Soul

Key terms

What the soul is

Its parts and powers

Its beginning and end

Knowing the soul

World soul

Is the universe itself alive? The world soul is a soul attributed to the whole world, so that the cosmos is a living, thinking creature. These readings ask why writers have pictured the world this way and what it makes of the order we find in it.

3 readings

In the Timaeus, the speaker of the dialogue gives an account of the making of the world by the “creator”, and in the passage at 29d to 30c he reasons from what is “fairest” to the presence of “intelligence” in a body. The dialogue was the one work of Plato widely known in the Latin West through the Middle Ages. The passage stands under this term as the account of the world as a “living creature” endowed with “soul”.

Book IV of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is a series of private notes, written by the emperor for himself, in the manner of the Stoic school. In this passage he bids himself consider the world as “one living substance” having “one soul”. The Stoic doctrine of the “world-soul” is here put in its Roman form. The passage stands under this term for that doctrine.

The fifth Ennead of Plotinus opens with the tract on the three primary hypostases, the One, “Intelligence” and “Soul”, as his pupil Porphyry arranged the treatises. In the passage the “universal Soul” is spoken of as the maker of the living creatures and the stars. The Enneads are the chief text of the Platonism of late antiquity, and Augustine read them. The passage stands under this term for the Platonic account of the soul of the world.