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The soul, in some religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, is the immaterial or eternal part of a living being, commonly held to be separable in existence from the body—the metaphysical part as distinct from the physical part. The soul is generally conceived as existing within humans and sometimes within all living things, inanimate objects, and the universe as a whole. In some cultures, non-human living things, and sometimes other objects (such as rivers) are said to have souls; these cultures hold a belief known as animism.[1] The soul is often believed to live on after a person’s death, and some religions posit that God creates souls.
The soul has been deemed integral or essential to consciousness and personality, and may be synonymous with spirit, mind or self.[2] Although the terms soul and spirit are sometimes used interchangeably, soul may denote a more worldly and less transcendent aspect of a person.[3] According to psychologist James Hillman, soul has an affinity for negative thoughts and images, whereas spirit seeks to rise above the entanglements of life and death.[4] The words soul and psyche can also be treated synonymously, although psyche has more physical connotations, whereas soul is connected more closely to metaphysics and religion.[5]
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The Modern English soul derived from Old English sáwol, sáwel (first attested to in the 8th century poem Beowulf v. 2820 and in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50), cognate to other Germanic terms for the same idea, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála. Further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. A common suggestion is a connection with the word sea, and from this evidence alone, it has been speculated that the early Germanic peoples believed that the spirits of deceased rested at the bottom of the sea or similar. A more recent suggestion[6] connects it with a root for "binding", Germanic *sailian (OE sēlian, OHG seilen), related to the notion of being "bound" in death, and the practice of ritually binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave to prevent his or her return as a ghost.
The word is in any case clearly an adaptation by early missionaries to the Germanic peoples, in particular Ulfilas, apostle to the Goths (4th century) of a native Germanic concept, coined as a translation of Greek ψυχή psychē "life, spirit, consciousness".
The Greek word is derived from a verb "to cool, to blow" and hence refers to the vital breath, the animating principle in humans and other animals, as opposed to σῶμα (soma) meaning "body". It could refer to a ghost or spirit of the dead in Homer, and to a more philosophical notion of an immortal and immaterial essence left over at death since Pindar. Latin anima figured as a translation of ψυχή since Terence. It occurs juxtaposed to σῶμα e.g. in Matthew 10:28:
In the Septuagint (LXX), ψυχή translates Hebrew נפש nephesh, meaning "life, vital breath", in English variously translated as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion"; e.g. in Genesis 1:20:
Paul of Tarsus used ψυχή and πνεῦμα specifically to distinguish between the Jewish notions of נפש nephesh and רוח ruah (spirit) (also in LXX, e.g. Genesis 1:2 וְר֣וּחַאֱלֹהִ֔ים = πνεῦμα θεοῦ = spiritus Dei = "the Spirit of God").
In theological reference to the soul, the terms "life" and "death" are viewed as emphatically more definitive than the common concepts of "biological life" and "biological death". Because the soul is said to be transcendent of the material existence, and is said to have (potentially) eternal life, the death of the soul is likewise said to be an eternal death. Thus, in the concept of divine judgment, God is commonly said to have options with regard to the dispensation of souls, ranging from Heaven (i.e. angels) to hell (i.e. demons), with various concepts in between. Typically both Heaven and hell are said to be eternal, or at least far beyond a typical human concept of lifespan and time.
Religions which subscribe to non-monotheistic views, in particular Dharmic religions, may have differing concepts, such as reincarnation, nirvana, etc.
The Ancient Greeks used the same word for 'alive' as for 'ensouled'. So the earliest surviving western philosophical view might suggest that the terms soul and aliveness were synonymous - perhaps not that having life universally presupposed the possession of a soul as in Buddhism, but that full "aliveness" and the soul were conceptually linked.
Francis M. Cornford quotes Pindar in saying that the soul sleeps while the limbs are active, but when one is sleeping, the soul is active and reveals in many a dream "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near".[7]
Erwin Rohde writes that the early pre-Pythagorean belief was that the soul had no life when it departed from the body, and retired into Hades with no hope of returning to a body.[8]
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Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the soul as the essence of a person, being, that which decides how we behave. He considered this essence as an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. The Platonic soul comprises three parts:
Each of these has a function in a balanced and peaceful soul.
In Plato's Republic, he describes the soul as having three parts that can be compared to society:
1. The Intellect of the soul is like the Philosopher Kings of society.
2. The Will of the soul is like the Guardians of society.
3. The Desire of the soul is like the Citizens of society.
The logos equates to the mind. It corresponds to the charioteer, directing the balanced horses of appetite and spirit. It allows for logic to prevail, and for the optimisation of balance.
The thymos comprises our emotional motive, that which drives us to acts of bravery and glory. If left unchecked, it leads to hubris – the most fatal of all flaws in the Greek view.
The eros equates to the appetite that drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. When the passion controls us, it drives us to hedonism in all forms. In the Ancient Greek view, this is the basal and most feral state.
Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core or "essence" of a living being, but argued against its having a separate existence in its entirety. In Aristotle's view, a living thing's soul is its activity, that is, its "life"; for example, the soul of an eye, he wrote, if it were an independent lifeform itself, would be sight. Again, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because 'cutting' is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul in its entirety as a separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). As the soul, in Aristotle's view, is an actuality of a living body, it cannot be immortal (when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops). More precisely, the soul is the "first actuality" of a body: its capacity simply for life itself, apart from the various faculties of the soul, such as sensation, nutrition and so forth, which when exercised constitute its "second" actuality, which we might call its "fulfillment." "The axe has an edge for cutting" was, for Aristotle, analogous to "humans have bodies for human activity." The rational activity of the soul's intellective part, along with that of the soul's two other parts—its vegetative and animal parts, which it has in common with other animals—thus in Aristotle's view constitute the essence of a human soul. Aristotle used his concept of the soul in many of his works; the De Anima (On the Soul) provides a good place to start to gain more understanding of his views.
There is on-going debate about Aristotle's views regarding the immortality of the human soul; Aristotle makes it clear, however, towards the end of his De Anima that he does believe that the intellective part of the soul is eternal and separable from the body. It is not clear, however, to what degree this soul is individual. For example, Aristotle writes that the soul after death "does not remember," a view compatible with Greek popular belief. It is perhaps worth noting that by Aquinas' interpretation of these remarks, Aristotle's account of the afterlife is more similar to the Christian than it appears at first glance.
Aristotle divided the intellectual faculty into two principal parts, the "deliberative" or "calculative" and the "scientific" or "theoretical." The first of these he then subdivided again, to yield a tripartite division of the intellectual soul as technical, prudential and theoretical. The first of these is art, which has its term in something outside man, the product of his activity. The second, prudence, has its term in activity itself; it is sometimes called the "art" of doing. Its highest expression is politics, to which, in the corpus of Aristotle's works, his treatise on ethics serves as an introduction. Prudence is concerned with what men ought to do, and thus with the future. The third part of the intellective faculty, scientific understanding, is the supreme activity of the faculty and accordingly of man himself, since it is the operation of his intellect that differentiates man from other animals. Theory is concerned with nature, and with what is rather than with what men ought to do. As these are parts of the rational faculty of man, their correct activity also constitutes the "excellences" or "virtues" of the rational part of man, of which there are five: art, prudence and science, corresponding in name to the faculties themselves, as well as "nous," often translated as "understanding" or "intelligence," and "sophia" or "wisdom. Nous is intuitive knowledge of first principles, which are indemonstrable; sophia is the combination of such "understanding" and science.
Following Aristotle, the Persian Muslim philosopher-physicians, Avicenna and Ibn al-Nafis, further elaborated on the Aristotelian understanding of the soul and developed their own theories on the soul. They both made a distinction between the soul and the spirit, and in particular, the Avicennian doctrine on the nature of the soul was influential among the Scholastics. Some of Avicenna's views on the soul included the idea that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of "The Ten Intellects", he viewed the human soul as the tenth and final intellect.
While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. He told his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic terms when he stated: "I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness."[9]
Avicenna generally supported Aristotle's idea of the soul originating from the heart, whereas Ibn al-Nafis on the other hand rejected this idea and instead argued that the soul "is related to the entirety and not to one or a few organs". He further criticized Aristotle's idea that every unique soul requires the existence of a unique source, in this case the heart. Ibn al-Nafis concluded that "the soul is related primarily neither to the spirit nor to any organ, but rather to the entire matter whose temperament is prepared to receive that soul" and he defined the soul as nothing other than "what a human indicates by saying 'I'".[10]
Following Aristotle and Avicenna, St. Thomas Aquinas understood the soul to be the first principle, or act, of the body. However, his epistemological theory required that, since the intellectual soul is capable of knowing all material things, and since in order to know a material thing there must be no material thing within it, the soul was definitely not corporeal. Therefore, the soul had an operation separate from the body and therefore could subsist without the body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings was subsistent and was not made up of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any natural process. The full argument for the immortality of the soul and Thomas's elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the Summa Theologica.
In his discussions of rational psychology Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest sense and that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved, or disproved. "We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the soul, but rather only so much: that all properties and actions of the soul cannot be cognized from materiality." It is from the "I", or soul, that Kant proposes transcendental rationalization, but cautions that such rationalization can only determine the limits of knowledge if it is to remain practical.[11]
Contemporary psychology is defined as the study of mental processes and behavior. However, the word "psychology" literally means "study of the soul",[12] and psychologist James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, has been credited with "restoring 'soul' to its psychological sense."[13] Although the words soul and spirit are often viewed as synonyms, Hillman argues that they can refer to antagonistic components of a person. Summarizing Hillman's views, author and psychotherapist Thomas Moore associates spirit with "afterlife, cosmic issues, idealistic values and hopes, and universal truths", while placing soul "in the thick of things: in the repressed, in the shadow, in the messes of life, in illness, and in the pain and confusion of love."[14] Hillman believes that religion—especially monotheism and monastic faiths—and humanistic psychology have tended to the spirit, often at the unfortunate expense of soul.[3] This happens, Moore says, because to transcend the "lowly conditions of the soul ... is to lose touch with the soul, and a split-off spirituality, with no influence from the soul, readily falls into extremes of literalism and destructive fanaticism."[15]
Hillman's archetypal psychology is in many ways an attempt to tend to the oft-neglected soul, which Hillman views as the "self-sustaining and imagining substrate" upon which consciousness rests, and "which makes meaning possible, [deepens] events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern" as well as "a special relation with death."[16] Departing from the Cartesian dualism "between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind," Hillman takes the Neoplatonic stance[17] that there is a "third, middle position" in which soul resides.[18] Archetypal psychology acknowledges this third position by attuning to, and often accepting, the archetypes, dreams, myths, and even psychopathologies through which soul, in Hillman's view, expresses itself.
For a contemporary understanding of the soul/mind and the problem concerning its connection to the brain/body, consider the rejection of Descarte's mind-body dualism by Gilbert Ryle's ghost in the machine argument, the tenuous unassailability of Richard Swinburne's argument for the soul, and the advances made in neuroscience which are steadily uncovering the truth/falsity of the concept of an independent soul/mind. The philosophy of mind and the philosophy of personal identity also contribute to a contemporary understanding of the soul/mind.
The Bahá'í Faith affirms that "the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel."[19] Bahá'u'lláh stated that the soul not only continues to live after the physical death of the human body, but is, in fact, immortal.[20] Heaven can be seen partly as the soul's state of nearness to God; and hell as a state of remoteness from God. Each state follows as a natural consequence of individual efforts, or the lack thereof, to develop spiritually.[21] Bahá'u'lláh taught that individuals have no existence previous to their life here on earth and the soul's evolution is always towards God and away from the material world.[21]
Buddhism teaches that all things are in a constant state of flux: all is changing, and no permanent state exists by itself.[22][23] This applies as much as to human beings as to anything else in the cosmos. Thus, a human being has no permanent self.[24][25] According to this doctrine of anatta (Pāli; Sanskrit: anātman), or "no-self", the words "I" or "me" do not refer to any fixed thing. They are simply convenient terms that allow us to refer to an ever-changing entity.[26]
The anatta doctrine is not a kind of materialism. Buddhism does not deny the existence of "immaterial" entities, and it (at least traditionally) distinguishes physical states from mental states.[27] Thus, the conventional translation of anatta as "no-soul"[28] can be confusing. If the word "soul" simply refers to an incorporeal component in living things that can continue after death, then Buddhism does not deny the existence of the soul.[29] Instead, Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent entity that remains constant behind the changing corporeal and incorporeal components of a living being. Just as the body changes from moment to moment, so thoughts come and go. And there is no permanent mental substance that experiences these thoughts, as in Cartesianism; rather, conscious mental states simply arise and perish with no "thinker" behind them.[30]. When the body dies, the incorporeal mental processes continue and are reborn in a new body.[29] Because the mental processes are constantly changing, the being that is reborn is neither entirely different than, nor exactly the same as, the being that died.[31] However, the new being is continuous with the being that died — in the same way that the "you" of this moment is continuous with the "you" of a moment before, despite the fact that you are constantly changing.[32]
Buddhist teaching holds that a notion of a permanent, abiding self is a delusion that is one of the root causes for human conflict on the emotional, social, and political levels.[33][34] They add that an understanding of anatta ("not-self" or "no soul") provides an accurate description of the human condition, and that this understanding allows us to pacify our mundane desires.
Various schools have differing ideas about what continues after death.[35] The Yogacara school in Mahayana Buddhism said there are Store consciousness continue to exist after death.[36] In some schools, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, the view is that there are three minds: Very-Subtle-Mind, which isn't disintegrated in incarnation-death; Subtle-Mind, which is disintegrated in death, and is "dreaming-mind" or "unconscious-mind"; and Gross-Mind. Gross-Mind doesn't exist when one is sleeping, so it is more impermanent even than Subtle-Mind, which doesn't exist in death. Very-Subtle-Mind, however, does continue, and when it "catches on" or coincides with phenomena again, a new Subtle-Mind emerges, with its own personality/assumptions/habits and that someone/entity experiences the karma on that continuum that is ripening then.
One should note the polarity in Tibetan Buddhism between shes-pa (the principle of consciousness) and rigpa (pure consciousness equal to Buddha-nature). The concept of a person as a tulku provides even more controversy[citation needed]. A tulku has, due to heroic austerities and esoteric training (or due to innate talent combined with great subtle-mind commitment in the moment of death), achieved the goal of transferring personal "identity" (or nature/commitment) from one rebirth to the next (for instance, Tibetans consider the Dalai Lama a tulku). The mechanics behind this work as follows: although Buddha-nature does not incarnate[citation needed], the individual self comprises skandhas, or components, that undergo rebirth. For an ordinary person, skandhas cohere in a way that dissolves upon the person's death. So, elements of the transformed personality re-incarnate, but they lose the unity that constitutes personal selfhood for a specific person. In the case of tulkus, however, they supposedly achieve sufficient "crystallization" of skandhas in such a manner that the skandhas do not entirely "disentangle" upon the tulku's death[citation needed]; rather, a directed reincarnation occurs. In this new birth, the tulku possesses a continuity of personal identity/commitment, rooted in the fact that the consciousness or shes-pa (which equates to a type of skandha called vijnana) has not dissolved after death, but has sufficient durability to survive in repeated births. Since, however, subtle-mind emerges in incarnation, and gross-mind emerges in periods of sufficient awareness within some incarnations, there isn't really any contradiction: very-subtle-mind's original nature, that is irreducible mind / clarity whose function is knowing, doesn't have any "body", and the coarser minds that emerge "on" it while it drifts/wanders/dreams aren't continuous. Any continuity of awareness achieved by tulku is simply a greater continuity than is achieved by/in a normal incarnation, as it continues across several, is only a difference of degree.
Plants were said to be non-sentient (無情),[37] but Buddhist monks should avoid cutting or burning trees, because some sentient beings rely on them.[38] Some Mahayana monks said non-sentient beings such as plants and stones have buddha-nature.[39][40] Some buddhists said about plants or divisible consciousnesses.[41][42][43][44][45]
Certain modern Buddhists, particularly in Western countries, reject the concept of rebirth or reincarnation as incompatible with the concept of anatta, or at least take an agnostic stance toward the concept. Stephen Batchelor discusses this issue in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs. Others point to research done at the University of Virginia as proving that at least some people are reborn.[46]
The Christian view of the soul is based upon the teaching of both the Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament contains the statements "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7) and "And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7). In the New Testament can be found a statement by Paul the Apostle, "And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam [was made] a quickening spirit." (1 Corinthians 15:45).
The majority of Christians understand the soul as an ontological reality distinct from, yet integrally connected with, the body. Its characteristics are described in moral, spiritual, and philosophical terms. When people die their souls will be judged by God and determined to spend an eternity in heaven or in hell. Though all branches of Christianity –Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox, Evangelical or mainline Protestants – teach that Jesus Christ plays a decisive role in the salvation process, the specifics of that role and the part played by individual persons or ecclesiastical rituals and relationships, is a matter of wide diversity in official church teaching, theological speculation and popular practice. Many Christians believe that if one has not repented of one's sins and trusted in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, he will go to hell and suffer eternal separation from God. Variations also exist on this theme, e.g. some which hold that the unrighteous soul will be destroyed instead of suffering eternally. Believers will inherit eternal life in heaven and enjoy eternal fellowship with God. There is also a belief that babies (including the unborn) and those with cognitive or mental impairments who have died will be received into heaven on the basis of God's grace through the sacrifice of Jesus.
Among Christians, there is uncertainty regarding whether human embryos have souls, and at what point between conception and birth the fetus acquires a soul and consciousness.[47][48][49]
Some Christians regard the soul as the immortal essence of a human – the seat or locus of human will, understanding, and personality.
Other Christians reject the idea of the immortality of the soul, citing the Apostles' Creed's reference to the "resurrection of the body" (the Greek word for body is soma σωμα, which implies the whole person, not sarx σαρξ, the term for flesh or corpse). They consider the soul to be the life force, which ends in death and is restored in the resurrection. Theologian Frederick Buechner sums up this position in his 1973 book Whistling in the Dark: "...we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e., resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place."
Augustine, one of western Christianity's most influential early Christian thinkers, described the soul as "a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body". Some Christians espouse a trichotomic view of humans, which characterizes humans as consisting of a body (soma) , soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma),[50] however the majority of modern Bible scholars point out how spirit and soul are used interchangeably in many biblical passages, and so hold to dichotomy: the view that each of us is body and soul. Paul said that the "body wars against" the soul, and that "I buffet my body", to keep it under control. Philosopher Anthony Quinton said the soul is a "series of mental states connected by continuity of character and memory, [and] is the essential constituent of personality. The soul, therefore, is not only logically distinct from any particular human body with which it is associated; it is also what a person is". Richard Swinburne, a Christian philosopher of religion at Oxford University, wrote that "it is a frequent criticism of substance dualism that dualists cannot say what souls are.... Souls are immaterial subjects of mental properties. They have sensations and thoughts, desires and beliefs, and perform intentional actions. Souls are essential parts of human beings..."
The origin of the soul has provided a sometimes vexing question in Christianity; the major theories put forward include soul creationism, traducianism and pre-existence. According to creationism, each individual soul is created directly by God, either at the moment of conception or some later time (identical twins arise several cell divisions after conception, but no creationist would deny that they have whole souls). According to traducianism, the soul comes from the parents by natural generation. According to the preexistence theory, the soul exists before the moment of conception.
Roman Catholic beliefs:
Orthodox Christian beliefs:
Protestant beliefs:
Other beliefs:
In Hinduism, the Sanskrit words most closely corresponding to soul are "Jiva/Atma", meaning the individual Self. The term "soul" is misleading as it implies an object possessed, whereas Self signifies the subject which perceives all objects. All the three major schools of Hindu philosophy agree, on the basis of the Vedic revelation, that the Atman or jivatman (individual Self) is related to Brahman (lit. "the Immensity") or the Supreme Self of the Universe (Paramatman). But they differ in the nature of this relationship. In Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism) the Individual Self (jivatman) and the Supreme Self (paramatman) are one and the same. Dvaita or dualistic rejects this concept of identity, instead identifying the Self as separate but similar part of supreme Self (God), but it never lose its individual identity. Visishtadvaita or Qualified Non-dualism takes a middle path and accepts the jivatman as a "mode" [prakara] or attribute of the Brahman.
The jivatman becomes involved in the process of becoming and transmigrating through cycles of birth and death because of ignorance of its own true nature. The spiritual path consists of Self-realization — a process in which one acquires the knowledge of the Self (brahma-jñanam) and through this knowledge applied through meditation and realization one then returns to the Source which is Brahman.
The qualities which are common to both Brahmnan and jivatman are: being (sat), consciousness (chit), and bliss/love (ananda). Liberation or Moksha (final release) is liberation from all limiting adjuncts (upadhis) and the unification with Brahman.
The Mandukya Upanishad verse 7 describes the Atman in the following way:-
"Not inwardly cognitive, not outwardly cognitive, not both-wise cognitive, not a cognition-mass, not cognitive, not non-cognitive, unseen, with which there can be no dealing, ungraspable, having no distinctive mark, non-thinkable, that cannot be designated, the essence of the assurance of which is the state of being one with the Self, the cessation of development, tranquil, benign, without a second (a-dvaita)—[such] they think is the fourth. That is the Self. That should be discerned."
The existence of Atman does not need any proof as it is self-evident. Through a process of Self-enquiry (atma-vichara) one comes to understand its nature. This process is one of negating all objective concepts and to continually ask oneself "who am I?" Am I the body? The senses? The thoughts? etc, once all objectivity has ceased what remains is pure subjective Self — that is Atman.
Since the quality of Atman is primarily consciousness - all sentient and insentient beings are pervaded by Atman — including plants, animals, humans and gods. The difference between them is the contracted or expanded state of that consciousness. For example animals and humans share in common, desire to live, fear of death, desire to procreate and to protect their families and territory and the need for sleep. But animals consciousness is more contracted and has less possibility to expand than does human consciousness.
When the Atman becomes embodied it is called birth, when the Atman leaves a body it is called death. The Atman transmigrates from one body to another body based on karmic [performed deeds] reactions.
According to a few verses from the Qur'an the following information can be deduced: In part 15 verse 29,[55] the creation of humans involves God "breathing" souls into them. This intangible part of an individual's existence is "pure" at birth. It has the potential of growing and achieving nearness to God if the person leads a righteous life.
There is a hadith reported by Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud, in which it is stated that the soul is breathed in the embryo after 40 days after fertilization takes place.[citation needed] This version of hadith is supported by some other hadiths narrated by Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj in which the period is said to be around 40 days.
At death, a person’s spririt or soul doesn’t perish, it is extracted from the body and enters an intermediate state known as Barzakh, a parallel universe for which humans in mortal world have no hardcoded visualization. This stage results in a cold sleep state where the soul will rest until the Judgment Day. The person is either rewarded in the next realm of existence by going to heaven if they have followed Allah's commands or punished if they have disobeyed Him (Qur'an 66:8, 39:20,[56][57]).
[For such is the state of the disbelievers], when death comes to one of them he says: "My Lord, send me back. That I may do righteousness in the things I neglected." Never, it is but a word he says. And beyond them is a Barzakh until the day when they (all) are raised up." Qur'an 23: 99-100.
The interrogation by the angels takes place with everyone who dies, no matter whether he is buried in the grave or cremated or his dead body is immersed in the river or eaten up by carnivorous birds and animals.
The human soul is split into three parts; the Qalb (Heart), Ruh (blood) and the Nafs (passion of the soul) although Ruh is the actual soul it is pumped from the Heart.
The Islamic prophet Muhammad said: "sleep is the brother of death"[citation needed] and also: "the grave is the first stage of the journey into eternity."[citation needed] During sleep angels take the soul but the connection with the body remains.[citation needed] The example of the dream is quite sufficient to understand the misgiving that, sometimes, a dead body remains lying unburied for three or four days and yet no sound of the questions and answers is heard by anyone. In the dream, too, all sorts of things happen to a man, he talks, eats and drinks but no evidence of it is noticed by those around him.
According to Jainism, Soul (Jiva) exists too, having a separate existence from the body that houses it. Every living being from a plant or a bacterium to human, has a soul. The soul (Jiva) is differentiated from non-soul or non-living reality (ajiva) that consists of: matter, time, space, medium of motion and medium of rest.
For Jains, Moksa- the realization of the soul and its salvation- are the highest objective to be attained. Most of the Jaina texts deal with various aspects of the soul i.e. its qualities, attributes, bondage and interaction with other elements, and its salvation through the right views, right knowledge and right conduct. Following are the quotes on soul from Pancastikayasara, a 1st century CE Jaina text authored by 'Acarya Kundakunda:
- The qualities of soul and its states of existence are described in Verse 16 - The Jiva (Soul) and other Dravyas (substances) are real. The qualities of jiva are cetana i.e. consciousness and upoyoga i.e. knowledge and perception, which are manifold. The soul manifests in the following form as a deva i.e. demi-god, as a human, as a hellish being or as a plant or animal.
- The permanency and the modes of soul are described in Verse 18 – Though the soul experiences both birth and death, it is neither really destroyed nor created. Decay and origin refer respectively to the disappearing of one state and appearing of another state and these are merely the modes of the soul.
- The cycle of transmigration of the soul until it attains Nirvana or liberation is described in Verse 21 – Thus Jiva with its attributes and modes, roaming in samsara (universe), may lose its particular form and assume a new one. Again this form may be lost and the original acquired.
In another text, Bhavapahuda, gatha 64, Acharya Kundakunda describes soul as thus:
This is translated as follows:
Hence the soul according to Jainism is indestructible and permanent from the point of view of substance. It is temporary and ever changing from the point of view of its modes. Māhavīras responses to various questions recorded in Bhagvatisūtra demonstrates a recognition that there are complex and multiple aspects to truth and reality and a mutually exclusive approach cannot be taken to explain such reality:
The soul continuously undergoes modifications as per the karma it attracts and hence reincarnates in the following four states of existence -
The soul is always found to be in bondage (with its karmas) since the beginningless time and hence continuously undergoes the cycle of birth and death in these four states of existence until it attains liberation (Moksa).
The Jaina beliefs on the soul can be summarized under:
Jewish views of the soul begin with the book of Genesis, in which verse 2:7 states, "Hashem formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." (New JPS)
The Torah offers no systematic definition of a soul; various descriptions of the soul exist in classical rabbinic literature.
Saadia Gaon, in his Emunoth ve-Deoth 6:3, explained classical rabbinic teaching about the soul. He held that the soul comprises that part of a person's mind which constitutes physical desire, emotion, and thought.
Maimonides, in his The Guide for the Perplexed, explained classical rabbinic teaching about the soul through the lens of neo-Aristotelian philosophy, and viewed the soul as a person's developed intellect, which has no substance.
In Kabbalah the soul is understood to have three elements. The Zohar, a classic work of Jewish mysticism, describes the three elements as nephesh, ru'ah, and neshamah. They are differentiated thus:
The next two parts of the soul are not implanted at birth, but are slowly created over time; their development depends on the actions and beliefs of the individual. They are said to only fully exist in people awakened spiritually:
The Raaya Meheimna, a Kabbalistic tractate always published with the Zohar, posits two more parts of the human soul, the chayyah and yehidah. Gershom Scholem wrote that these "were considered to represent the sublimest levels of intuitive cognition, and to be within the grasp of only a few chosen individuals":
Both Rabbinic and kabbalistic works also posit a few additional, non-permanent states to the soul that people can develop on certain occasions. These extra souls, or extra states of the soul, play no part in any afterlife scheme, but are mentioned for completeness.
For more detail on Jewish beliefs about the soul see Jewish eschatology.
Sikhism considers Soul (atma) to be part of Universal Soul, which is God (Parmatma). Various hymns are cited from the holy book "Sri Guru Granth Sahib" (SGGS) that suggests this belief. "God is in the Soul and the Soul is in the God."[59] The same concept is repeated at various pages of the SGGS. For example: "The soul is divine; divine is the soul. Worship Him with love."[60] and "The soul is the Lord, and the Lord is the soul; contemplating the Shabad, the Lord is found."[61]
In Taoism a soul has "sanhunqipo" (三魂七魄). These are the sub-souls including three hun (魂 hún) or yang souls and the seven po (魄 pò) or yin souls.[62][63][64] The pò is linked to the dead body and the grave, whereas the hún is linked to the ancestral tablet. A living being that loses any of them is said to have mental illness or unconsciousness, while a dead soul may reincarnate to a disability, lower desire realms or may even be unable to reincarnate. Also, Journeys to the Under-World said there can be hundreds of divisible souls.[65]
In Egyptian Mythology, an individual was believed to be made up of various elements, some physical and some spiritual. See the article Egyptian soul for more details.[citation needed]
Kuttamuwa was an 8th century BC royal official from Sam'al who ordered an inscribed stele, that was to be erected upon his death. The inscription requested that his mourners commemorate his life and his afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele". It is one of the earliest references to a soul as a separate entity from the body. The 800-pound (360 kg) basalt stele is 3 ft (0.91 m) tall and 2 ft (0.61 m) wide. It was uncovered in the third season of excavations by the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Illinois.[66]
Some transhumanists believe that it will become possible to perform mind transfer, either from one human body to another, or from a human body to a computer. Operations of this type (along with teleportation), raise philosophical questions related to the concept of the soul.[citation needed]
Crisscrossing specific religions, the concept of spiritual therianthropy and belief in the existence of otherkin also occur. Therianthropy involves the belief that a person or their soul has a spiritual, emotional, or mental connection with an animal. Such a belief may manifest itself in many forms, and many explanations for it often draw on a person's religious beliefs. Otherkin hold similar beliefs: they see their souls as partially or entirely non-human, and not necessarily of this world.[citation needed]
In Theosophy the soul is the field of our psychological activity (thinking, emotions, memory, desires, will, and so on) as well as of the so-called paranormal or psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, out-of-body experiences, etc.). However, the soul is not the highest, but a middle dimension of human beings. Higher than the soul is the spirit, which is considered to be the real self; the source of everything we call “good”—happiness, wisdom, love, compassion, harmony, peace, etc. While the spirit is eternal and incorruptible, the soul is not. The soul acts as a link between the material body and the spiritual self, and therefore shares some characteristics of both. The soul can be attracted either towards the spiritual or towards the material realm, being thus the “battlefield” of good and evil. It is only when the soul is attracted towards the spiritual and merges with the Self that it becomes eternal and divine.
Some people, who do not necessarily favor organized religion, simply label themselves as "spiritual" and hold that both humans and all other living creatures have souls. Some further believe the entire universe has a cosmic soul as a spirit or unified consciousness. Such a conception of the soul may link with the idea of an existence before and after the present one, and one could consider such a soul as the spark, or the self, the "I" in existence that feels and lives life.[citation needed]
In Surat Shabda Yoga, the soul is considered to be an exact replica and spark of the Divine. The purpose of Surat Shabd Yoga is to realize one's True Self as soul (Self-Realisation), True Essence (Spirit-Realisation) and True Divinity (God-Realisation) while living in the physical body.
G. I. Gurdjieff taught that nobody is ever born with a soul. Rather, you must create a soul during the course of your life. Without a soul, Gurdjieff taught that you will "die like a dog".[citation needed]
Science and medicine seek naturalistic accounts of the observable natural world. This stance is known as methodological naturalism.[67] Much of the scientific study relating to the soul has involved investigating the soul as an object of human belief, or as a concept that shapes cognition and an understanding of the world, rather than as an entity in and of itself.
When modern scientists speak of the soul outside of this cultural and psychological context, they generally treat soul as a poetic synonym for mind. Francis Crick's book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, for example, has the subtitle, "The scientific search for the soul". Crick held the position that one can learn everything knowable about the human soul by studying the workings of the human brain. Depending on one's belief regarding the relationship between the soul and the mind, then, the findings of neuroscience may be relevant to one's understanding of the soul.
An oft-encountered analogy is that the brain is to the mind as computer hardware is to computer software. The idea of the mind as software has led some scientists to use the word "soul" to emphasize that the human mind has powers beyond or at least qualitatively different from what artificial software can do. Roger Penrose expounds this position in The Emperor's New Mind. He posits that the mind is in fact not like a computer as generally understood, but rather a quantum computer, that can do things impossible on a classical computer, such as decide the halting problem (although quantum computers in actuality cannot do any more than a regular Turing machine, including deciding the halting problem, they can in theory solve problems that would require billions of years for linear algorithms on the fastest computers in the world in minutes or seconds). Some have located the soul in this possible difference between the mind and a classical computer.
In his book Consilience, E. O. Wilson took note that sociology has identified belief in a soul as one of the universal human cultural elements. Wilson suggested that biologists need to investigate how human genes predispose people to believe in a soul.
Daniel Dennett has championed the idea that the human survival strategy depends heavily on adoption of the intentional stance, a behavioral strategy that predicts the actions of others based on the expectation that they have a mind like one's own (see theory of mind). Mirror neurons in brain regions such as Broca's area may facilitate this behavioral strategy. The intentional stance, Dennett suggests, has proven so successful that people tend to apply it to all aspects of human experience, thus leading to animism and to other conceptualizations of soul.[68]
"Soul". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Soul.
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The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being.
Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
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Soul m.
Soul
Soul m
(Greek psyche; Latin anima; French ame; German Seele).
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The question of the reality of the soul and its distinction from the body is among the most important problems of philosophy, for with it is bound up the doctrine of a future life. Various theories as to the nature of the soul have claimed to be reconcilable with the tenet of immortality, but it is a sure instinct that leads us to suspect every attack on the substantiality or spirituality of the soul as an assault on the belief in existence after death. The soul may be defined as the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. The term "mind" usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while "soul" denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well. That our vital activities proceed from a principle capable of subsisting in itself, is the thesis of the substantiality of the soul: that this principle is not itself composite, extended, corporeal, or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality. If there be a life after death, clearly the agent or subject of our vital activities must be capable of an existence separate from the body. The belief in an animating principle in some sense distinct from the body is an almost inevitable inference from the observed facts of life. Even uncivilized peoples arrive at the concept of the soul almost without reflection, certainly without any severe mental effort. The mysteries of birth and death, the lapse of conscious life during sleep and in swooning, even the commonest operations of imagination and memory, which abstract a man from his bodily presence even while awake-all such facts invincibly suggest the existence of something besides the visible organism, internal to it, but to a large extent independent of it, and leading a life of its own. In the rude psychology of the primitive nations, the soul is often represented as actually migrating to and fro during dreams and trances, and after death haunting the neighbourhood of its body. Nearly always it is figured as something extremely volatile, a perfume or a breath. Often, as among the Fijians, it is represented as a miniature replica of the body, so small as to be invisible. The Samoans have a name for the soul which means "that which comes and goes". Many peoples, such as the Dyaks and Sumatrans, bind various parts of the body with cords during sickness to prevent the escape of the soul. In short, all the evidence goes to show that Dualism, however uncritical and inconsistent, is the instinctive creed of "primitive man" (see Animism).
Early literature bears the same stamp of Dualism. In the "Rig-Veda" and other liturgical books of India, we find frequent references to the coming and going of manas (mind or soul). Indian philosophy, whether Brahminic or Buddhistic, with its various systems of metempsychosis, accentuated the distinction of soul and body, making the bodily life a mere transitory episode in the existence of the soul. They all taught the doctrine of limited immortality, ending either with the periodic world-destruction (Brahminism) or with attainment of Nirvana (Buddhism). The doctrine of a world-soul in a highly abstract form is met with as early as the eighth century before Christ, when we find it described as "the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower, the Eternal in which space is woven and which is woven in it."
In Greece, on the other hand, the first essays of philosophy took a positive and somewhat materialistic direction, inherited from the pre-philosophic age, from Homer and the early Greek religion. In Homer, while the distinction of soul and body is recognized, the soul is hardly conceived as possessing a substantial existence of its own. Severed from the body, it is a mere shadow, incapable of energetic life. The philosophers did something to correct such views. The earliest school was that of the Hylozoists; these conceived the soul as a kind of cosmic force, and attributed animation to the whole of nature. Any natural force might be designated psyche: thus Thales uses this term for the attractive force of the magnet, and similar language is quoted even from Anaxagoras and Democritus. With this we may compare the "mind-stuff" theory and Pan-psychism of certain modern scientists. Other philosophers again described the soul's nature in terms of substance. Anaximander gives it an aeriform constitution, Heraclitus describes it as a fire. The fundamental thought is the same. The cosmic ether or fire is the subtlest of the elements, the nourishing flame which imparts heat, life, sense, and intelligence to all things in their several degrees and kinds. The Pythagoreans taught that the soul is a harmony, its essence consisting in those perfect mathematical ratios which are the law of the universe and the music of the heavenly spheres. With this doctrine was combined, according to Cicero, the belief in a universal world-spirit, from which all particular souls are derived.
All these early theories were cosmological rather than psychological in character. Theology, physics, and mental science were not as yet distinguished. It is only with the rise of dialectic and the growing recognition of the problem of knowledge that a genuinely psychological theory became possible. In Plato the two standpoints, the cosmological and the epistemological, are found combined. Thus in the "Timaeus" (p. 30) we find an account derived from Pythagorean sources of the origin of the soul. First the world-soul is created according to the laws of mathematical symmetry and musical concord. It is composed of two elements, one an element of "sameness" (tauton), corresponding to the universal and intelligible order of truth, and the other an element of distinction or "otherness" (thateron), corresponding to the world of sensible and particular existences. The individual human soul is constructed on the same plan. Sometimes, as in the "Phaedrus", Plato teaches the doctrine of plurality of souls (cf. the well-known allegory of the charioteer and the two steeds in that dialogue). The rational soul was located in the head, the passionate or spirited soul in the breast, the appetitive soul in the abdomen. In the "Republic", instead of the triple soul, we find the doctrine of three elements within the complex unity of the single soul. The question of immortality was a principal subject of Plato's speculations. His account of the origin of the soul in the "Timaeus" leads him to deny the intrinsic immortality even of the world-soul, and to admit only an immortality conditional on the good pleasure of God. In the "Phaedo" the chief argument for the immortality of the soul is based on the nature of intellectual knowledge interpreted on the theory of reminiscence; this of course implies the pre-existence of the soul, and perhaps in strict logic its eternal pre-existence. There is also an argument from the soul's necessary participation in the idea of life, which, it is argued, makes the idea of its extinction impossible. These various lines of argument are nowhere harmonized in Plato (see IMMORTALITY). The Platonic doctrine tended to an extreme Transcendentalism. Soul and body are distinct orders of reality, and bodily existence involves a kind of violence to the higher part of our composite nature. The body is the "prison", the "tomb", or even, as some later Platonists expressed it, the "hell" of the soul. In Aristotle this error is avoided. His definition of the soul as "the first entelechy of a physical organized body potentially possessing life" emphasizes the closeness of the union of soul and body. The difficulty in his theory is to determine what degree of distinctness or separateness from the matter of the body is to be conceded to the human soul. He fully recognizes the spiritual element in thought and describes the "active intellect" (nous poetikos) as "separate and impassible", but the precise relation of this active intellect to the individual mind is a hopelessly obscure question in Aristotle's psychology. (See INTELLECT; MIND.)
The Stoics taught that all existence is material, and described the soul as a breath pervading the body. They also called it Divine, a particle of God (apospasma tou theu) -- it was composed of the most refined and ethereal matter. Eight distinct parts of the soul were recognized by them:
Epicureanism accepted the Atomist theory of Leucippus and Democritus. Soul consists of the finest grained atoms in the universe, finer even than those of wind and heat which they resemble: hence the exquisite fluency of the soul's movements in thought and sensation. The soul-atoms themselves, however, could not exercise their functions if they were not kept together by the body. It is this which gives shape and consistency to the group. If this is destroyed, the atoms escape and life is dissolved; if it is injured, part of the soul is lost, but enough may be left to maintain life. The Lucretian version of Epicureanism distinguishes between animus and anima: the latter only is soul in the biological sense, the former is the higher, directing principle (to hegemonikon) in the Stoic terminology, whose seat is the heart, the centre of the cognitive and emotional life.
Graeco-Roman philosophy made no further progress in the doctrine of the soul in the age immediately preceding the Christian era. None of the existing theories had found general acceptance, and in the literature of the period an eclectic spirit nearly akin to Scepticism predominated. Of the strife and fusion of systems at this time the works of Cicero are the best example. On the question of the soul he is by turns Platonic and Pythagorean, while he confesses that the Stoic and Epicurean systems have each an attraction for him. Such was the state of the question in the West at the dawn of Christianity. In Jewish circles a like uncertainty prevailed. The Sadducees were Materialists, denying immortality and all spiritual existence. The Pharisees maintained these doctrines, adding belief in pre-existence and transmigration. The psychology of the Rabbins is founded on the Sacred Books, particularly the account of the creation of man in Genesis. Three terms are used for the soul: nephesh, nuah, and neshamah; the first was taken to refer to the animal and vegetative nature, the second to the ethical principle, the third to the purely spiritual intelligence. At all events, it is evident that the Old Testament throughout either asserts or implies the distinct reality of the soul. An important contribution to later Jewish thought was the infusion of Platonism into it by Philo of Alexandria. He taught the immediately Divine origin of the soul, its pre-existence and transmigration; he contrasts the pneuma, or spiritual essence, with the soul proper, the source of vital phenomena, whose seat is the blood; finally he revived the old Platonic Dualism, attributing the origin of sin and evil to the union of spirit with matter.
It was Christianity that, after many centuries of struggle, applied the final criticisms to the various psychologies of antiquity, and brought their scattered elements of truth to full focus. The tendency of Christ's teaching was to centre all interest in the spiritual side of man's nature; the salvation or loss of the soul is the great issue of existence. The Gospel language is popular, not technical. Psyche and pneuma are used indifferently either for the principle of natural life or for spirit in the strict sense. Body and soul are recognized as a dualism and their values contrasted: "Fear ye not them that kill the body . . . but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell."
In St. Paul we find a more technical phraseology employed with great consistency. Psyche is now appropriated to the purely natural life; pneuma to the life of supernatural religion, the principle of which is the Holy Spirit, dwelling and operating in the heart. The opposition of flesh and spirit is accentuated afresh (Romans 1:18, etc.). This Pauline system, presented to a world already prepossessed in favour of a quasi-Platonic Dualism, occasioned one of the earliest widespread forms of error among Christian writers -- the doctrine of the Trichotomy. According to this, man, perfect man (teleios) consists of three parts: body, soul, spirit (soma, psyche, pneuma). Body and soul come by natural generation; spirit is given to the regenerate Christian alone. Thus, the "newness of life", of which St. Paul speaks, was conceived by some as a superadded entity, a kind of oversoul sublimating the "natural man" into a higher species. This doctrine was variously distorted in the different Gnostic systems. The Gnostics divided man into three classes:
Two features claim attention in this the earliest essay towards a complete anthropology within the Christian Church:
The dubious language of these writers can only be understood in relation to the system they were opposing. By assigning a literal divinity to a certain small aristocracy of souls, Gnosticism set aside the doctrine of Creation and the whole Christian idea of God's relation to man. On the other side, by its extreme dualism of matter and spirit, and its denial to matter (i.e. the flesh) of all capacity for spiritual influences, it involved the rejection of cardinal doctrines like the Resurrection of the Body and even of the Incarnation itself in any proper sense. The orthodox teacher had to emphasize:
Tertullian's treatise "De Anima" has been called the first Christian classic on psychology proper. The author aims to show the failure of all philosophies to elucidate the nature of the soul, and argues eloquently that Christ alone can teach mankind the truth on such subjects. His own doctrine, however, is simply the refined Materialism of the Stoics, supported by arguments from medicine and physiology and by ingenious interpretations of Scripture, in which the unavoidable materialism of language is made to establish a metaphysical Materialism. Tertullian is the founder of the theory of Traducianism, which derives the rational soul ex traduce, i.e. by procreation from the soul of the parent. For Tertullian this was a necessary consequence of Materialism. Later writers found in the doctrine a convenient explanation of the transmission of original sin. St. Jerome says that in his day it was the common theory in the West. Theologians have long abandoned it, however, in favour of Creationism, as it seems to compromise the spirituality of the soul. Origen taught the pre-existence of the soul. Terrestrial life is a punishment and a remedy for prenatal sin. "Soul" is properly degraded spirit: flesh is a condition of alienation and bondage (cf. Comment. ad Rom., i, 18). Spirit, however, finite spirit, can exist only in a body, albeit of a glorious and ethereal nature.
Neo-Platonism, which through St. Augustine contributed so much to spiritual philosophy, belongs to this period. Like Gnosticism, it uses emanations. The primeval and eternal One begets by emanation nous (intelligence); and from nous in turn springs psyche (soul), which is the image of nous, but distinct from it. Matter is a still later emanation. Soul has relations to both ends of the scale of reality, and its perfection lies in turning towards the Divine Unity from which it came. In everything, the neo-Platonist recognized the absolute primacy of the soul with respect to the body. Thus, the mind is always active, even in sense -- perception -- it is only the body that is passively affected by external stimuli. Similarly Plotinus prefers to say that the body is in the soul rather than vice versa: and he seems to have been the first to conceive the peculiar manner of the soul's location as an undivided and universal presence pervading the organism (tota in toto et tota in singulis partibus). It is impossible to give more than a very brief notice of the psychology of St. Augustine. His contributions to every branch of the science were immense; the senses, the emotions, imagination, memory, the will, and the intellect -- he explored them all, and there is scarcely any subsequent development of importance that he did not forestall. He is the founder of the introspective method. Noverim Te, noverim me was an intellectual no less than a devotional aspiration with him. The following are perhaps the chief points for our present purpose:
Medieval psychology prior to the Aristotelean revival was affected by neo-Platonism, Augustinianism, and mystical influences derived from the works of pseudo-Dionysius. This fusion produced sometimes, notably in Scotus Eriugena, a pantheistic theory of the soul. All individual existence is but the development of the Divine life, in which all things are destined to be resumed. The Arabian commentators, Averroes and Avicenna, had interpreted Aristotle's psychology in a pantheistic sense. St. Thomas, with the rest of the Schoolmen, amends this portion of the Aristotelean tradition, accepting the rest with no important modifications. St. Thomas's doctrine is briefly as follows:
Modern speculations respecting the soul have taken two main directions, Idealism and Materialism. Agnosticism need not be reckoned as a third and distinct answer to the problem, since, as a matter of fact, all actual agnosticisms have an easily recognized bias towards one or other of the two solutions aforesaid. Both Idealism and Materialism in present-day philosophy merge into Monism, which is probably the most influential system outside the Catholic Church.
History
Descartes conceived the soul as essentially thinking (i.e. conscious) substance, and body as essentially extended substance. The two are thus simply disparate realities, with no vital connection between them. This is significantly marked by his theory of the soul's location in the body. Unlike the Scholastics he confines it to a single point -- the pineal gland -- from which it is supposed to control the various organs and muscles through the medium of the "animal spirits", a kind of fluid circulating through the body. Thus, to say the least, the soul's biological functions are made very remote and indirect, and were in fact later on reduced almost to a nullity: the lower life was violently severed from the higher, and regarded as a simple mechanism. In the Cartesian theory animals are mere automata. It is only by the Divine assistance that action between soul and body is possible. The Occasionalists went further, denying all interaction whatever, and making the correspondence of the two sets of facts a pure result of the action of God. The Leibnizian theory of Pre-established Harmony similarly refuses to admit any inter-causal relation. The superior monad (soul) and the aggregate of inferior monads which go to make up the body are like two clocks constructed with perfect art so as always to agree. They register alike, but independently: they are still two clocks, not one. This awkward Dualism was entirely got rid of by Spinoza. For him there is but one, infinite substance, of which thought and extension are only attributes. Thought comprehends extension, and by that very fact shows that it is at root one with that which it comprehends. The alleged irreducible distinction is transcended: soul and body are neither of them substances, but each is a property of the one substance. Each in its sphere is the counterpart of the other. This is the meaning of the definition, "Soul is the Idea of Body". Soul is the counterpart within the sphere of the attribute of thought of that particular mode of the attribute of extension which we call the body. Such was the fate of Cartesianism.
English Idealism had a different course. Berkeley had begun by denying the existence of material substance, which he reduced merely to a series of impressions in the sentient mind. Mind is the only substance. Hume finished the argument by dissolving mind itself into its phenomena, a loose collection of "impressions and ideas". The Sensist school (Condillac etc.) and the Associationists (Hartley, the Mills, and Bain) continued in similar fashion to regard the mind as constituted by its phenomena or "states", and the growth of modern positive psychology has tended to encourage this attitude. But to rest in Phenomenalism as a theory is impossible, as its ablest advocates themselves have seen. Thus J.S. Mill, while describing the mind as merely "a series [i.e. of conscious phenomena] aware of itself as a series", is forced to admit that such a conception involves an unresolved paradox. Again, W. James's assertion that "the passing thought is itself the Thinker", which "appropriates" all past thoughts in the "stream of consciousness", simply blinks the question. For surely there is something which in its turn "appropriates" the passing thought itself and the entire stream of past and future thoughts as well, viz. the self-conscious, self-asserting "I" the substantial ultimate of our mental life. To be in this sense "monarch of all it surveys" in introspective observation and reflective self-consciousness, to appropriate without itself being appropriated by anything else, to be the genuine owner of a certain limited section of reality (the stream of consciousness), this is to be a free and sovereign (though finite) personality, a self-conscious, spiritual substance in the language of Catholic metaphysics.
Criticism
The foregoing discussion partly anticipates our criticism of Materialism (q. v.). The father of modern Materialism is Hobbes, who accepted the theory of Epicurus, and reduced all spirits either to phantoms of the imagination or to matter in a highly rarefied state. This theory need not detain us here. Later Materialism has three main sources:
As regards monistic systems generally, it belongs rather to cosmology to discuss them. We take our stand on the consciousness of individual personality, which consciousness is a distinct deliverance of our very highest faculties, growing more and more explicit with the strengthening of our moral and intellectual being. This consciousness is emphatic, as against the figments of a fallaciously abstract reason, in asserting the self-subsistence (and at the same time the finitude) of our being, i.e. it declares that we are independent inasmuch as we are truly persons or selves, not mere attributes or adjectives, while at the same time, by exhibiting our manifold limitations, it directs us to a higher Cause on which our being depends.
Such is the Catholic doctrine on the nature, unity, substantiality, spirituality, and origin of the soul. It is the only system consistent with Christian faith, and, we may add, morals, for both Materialism and Monism logically cut away the foundations of these. The foregoing historical sketch will have served also to show another advantage it possesses -- namely, that it is by far the most comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating, syntheseis of whatever is best in rival systems. It recognizes the physical conditions of the soul's activity with the Materialist, and its spiritual aspect with the Idealist, while with the Monist it insists on the vital unity of human life. It enshrines the principles of ancient speculation, and is ready to receive and assimilate the fruits of modern research.
Many philosophies and religions say that a soul is the part of a living human being which is supernatural and lives after death. It cannot be discovered by science, because it cannot be tested in any controlled way. Many different opinions exist as to what happens to personal experience after death. Most atheists say that there is no such thing as a soul, and that the body is the only part of a person.
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In popular culture, soul usually means deep feeling and commitment. It is in this sense that the word appears in the term soul music. However that music was also influenced by gospel music which was religious.
One common idea C. S. Lewis had about souls that is easy to express, is that a person is a soul, and has a body.[1] The soul is the "I" in "I exist" that feels and lives life. What people call the mind could be part of the soul: one soul started this article, other souls have edited it, and another soul is reading it. This view, however, implies that the human body is a possession, and seems to devalue bodies that do not have souls as defined or understood by the speaker (some people say that animals, heretics, and people of another religion do not have souls). Like most uses of the verb to be, there is an ideology in these simple words.
One distinction often made is between soul, which is distinct from other souls, and spirit which may be combined with that of other beings. The idea of the Holy Spirit in Christianity, for example, is a universal and shared spirit many souls are part of, and which is expressed on Earth in that faith by "the Church" meaning "the body of Christ" meaning "all bodies that follow Jesus." This could be more inclusive than the is/has view of souls and bodies.
Reincarnation is a belief that says that after the body dies, the soul will be born again in another body.
   | The soul in Judaism - Soul, The - Jewish Knowledge Base |
| | "spirituo-capitalist" booth - we buy souls / wir kaufen seelen |
| | The Early Greek Concept of the Soul - The Early Greek Concept of the Soul |
| | Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 382 - Catechism of the Catholic Church - Man |
| | What Is Man - 3. What Is Man |
| | online - Christadelphian Statement of Faith |
| | Body, Soul and Spirit - The Journal of Biblical Accuracy: Body, Soul and Spirit |
| | Journal of Biblical Accuracy - The Journal of Biblical Accuracy |
 | "SPIRIT, SOUL, AND MIND" - American Atheists | Page Not Found |
| | Do Humans Have Souls? - Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc - Do Humans Have Souls? |
| | Islam Way Online - Your Religion and Spirituality Portal - Spiritual Healing - Ways to Soul's Nourishment and Perfection |
| | Official Website - Welcome to Soul.com |
| | chabad.org - Chabad Lubavitch - Torah, Judaism and Jewish Info |
| | The soul in Islam - Tafsir (Sura 39, verse 42) To die/to sleep (the soul/nafs) |
| | Discussion of the soul in Biblical Christianity - Bible Basic Study 4.2 - The Soul |
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