Soul of the world

Meaning

The soul of the world names the penetrating heavenly spirit within, or identified with, the philosophical subject. The main passage attributes the term to Avicenna and explains it by comparison: as soul is present and moves in the body’s members, this spirit is present and moves in elemental creatures.

The English preserves both the attribution and the analogy. The unit does not independently establish a quotation from a particular Avicennian work, nor does it identify every creature as one human body. Its claim concerns distributed presence and movement, followed by the description of an inseparable union of body and soul. That local cosmological sense is distinct from a believer’s individual soul.