Psychosophy

The word psychosophy has etymological roots in the Greek words ψυχή (psychē) and σοφίᾱ (sophiā), which are often interpreted as "soul" and "wisdom," respectively. It was used in a wide variety of contexts from 1743 to the 1920s but fell out of use in the 20th century.

There are several distinct contexts in which the word has been employed, including:

The word psychology does not occur previous to the sixteenth century. Melanchthon employed the term as a title of academic lectures. R. Gockel used it in 1590 as a collective title for the works of various authors. The term became generally known through Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who did so much for the establishment of philosophical terminology. Up to Wolff's time the term psychosophy, apparently introduced by J. J. Becker, seems to have been in use. The term pneumatology is also found in the writings of Leibniz.

According to the philosopher , Psychosophy: "it is a knowledge of the first causes, which aims at the plenitude of human beings and their integration in the World through the unification of the mind". A basic principle of this discipline is that "psychic balance and moral balance are consecutive." Nevertheless, it does not deal with personal or subjective problems, as it may only bloom in mature spirits. Therefore, "psychosophy starts where psychology ends." "Psychosophy starts from an essential perspective (for which the author has developed a theory of perspective within his theory of knowledge), not from what has been revealed but from what is revealing" (Op. Cit.).

Eleven years later, Ozan Lavoisier published Psychosophy. Psycho-philosophical research on the nature of human beings, a thick volume in which he elaborates upon his method of knowledge in detail. He make clear that his discipline is not in search of news, but "perennial truths found in ancient traditions." It is essentially "a philosophy that makes use of transcendental psychology in order to provide grounds for a metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of history, that is to say, a philosophical system." This system has been elaborated in future works.

The word psychosophy was utilized in several articles published in the Theosophical journal The Theosophist:

The term was also used by William Wilberforce Juvenal Colville in an obscure 1914 publication entitled "The New Psychosophy." The following year, in 1915, Cora L.V. (Scott) Richmond employed the word as the title of her 436-page book exploring various metaphysical subjects. These two writings are examples of the approach that could broadly be considered neo-theosophical.

The term was used by the Austrian philosopher and scholar Rudolf Steiner in a three part series of twelve lectures given in Berlin in 1910, two years before he left the Theosophical Society, but was not apparently used again in Steiner's extensive published works. The lectures lay almost dormant for nearly 90 years until their publication. The four lectures on psychosophy discuss Steiner's perspective on the primary aspects of the human soul, the activities and interactions of various soul forces, the dynamics of love and hate, and the process of judging. Steiner distinguished psychosophy from anthroposophy (wisdom of the human being) and pneumatosophy (wisdom of the spirit).

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