Body (philosophy)

“ But we have ideas of the affections of the body; therefore the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body actually existing. It follows that man consists of mind and body, and that the human body exists as we perceive it. ”

“ Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative, the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit, an intelligence and a will. ”

“ Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly{3} speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature. ”

“ For when 'tis seen to drive the members on, To snatch from sleep the body, and to change The countenance, and the whole state of man To rule and turn,—what yet could never be Sans contact, and sans body contact fails— Must we not grant that mind and soul consist Of a corporeal nature?—And besides Thou markst that likewise with this body of ours Suffers the mind and with our body feels. ”

“ That the corporeal soul is the immediate subject of the rational soul, of which seeing it is the act, perfection, complement and form, also by it the rational soul is made or becometh the form and act of the humane body. ”

“ By thinking upon the things that pertain to the spiritual selfhood, and consciously ruling and harmonizing the bodily instrument. The body is a living epistle, setting forth the quality of the life, mind, and soul, of which it is the visible result and correspondence. ”

“ It requires of him to watch over the state of his body—the partial derangement of whose functions so often confuses the mind—that, by preserving a vigorous and animated condition of the corporeal system, he may secure vigour and vivacity of mind. ”

“ The body, however, is not the Life; it is merely the material agency that enables the Life to manifest in a material universe for a certain, though not necessarily a given, period of time. It is the Life, or the Soul, or the Personality that uses, and that in using shapes and moulds, the body and that also determines its strength or its weakness. ”

“ The awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body." 35
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd. ”

“ Is it like a human body? The answer is: Yes, but of a perfection of shape, symmetry and beauty, with which no human body can be compared; it is the Original Body, of which the human body is a poor imitation. ”

“ As thou hast no thought that "This is the Self," regarding the body's shadow, or the reflected form, or the body seen in dream, or the shape imagined in the mind, so let not this thought exist regarding the living body. ”

“ Although what is called my Body is shown to be a group of qualities which are feelings—its color, form, solidity, position, motion—all its physical attributes being what is felt by us in consequence of the laws of our organization ”

“ Sense-bearing motion along the vitals springs.
For lurks this essence far and deep and under,
Nor in our body is aught more shut from view,
And 'tis the very soul of all the soul.
And as within our members and whole frame
The energy of mind and power of soul
Is mixed and latent, since create it is
Of bodies small and few, so lurks this fourth,
This essence void of name, composed of small,
And seems the very soul of all the soul,
And holds dominion o'er the body all. ”

“ A man’s body,—said the Professor,—is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic’s senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. ”

“ I counsel you that you study earnestly the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, so that, God helping you, you may in deed and truth become Bahá’ís.
CONCERNING BODY, SOUL AND SPIRIT 4 Avenue de Camöens, Paris,
Friday morning, November 17th
There are in the world of humanity three degrees; those of the body, the soul, and spirit.
The body is the physical or animal degree of man. From the bodily point of view man is a sharer of the animal kingdom. The bodies alike of men and animals are composed of elements held together by the law of attraction. ”

“ As the accumulation of experience makes it increasingly clearer that the bodies of my fellow-men and my own body, in so far as it is an object perceived like others by the organs of the special senses, exhibit in many respects the same conformity to certain general laws, and are composed of the same constituent parts as the rest of the sensible world, such animated bodies of purposive agents have to be included along with the rest of sensible existence in the physical order. ”

“ When you see yourself as a body, you are body and nothing else; and that is the perception of the vast majority of mankind. They may talk of soul and mind, and all these things, but what they perceive is the physical form, the touch, taste, vision, and so on. Again, with certain men in certain states of consciousness, they perceive themselves as thought. ”

“ But the body, though comparatively insignificant, is still deserving of special regard. The corporeal is a part of the nature which the infinite Creator has bestowed on us—a piece of mechanism "curiously wrought," and "fearfully and wonderfully made." ”

“ To illustrate, take me physically, leave out of account all the rest of my nature now for a moment, and consider me as an animal. From the point of view of my body, that which conduces to length of life, to fullness, to completion, to enjoyment of life, is right, the only right, from this physical point of view. ”

“ The human body in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: the body is a more wonderful thought than the old " soul." ”

“ And if we avoid what is unseemly, both in the condition and motion of the body, why may we not on the other hand pursue beauty? And we also desire health, strength, and freedom from pain, not merely because of their utility, but also for their own sakes. For since nature wishes to be made complete in all her parts, she desires this condition of the body, which is most according to nature, for its own sake: but nature is put into complete confusion if the body is either sick, or in pain, or destitute of strength. ”

“ Hence, if we generalise the term “body” to stand for any system of habitual reactions discharging this function of serving as a medium of communication between individuals forming a society, we may fairly say that a body is indispensable to the existence of a self. ”

“ Can you believe it possible that the body, which is of itself a mass of mere matter, is capable either of designing or of accomplishing such stupendous purposes? Or is it to be supposed that what is called nature, which in itself is dead, being created for the reception of life, but not possessing any life properly its own, hath the ability to produce such living activities? ”

“ We divide the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teachings of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgment and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary co-efficients, of a most complex integral. ”

“ To one and all, I say, cultivate each heaven-given faculty, remembering too that the body cannot be divorced from the mind, that in the perfect man the body must be perfected as well as the soul, that the body should be not merely the setting of the soul but the expression of it. ”

“ The body is not alien to the mind, it is the seed plot from which mind flowers out in every part. Regard the form of man, observe the quick play of the features, the expressive smile, the speaking glance, every attitude, every gesture full of meaning, the whole body irradiated as it were, with the indwelling intelligence. ”

“ That the body is in some measure an image of the mind, or rather that the mind is moulded to the body, like melted lead to the clay in which it is cast, has been insisted on by many philosophers, who have made human nature their peculiar study ”

“ But our bodily organs are much more than any artificial tools can be, they are part of our very being. The body is part of the constitution of man. We are not spirit or soul alone,—though it is sometimes necessary to emphasise the fact that we are soul at all,—we are in truth soul and body together. ”

“ The body, too, should be composed, not sprawling about, whether in motion or in repose. For we should require of the body as a whole just what the mind exhibits in the face, when it preserves it intelligent and comely. ”

“ Numerous other proofs might be adduced to prove that though the body is the means through which the mind is reached, yet the sensation is all in the mind. Man makes use of his body for the gratification of all his sensuous desires ”

“ When we examine the human body, the most curious and unaccountable circumstance that we observe, is its life, or its power of motion, sensation, and thought: for though the structure of the different parts which we have examined must excite our admiration and wonder, each part being admirably fitted for the performance of its different functions, yet without the breath of life, all these beautiful contrivances would have been useless. ”

“ The world experienced (otherwise called the ‘field of consciousness’) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is ‘here’; when the body acts is ‘now’ ”

“ At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due—learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. ”

“ On every side, therefore, bodies were seen in the act of swallowing their souls; and it frequently happened, that when a soul had only his legs projecting from the mouth another seized him by the feet, and dragged him back again, having a desire for the same body. ”

“ For just as food, dispersed through all the pores Of body, and passed through limbs and all the frame, Perishes, supplying from itself the stuff For other nature, thus the soul and mind, Though whole and new into a body going, Are yet, by seeping in, dissolved away, Whilst, as through pores, to all the frame there pass Those particles from which created is This nature of mind, now ruler of our body, Born from that soul which perished, when divided Along the frame. ”

“ It is the physical body that relates us to the physical universe about us, that in which we find ourselves in this present form of existence. But the body, wondrous as it is in its functions and its mechanism, is not the life. It has no life and no power in itself. ”

“ I have a body which serves as the vehicle or instrument of my life as a man here upon earth: a body which is the organ of my spirit's self-expression and the medium both of my life's experience and of my intercourse with other men. ”

“ The whole body is deranged; and the head, which ought to be the seat of sense and the temple of wisdom, is insensible to the wants of the body, and to the fact that, if the body sinks, the head must sink also. ”

“ I imagine perhaps an inner being, of ‘astral’ or ethereal nature, and possessing a new range of much finer and more subtle qualities than the body—a being inhabiting the body and perceiving through its senses, but quite capable of surviving the tenement in which it dwells and I think of that as the Self. ”

“ Now we have considered, in this and the preceding chapters, extension, figure, solidity, motion, hardness, roughness, as well as colour, heat and cold, sound, taste, and smell. We have endeavoured to shew, that our nature and constitution lead us to conceive these as qualities of body, as all mankind have always conceived them to be. We have likewise examined, with great attention, the various sensations we have by means of the five senses, and are not able to find among them all, one single image of body, or of any of its qualities. ”

“ Putting theology on one side, and dealing only with the common sense of mankind, our body is certainly part of our personality. With the destruction of our bodies, our personality, as far as we can follow it, comes to a full stop; and with every modification of them it is correspondingly modified. But what are the limits of our bodies? They are composed of parts, some of them so unessential as to be hardly included in personality at all, and to be separable from ourselves without perceptible effect, as hair, nails, and daily waste of tissue. ”

“ It is not a very uncommon faculty, but it is one which needs cultivation and development." "But what is a Thought Body?" My hostess smiled: "It is difficult to explain truths on the plane of thought to those who are immersed body and soul in matter. I can only tell you that every person has, in addition to this natural body of flesh, bones, and blood, a Thought Body, the exact counterpart in every respect of this material frame. It is contained within the material body, as air is contained in the lungs and in the blood. It is of finer matter than the gross fabric of our outward body. ”