VIII. On Mind and Soul, and that the latter is immortal.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: First, we must consider what soul is. It is, then, that by which the animate differs from the inanimate. The difference lies in motion, sensation, imagination, intelligence. Soul therefore, when irrational, is the life of sense and imagination; when rational, it is the life which controls sense and imagination and uses reason. The irrational soul depends on the affections of the body; it feels desire and anger irrationally. The rational soul both, with the help of reason, despises the body, and, fighting against the irrational soul, produces either virtue or vice, according as it is victorious or defeated.
“Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Context: Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature — that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
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Miguel de Unamuno 199
19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher 1864–1936Related quotes
“The inanimate universe is related to the animate as means to end.”
We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end.
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 78–79
Book II: On the soul; In: Aristotle (1808). Works, Vol. 4. p. 63 (412a-424b)
De Anima
The Origin of Humankind (1994)
Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 6, p. 132
At the conclusion of his speech on Indian tradition he recited a passage from Matsyapurana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".