The soul

Life [ psukhê] is the same in one and all, and men say that he is but mortal despite the triumph that Zeus son of Kronos grants him.

The horses swerved aside as he fell headlong from the chariot, and there was no life-breath [ psukhê] left in him.

He missed him, but struck his charioteer and squire [ therapôn] Eniopeus son of noble Thebaios in the breast by the nipple while the reins were in his hands, so that he lost his life-breath [ psukhê] there and then, and the horses swerved as he fell headlong from the chariot.

this weak servant says that for a long while I had a strong desire to write a book on the soul (nafs) and the spirit, gathering into it what people have said and what has been disclosed by way of unveilings (futūḥ).

As for the spirit, what is understood by it among them is that it is a substance which is neither a body nor bodily, so that the intellects (ʿuqūl) and the souls both fall under it;

As for the soul (nafs), they did not mention it explicitly in medicine, since in medicine they mentioned only the elements, the temperaments (amzijah), the organs, the spirits, the faculties and the acts.

the existence of the soul (*nafs*) is a matter of innate constitution (*fiṭrī*) and stands in no need of definition, for each (5) of us ( 6 )

“The soul is a spiritual nature, living and knowing, stripped (5) bare of bodily matter (*hayūlā*), whose acts appear through the instrument of the bodily senses”

the rational soul is nothing but that to which each one of mankind points

It is long and difficult, but I must go through with it, for thus the shade [ psukhê] of Teiresias prophesied concerning me, on the day when I went down into Hades to ask about my return [ nostos] and that of my companions.

Then he told of cunning Circe and her craft, and how he sailed to the chill house of Hades, to consult the ghost [ psukhê] of the Theban seer Teiresias, and how he saw his old comrades in arms, and his mother who bore him and brought him up when he was a child;

But the wolves and birds of prey have long since torn Odysseus to pieces, and his psukhê left him behind;

And how great a nation that knew the road of happiness and walked it and set its course toward it, and preferred the life of its spirit to the upkeep of its frame, so that what is hard for a nation which has spent itself in the service of the frame and in guarding what the soul commands came easy to it;

What a pity, then, for a nation that supposed happiness to be the hoarding of wealth and the cramming of bodily frames with the varieties of foods and drinks, that raced one another in the acquiring of sleek horses and towering palaces and took pride in servants and retinue and lineage, and left their souls to what they crave, and neglected their spirit and the law of their Lord, all the while rec …

It is a testimony to the goodness of his course and his conduct in this world of his — with his own soul (nafs), with his Creator, and with His creatures;

But, as we hold, the true philosophers and they alone are always most eager to release the soul, and just this—the release and separation of the soul from the body—is their study, is it not?

We believe, do we not, that death is the separation of the soul from the body, and that the state of being dead is the state in which the body is separated from the soul and exists alone by itself and the soul is separated from the body and exists alone by itself?

To begin with, then, it is clear that in such matters the philosopher, more than other men, separates the soul from communion with the body?

And did we not agree that the excellence or virtue of soul is justice and its defect injustice?

and now, answering to these four sections, assume these four affections occurring in the soul:

By the distinction that there is one section of it which the soul is compelled to investigate by treating as images the things imitated in the former division, and by means of assumptions from which it proceeds not up to a first principle but down to a conclusion, while there is another section in which it advances from its assumption to a beginning or principle that transcends assumption, and in …

For from the first origin the soul, conjoined and configured to the body in Adam, made itself the seed both of the whole substance and of this condition.

While we claim this for the soul, which we acknowledge to be uniform and simple, we must call it spirit under a certain condition — not by the name of its state, but of its act;

for them the corporeality of the soul will shine out in the Gospel itself.

So far is the soul here recognized as immortal by nature, which cannot be killed by men, and the flesh as having mortality, whose is the killing;

And if so, salvation will now look not to the soul — safe, namely, by its own nature through immortality — but to the flesh rather, which all agree to be perishable.

Further, the apostle prefers that the inner man be understood not so much the soul as the mind and the disposition — that is, not the substance itself, but the savour of the substance.

The student of politics therefore as well as the psychologist must study the nature of the soul, though he will do so as an aid to politics, and only so far as is requisite for the objects of enquiry that he has in view:

namely that the soul consists of two parts, one irrational and the other capable of reason.

Of the irrational part of the soul again one division appears to be common to all living things, and of a vegetative nature:

and what we now do, when we are unbent from our cares, in wishing to behold and survey something — that we shall then do far more freely, and we shall set our whole selves to contemplating and discerning things, because there is by nature in our minds a certain insatiable desire to see the truth, and the very borders of those regions, when we shall have come to them, will give us a knowledge of he …

There is the further point, that the soul escapes the more easily out of this air which I now so often name, and breaks through it, because nothing is swifter than the soul, and there is no speed which can vie with the soul's speed.

And so often, hindered either by thought or by some force of disease, with eyes and ears open and unimpaired we neither see nor hear, so that it may readily be understood that it is the soul that both sees and hears, and not those parts which are, as it were, the windows of the soul, through which nonetheless the mind can perceive nothing unless it be active and present.

In general, it belongs to virtue to make the disposition of the soul worthy, employing calm and ordered movements, in harmony throughout all its parts;

and the virtues of the soul as a whole are justice, liberality, and greatness of soul.

And each of us partakes of his beneficence according as he will, since the difference of election is wrought by the soul's choice and joint exercise, become worthy.

and, though hardly emerged from boyhood, they have come to appreciate what most of their elders do not know, namely, that if one is to govern his youth rightly and worthily and make the proper start in life, he must give more heed to himself than to his possessions, he must not hasten and seek to rule over others before he has found a master to direct his own thoughts, and he must not take as grea …

So the distinguishing which is the forge of multiplicity is only by the soul and in the soul.

for they are, one and all, forms of a single reality, differing by reason of the divergence of the rulings of the abodes which the soul (*nafs*) inhabits in the stages of its ascent and the apprehensions of its descent, and of the apprehensions which those abodes require.

but the indication of some of the subtleties bearing upon speech completes this purpose, for it is the most proper of the properties of the soul, which is that to which all reverts.

and were the covering lifted, you would see most human souls seized along with these wicked spirits, in their captivity and their grasp, driving them wherever they will, and unable to refuse them or to oppose them.

It has already passed that there are in existence earthly souls, strong, not in the grossness of the predatory and bestial souls and their density and their scant perception, nor upon the configurations of human souls and their preparednesses, such that their attachment to dense bodies over which earthiness predominates would be entailed — nor in the purity of the immaterial souls and their subtle …

The jinn are earthly souls embodied in subtle bodies compounded of the subtle parts of the elements;

For when the soul and frame together are sunk

When comes that sundering of our body and soul

The nature of mind and energy of soul,

Will you ever, my soul, be good and simple and one and naked, more manifest than the body that surrounds you?

The soul is a sphere true to its own form, when it neither stretches out toward anything, nor shrinks inward, nor is scattered, nor sinks down, but is lit with the light by which it sees the truth of all things and the truth within itself.

What is my ruling faculty to me, and what manner of thing am I now making it, and to what use am I now putting it?

” The remaining degrees before the human realm (*nāsūt*) are the universal souls;

the universal souls that nurture the world of the human realm, appearing in it in the manner its degree in the descent requires, are four souls.

I can almost see you, when you turn to your own soul (*nafs*), having found that your knowledge of your soul is your soul itself — and this is not hard.

, and I pored long over it at a time when I was engrossed in uncovering the hidden things of the secrets of the science of the soul (*ʻilm al-nafs*) and in studying its states;

And their doctrine — that is, the doctrine of the Muslim theologians — concerning the soul is agreement upon its immortality and its not perishing after the perishing of the body.

and the first defines it, as Ibn Sīnā the philosopher set out in his treatise on the soul, as a first perfection for a natural instrumental body.

Otherwise, if the soul had been ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what it was.

But we meet them with another argument of theirs, demanding why, by undergoing flesh of the nature of soul, Christ should be seen to have had a soul of the nature of flesh.

But in Christ we find the soul and the flesh set forth by simple and bare vocabularies — that is, the soul "soul" and the flesh "flesh," nowhere the soul "flesh" or the flesh "soul" — though they ought to have been so named, if they had been so — but each substance even pronounced by him distinctly, severally, surely on account of the distinction of the two qualities:

Deservedly therefore is every soul both defendant and witness — defendant of error in so far as it is witness of truth — and it shall stand before the courts of God on the day of judgement, having nothing to say.

I do not think they can seem frivolous and cold to anyone, if he reconsiders the majesty of nature, from which the authority of the soul is reckoned.

But these same, elsewhere confessing the soul to be divine and bestowed by God, fall into a testimony of the soul itself, to be turned back against their former opinion.

for my soul seems to me to be slipping away from those parts of my body, from which, as it appears, it is wont to begin its departure.

Neither have I been able to convince myself of this—that the soul will want intelligence just when it is separated from this unintelligent body;

nor yet, my sons, have I ever convinced myself of this—that only as long as it is contained in a mortal body is the soul alive, but when it has been freed from it, is dead;

For whenever I feel an inclination to indulge my appetite, I do not buy fancy articles at the market (for they come high), but I draw on the store-house of my soul.

Where do you think men harbour their righteousness, Callias, in their souls or in their purses?

So you make their souls more righteous by putting money into their purses?