Bernhard Riemann: Quotes about the soul

Bernhard Riemann was German mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on soul.
Bernhard Riemann: 86 quotes4 likes

“The souls of perished creatures shall… form the elements of the soul-life of the earth.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“From the standpoint of exact natural science, of the explanation of nature from causes, the assumption of an earth-soul is… an hypothesis for the explanation of Being and of the historical development of the organic world.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“Zend-Avesta, a truly life giving word creating new life in knowledge as in faith! …As Fechner in his Nanna sought to show that plants have souls, so the point of departure of his contemplations in the Zend-Avesta is the doctrine that the stars have souls. The method he employs is not that of the abstraction of general laws by induction and the application and testing of these in the explanation of nature, it is analogy. He compares the earth with our own organism, which we know to be endowed with a soul. He searches out not merely in a one-sided way the similarities, but does equal justice to the dissimilarities, too, and so arrives at the conclusion that all the former show the earth to be a being with a soul, and that all the latter indicate that it is a being with a soul far higher than our own.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“There remains only the assumption that the ponderable masses within the rigid earth-crust are supporters of the soul-life of the earth.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“The soul is a compact of mind-masses combined in a most intimate and manifold manner. It grows constantly by accession of mind-masses, and upon these depend its development.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“Mind-masses entering the soul appear to us as ideas, the quality of the latter depending on the inner state of the former.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“An immediate consequence of these principles of explanation is that the souls of organic beings, i. e., the compacts of mind-masses, arisen during life, continue to exist after death. (Their isolated persistence is not sufficient). But in order to explain the orderly development of organic nature in which the earlier collected experiences obviously serve as basis for the later creations, it is necessary to assume that these mind-masses enter into a greater compact of mind-masses, the Earth-Soul, and that these serve a higher soul-life according to the same laws as the mind-masses engendered in our nerve-processes observe in their service of our own soul-life.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“With every simple act of thinking, something permanent, substantial, enters our soul. This substantial somewhat appears to us as a unit but (in so far as it is the expression of something extended in space and time) it seems to contain an inner manifoldness; I therefore name it "mind-mass."”

Bernhard Riemann

All thinking is, accordingly, formation of new mind masses.
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“The different thought-processes seem to differ chiefly in respect to their temporal rhythm. If plants have souls, then hours and days must be for them what seconds are for us. The corresponding period for the earth-soul, at least for its outward activity, possibly embraces many thousands of years.”

Bernhard Riemann

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)