English

Alternative forms

• world-soul, World Soul, World-Soul, world's soul

Noun

world soul ‎(plural world souls)

1. (religion, philosophy) A single, unifying spirit believed by some to animate every living being in the world and to underlie the value of every inanimate thing as well.
   • 1633, John Donne, "The Canonization":

     You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

     Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

     Into the glasses of your eyes

   • 1847, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The World-Soul":

     Thanks to the morning light,

     Thanks to the seething sea,

     To the uplands of New Hampshire,

     To the green-haired forest free . . .

   • 1912, Marian Fell (translator) Anton Chekhov (author), The Seagull, act 1:

     NINA: The bodies of all living creatures have dropped to dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into stones and water and clouds; but their spirits have flowed together into one, and that great world-soul am I!

   • 1913 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, ch. 1:

     Like many ungainly or otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he [Thomas Carlyle] was a seer. By which I do not mean to refer so much to his transcendental rhapsodies about the World-soul or the Nature-garment or the Mysteries and Eternities generally.

   • 1940 April 29, "Scientist on Immortality," Time:

     During the long nights on the mountain overshadowing Pasadena, he has done a lot of unorthodox thinking about the human mind, the human soul, the World Soul, Cosmic Consciousness, Cosmos, God.

   • 2001 June 3, Marina Warner, "Books: Where Heaven Touches Down," New York Times (retrieved 19 July 2011):

     [H]er vision of Sant'Agnese resembles the beautiful Neoplatonist concept of the world soul as a great boat, in which every individual is a member of the crew who rows it through the cosmos for the space of existence, and then merges back into its fabric.

Synonyms

• anima mundi

Translations

See also

• panpsychism
• pantheism

References

• world soul at OneLook Dictionary Search