The animal spirit
idea · 4 works · 4 mentions · 6 anchored passages
the animal spirit · al-rūḥ al-ḥayawānī · al-rūḥ al-ḥayawanī · al-rūḥ al-ḥayawānīyah · an airy substance · rūḥ · the spirit · الروح · الروح الحيواني · الروح الحيوانية
in the texts
Kitāb al-Safīnah al-Nūḥīyah fī al-sakīnah al-rūḥīyah
The second of the physicians' three spirits: a subtle vaporous body hotter than the natural spirit, arising from the heart, travelling by the arteries and carrying the faculty of life.
As for the animal spirit, it too is a subtle body, like vapour in consistency, and it is hotter than the natural spirit.
the natural spirit (al-rūḥ al-ṭabīʿī), the animal spirit (al-rūḥ al-ḥayawanī), and the psychic spirit (al-rūḥ al-nafsānī).
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The subtle vaporous body generated in the heart and distributed by the arteries, in which joy and sorrow arise and whose heat decides between insolence, abjectness and courage, and which also runs between the cerebral ventricles carrying forms.
In the left there is generated a subtle, vaporous, spiritual body, from which the animal spirit (*al-rūḥ al-ḥayawānīyah*) is sent forth in the arteries to all the regions of the body.
And when that body draws together and thickens, it stops up that passage, the spirit is held back from running (2), and the passage of the forms is barred.
others supposed it to be a spirit that issues from the heart to the brain;
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
The airy substance that is the soul first attachment, whose congeneity with the air explains why the echo of the realities is reflected onto it.
for the animal spirit is an airy substance, and this correspondence required the reflection of that echo onto it.
he means that the words are as it were the echo of what corresponds to them in the air, because of the congeneity between it and the animal spirit which is its first seat.
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The rūḥ, called the animal spirit in the technical definition and invoked in the sayings as the higher principle whose strength or weakness shows in conduct.
43 — A man's guile and his rancour toward another is one of the results of spiritual weakness and of his sense that he is contemptible;
the portion of the eye is a fair sight, and the portion of the spirit (rūḥ) is the loftiness of a companion's thought — and the portion of the spirit is the higher and the dearer.
33 — Your preoccupation with people is a weakness of the weakness of confidence in the spirit, and evidence of the soul's poverty;