De Anima

“ Not much more than a quarter of a century ago the word "animism" began to be used to describe that particular phase of the psychological condition of primitive peoples by which they believe that a spirit (anima) resides in everything, material and immaterial. ”

“ And this Astral Spirit is no more than that part in Man that is commonly called the sensitive Soul, and by the Schools is commonly defined thus: “Anima sentiens est vis, quæ apprehendit & percipit ea quæ extra ipsam sunt. And this is corporeal, and (as Dr. Willis holdeth) mortal and coextended with the Body, and that it hath the power of imagination, appetite, desire, and aversion and the like, and in a manner, a sensitive way of ratiocination, and yet is distinct from the rational Soul or Mens that is incorporeal, immortal, and far more excellent.” ”

“ Thus, as among savage tribes, the soul is actually identified with the shadow or the breath, the use of such words as σκιά, πνεῦμα, umbra, anima, shade, and spirit, may be held to show the derivation of the civilised conception of the soul from the same primitive and savage idea. ”

“ Well, the Over-Soul flows out into the All—into the universe of Think, (I can use no other term,) into that of Soul, Monads, Spirit, Matter; and while pervading and being imminent in All, is self-conscious at every point; in the Think, the Monad, the Soul, the Spirit, the Matter, in every particle that is, or can ever be. I hold this, as the truest definition of the Deity yet given; and in the radiant presence of such a thought, all human things must bow; all human pride stand back, all human ideas pale and fade. ”

“ In the same way we have every conceivable mode of progression and combination supplied by the nature of the mood, the actual condition of the individual soul-life, the degree of passion, its excitement or rapid transition of conflicting emotion, or the tranquillity of the heart or the mind in some long-drawn process of contemplation. As a rule, in respect to all such subject-matter, we are able to determine very little that is fixed, owing to the repeated changes in the ever varied facets of the soul. ”

“ And now the anguish of hope deferred created a fresh torture for him. Minds that have the habit of imaginative contemplation and poetic dreaming attribute to inanimate objects a soul, sensitive and variable as their own, and recognise in all things—be it form or colour, sound or perfume—a transparent symbol, an emblem of some emotion or thought; in every phenomenon and every group of phenomena they claim to discover a psychical condition, a moral significance. ”

“ He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.
Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! ”

“ The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world; for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour themselves out upon the world. ”

“ And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes, the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty—that most spiritual of all pleasures—sink deeper into the heart; one desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and death. ”

“ It will be incidentally shown here, again and again, that souls have the same qualities attributed to them as other spirits, are treated in like fashion, and pass without distinct breaks into every part of the general spiritual definition. The similar nature of soul and other spirit is, in fact, one of the commonplaces of animism, from its rudest to its most cultured stages. ”

“ The supreme aim now was to bring the intimate life of soul, the seriousness and the loftiness of religious emotion into harmony with the animation, the actual presence of characters and forms both in its corporeal and spiritual aspect, in order that the bodily configuration in its pose, movement, and colour, may not simply remain an external framework, but become itself essentially an expression of spirit and life, and by virtue of that expression, made throughout all its parts wholly the reflex of soul-life no less than of external form, reveal a beauty without break or interruption. ”

“ It is consequently the pre-eminent task of poetry to bring before our vision the energies of the life of Spirit, all that surges to and fro in human passion and emotion, or passes in tranquillity across the mind, that is the all-embracing realm of human idea, action, exploit, fatality, the affairs of this world and the divine Providence. ”

“ Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them seems somehow unattainable—that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into impersonal delight. ”

“ It was thus, the innate purity of the mind betrayed the unconscious sensibility of the heart, while the passions became so intimately incorporated with the spirit, as to leave their influence and agency almost equal. ”

“ The sages of old found that at the close of intense meditation their being was drawn into union with that which they contemplated. All desire tends to bring about unity with the object adored, and this is no less true of spiritual and elemental than of bodily desire; and I, with my imagination more and more drawn to adore an ideal nature, was tending to that vital contact in which what at first was apprehended in fantasy would become the most real of all things. ”

“ Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. [Pg 423]
Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses—
"Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." ”

“ With such natures love is an instinct; and it is to instinct, after all, that we must look for everything that is fresh and poetic in humanity. We have all made this sacrifice to culture,—a sacrifice of force to expression. ”

“ WHEN this house of sensuality was now at rest—that is, was mortified—its passions being quenched and its desires put to rest and lulled to sleep by means of this blessed night of the purgation of sense, the soul went forth, to set out upon the road and way of the spirit, which is that of progressives and proficients, and which, by another name, is called the way of illumination or of infused contemplation, wherein God Himself feeds and refreshes the soul, without meditation, or the soul’s active help. Such, as we have said, is the night and purgation of sense in the soul. ”

“ In this case, however, this ideality is actually the ideal and particular subjectivity, is, in short, the soul-life returning upon itself from its corporeal existence, is the individual passion and emotion of character and heart, which are no longer exclusively delivered in the external form, but mirror in the same the very ideal substance and activity of Spirit in the domain of its own conditions, aims, and actions. ”

“ No, Gentola̤, repeated embodiments do not inure the mortal expression of the Ego to the sorrows and vicissitudes of the physical plane, but through such experiences the Ego evolves into loftier, grander states of Being. Does the Ego and its mortal expression mutually experience joy and sorrow? Aye, truly, but the ego knows, while the objective expression or Soul only sees through a glass darkly. Only the fully freed Ego is capable of comprehending this occult statement, so patiently you will await its solution. ”

“ What would the soul in its perfection mirror? Would it reflect within itself the myriad life of humanity? Would the spirit mirror the heavens, and the imaginations of the Divine Mind well up within it in mystic and transcendental ideations? ”

“ The totality of the soul becomes will, or the totality of the soul becomes reason, or the totality of the soul becomes intuition, in the same way as a falling body of water, or the projected stream of a fountain becomes whatever dominant colour of sky or air or atmosphere penetrates it and transforms it. What we have called emotion, made up of the duality of love and malice, is something much more integral than this. For the totality of the soul, which becomes reason, consciousness, intuition, conscience, and the like, is always composed of the very stuff and matter of emotion. ”

“ He thought he could detect in nature—both animate and inanimate, with soul or without soul—something which manifests itself only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. ”

“ Hence it proceeds, that every action of the mind, which operates with the same calmness and tranquillity, is confounded with reason by all those, who judge of things from the first view and appearance. Now 'tis certain, there are certain calm desires and tendencies, which, tho' they be real passions, produce little emotion in the mind, and are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation. ”

“ But though I made use of the word passion to express the now prevailing propensity of Natura's soul, I do not think that ambition, strictly speaking, can come under that denomination: — to me it rather seems the effect of an assemblage of other passions, than a passion simple of itself, and natural to the mind of man ”

“ And yet for all that this intimate possession of their faith and love in its spiritual beauty is no sanity of soul which brings to them a sense of the sanity of their body; rather it is a sense of inward life, which has worked its way through their pain itself, or at least is made manifest in their suffering, and which, even in the moment of their ecstasy, retains the experience of pain as an essential condition of their beatitude. ”

“ Something had passed out of them all, some essential quality which united them to reality, some inner secret of being without which the animate and the inanimate alike became no better than phantoms. The spirit which made life vital had gone out of the world. ”

“ IN this line the soul describes the fire of love which, as we have said, like the material fire acting upon the wood, begins to take hold upon the soul in this night of painful contemplation. This enkindling now described, although in a certain way it resembles that which we described above as coming to pass in the sensual part of the soul, is in some ways as different from that other as is the soul from the body, or the spiritual part from the sensual. ”

“ Thus although the creative energy in the soul, emerging from fathomless abysses, can enable the soul to endure until death the most infernal torments, the fact remains that since the attribute of sensation, which depends entirely upon the existence of the bodily senses, is one of the soul's basic attributes and has its ground in the very substratum of the soul, the sensations of pain and pleasure whether coloured by emotion and imagination or left "pure" in the clear element of consciousness, are sensations from which the soul cannot escape. ”

“ And, in strict accordance with this scheme, the Soul here becomes conscious of being, in its upper reaches, Spirit, only on the day that it has broken away from the domination of the downward-tending Body, and of Self-Love. And once the Soul has thus affirmed the Spirit and denied the Body, the “Body” and the “Soul” cease to be directly mentioned; the one term “Humanity” now takes the Soul’s and the Body’s place. ”

“ How comes it to pass then, that when it is there where it loves, it yet animates the Body it is gone out of? And if it animates when it loves any where, how is that called a dead Body which it animates?
Pa. Indeed, you argue very cunningly, but you shan't catch me there. That Soul, which after some Sort governs the Body of the Lover, is but improperly call'd a Soul, when it is but some small Remains of the Soul; just as the Smell of a Rose remains in the Hand, when the Rose is gone. ”

“ Whatever use we may make of the word sensation, it is certain that we experience many affections caused by organic impressions, besides those of the five senses. What are passions but affections of the soul, springing from organic impressions? Does not the mere presence of an object often excite love, anger, pity, joy, grief, and many other sentiments of the soul? ”

“ The consequent emotion, piety, and conversion of the soul may even then awake our interest, but in that case it is only on the one side, namely, that of the soul: so soon as that enters into relation with somewhat else outside it, and the idea is that this external correlative shall effect the conversion of the heart, then we inevitably require that such should not be wholly a meaningless and irrational sequence of events. ”

“ Forgetful that no man has ever seen or touched this "spirit," apart from a personal soul, or this "life," apart from some living thing, the temperament I am thinking of loves to make imaginative excursions into what it supposes to be vast receding abysses of pure "spirit" and of impersonal inhuman "life." ”