Anîma Mundi

Anîma Mundi, according to many of the early philosophers, a force or vital principle immaterial, yet not intelligent; inseparable from matter, but giving it its form and movement, the source of all physical and sentient life. Plato held it impossible for pure spirit—the atmosphere in which alone eternal and archetypal ideas could exist—to bear any relation whatever to matter, and he therefore supposed the latter to be operated upon by an intermediate agency, the anima mundi. In the system of the Stoics, it was conceived to be the sole vital force in the universe; it usurped the office of pure spirit, and the doctrine became indistinguishable from Pantheism (q.v.). The notion does not seem to have been entertained by the schoolmen, but it reappears in the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Van Helmont, and, in a modified form, was held by More and Cudworth. The latter recognised in ‘plastic nature’ the universal agent of physical phenomena. Amos Comenius found argument from Gen. i. 2 to prove that the spirit that ‘moved on the face of the waters’ still gives life to all nature. The doctrine of the immaterial anima, in matter, but distinct from it, was upheld by Stahl in 1720; but his term animism has now been adopted with a much wider signification by Dr Tylor and other anthropologists of the new school. See ANIMISM.