On Psychology, Cosmology and Morality

"What modern psychology lacks entirely is criteria enabling it to situate the aspects or tendencies of the soul in their cosmic context.  In traditional psychology, these criteria are provided according to two principal "dimensions": on the one hand, according to a cosmology that "situates" the soul and its modalities in the hierarchy of states of existence, and, on the other hand, according to a morality directed toward a spiritual end.  The latter may provisionally espouse the individual horizon; it nonetheless keeps in view the universal principles attaching the soul to an order more vast than itself.  Cosmology in a sense circumscribes the soul; spiritual morality sounds its depths.  For just as a current of water reveals its force and direction only when it breaks against an object that resists it, so the soul can only show its tendencies and fluctuations only in relation to an immutable principle; whoever wishes to know the nature of the psyché must resist it, and one truly resists it only when one places oneself at a point which corresponds, if not effectively then at least virtually or symbolically, to the Divine Self, or to the intellect which is like a ray that emanates from the latter."

- From Modern Psychology, by Titus Burckhardt