked the men of authority of the day and both knew that the death that was their constant stalker would be at the hands of the men they rebuked. Yet the historian's childish notion that it was the common man or the rabble is the description written into the history books and taught in schools.

For the record this is not a book about religion. The book subscribes to the notion religion is a very private affair and reason is a very public affair. Only when they sugar coat their dogma and imagination in reason do we want their guts for garters.

I looked at modern subjects: Education, Psychology, Literature and Language itself. I found amongst the educated 'elite' as well as amongst the leaders of society those same characteristics of arrogance and a disdain for reason, common sense and the common man. And a refusal to secularise the parameters of their subjects. In Education I found no reference to "the flame" of Socrates only a consistent adherence to the mould of Plato and Aristotle who said of the common man "he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently." It is depressing reading but I am afraid necessary.

didn't start the book with the intention of unravelling that most important of relationships between reason - imagination- the emotionality of a human being and his own soul. I began to justify intellectually (or common sensibly if you prefer the term) what seemed to be the greatest moral problem of our time. The simple fact that Christians, Jews and Muslims in our society receive an education (or instruction if you prefer the term) in their own culture, morality and collective souls while millions of our children were denied an education in their own culture, morality and how to care for their own souls. The Muslims call them Secularists. (Men or children who base their culture, and morality and soul on reasoning practices). The Christians call them "pagans" which means ignorant soulless heathens. And heathen means uncivilised. My children were "pagans" in their local school. How could this be? Was I, their father, the Devil? The time for dying on the cross or drinking the hemlock out of respect for authority, controlled by a mindless establishment, had ended. The line had been drawn the fight begun. But on my journey I had happened on important questions that seemingly had even more important answers, that did not demand the esoteric verbiage of the drivelling philosophers that cloud our culture like a plague, yet never seem to find the answer to anything of importance. I had two patients on my hands and I could compare them. I first asked myself where is civilisation? And then I asked the souls of man themselves. "It's in the pots and pans, the buildings, the artefacts, in the high notes of literature and it will be revealed to you by your intellectual superiors" answered the metaphysical soul.

"It is a flame burning in the soul of the common man" declared the secular soul. My journey had a new starting point. I took a kit bag full of the tools of reasoning forged by the artisans of ancient Greece combined them with the concept of Socrates and Einstein of "New Things Under The Sun" and entered the flame to take a closer look. Our Psychologists had failed in their endeavour to describe "what they called emotional intelligence". They had followed their heroes Aristotle and Plato and their failed philosophy. Even the description Emotional Intelligence was a wrong description. But the reader himself must be the judge of that.

The book is 278 pages with a laminated cover. For ordering information and to order online click here.