Professional Documents
Culture Documents
a ghost, fairy, or angel.[1] The concepts of a person's spirit and soul, often also overlap, as
both are either contrasted with or given ontological priority over the body and both are
believed to survive bodily death in some religions,[2] and "spirit" can also have the sense of
"ghost", i.e. a manifestation of the spirit of a deceased person. In English Bibles, "the Spirit"
(with a capital "S"), specifically denotes the Holy Spirit.
Spirit is often used metaphysically to refer to the consciousness or personality.
Historically, it was also used to refer to a "subtle" as opposed to "gross" material substance,
as in the famous last paragraph of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.[3]
EtymologyEdit
The English word "spirit" comes from the Latinspiritus, meaning "breath", but also "spirit,
soul, courage, vigor", ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European *(s)peis. It is distinguished
from Latin anima, "soul" (which nonetheless also derives from an Indo-European root
meaning "to breathe", earliest form *h2enh1-).[4] In Greek, this distinction exists
between pneuma (πνεῦμα), "breath, motile air, spirit," and psykhē (ψυχή), "soul"[1] (even
though the latter term, ψῡχή = psykhē/psūkhē, is also from an Indo-European root meaning
"to breathe": *bhes-, zero grade *bhs-devoicing in proto-Greek to *phs-, resulting in
historical-period Greek ps- in psūkhein, "to breathe", whence psūkhē, "spirit", "soul").[5]
The word "spirit" came into Middle English via Old French. The distinction between soul
and spirit also developed in the Abrahamic religions: Arabic nafs ( )نفسopposite rūħ (;)روح
Hebrew neshama ( נְ שָׁ מָׁ הnəšâmâh) or nephesh ֶֶ֫נפֶשnép̄ eš (in Hebrew neshamacomes from
the root NŠM or "breath") opposite ruach (ַ רּוחrúaħ). (Note, however, that in Semitic just as
in Indo-European, this dichotomy has not always been as neat historically as it has come to
be taken over a long period of development: Both ( ֶֶ֫נפֶשroot )נפשand ַ( רּוחroot )רוח, as well
as cognate words in various Semitic languages, including Arabic, also preserve meanings
involving misc. air phenomena: "breath", "wind", and even "odour").[6][7][8]
Spiritual and metaphysical usageEdit
The connection between spirit and life is one of those problems involving factors of
such complexity that we have to be on our guard lest we ourselves get caught in the
net of words in which we seek to ensnare these great enigmas. For how can we
bring into the orbit of our thought those limitless complexities of life which we call
"Spirit" or "Life" unless we clothe them in verbal concepts, themselves mere
counters of the intellect? The mistrust of verbal concepts, inconvenient as it is,
nevertheless seems to me to be very much in place in speaking of fundamentals.
"Spirit" and "Life" are familiar enough words to us, very old acquaintances in fact,
pawns that for thousands of years have been pushed back and forth on the thinker's
chessboard. The problem must have begun in the grey dawn of time, when someone
made the bewildering discovery that the living breath which left the body of the
dying man in the last death-rattle meant more than just air in motion. It can scarcely
be an accident onomatopoeic words like ruach, ruch, roho (Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili)
mean ‘spirit’ no less clearly than the Greek πνεύμα and the Latin spiritus.[13]