This was the Great Forgetting. If the world has no soul, it cannot feel pain. It cannot suffer injustice. It is, in the cold language of property, “standing reserve.”
“We are the world’s self-consciousness,” wrote the philosopher Thomas Berry. “The world has become us, so that we might become the world.” anima mundi
That is the Anima Mundi . Not a metaphor. A memory. This was the Great Forgetting
The Stoics took it further. They called it Pneuma (breath or spirit)—a fiery, intelligent substance that permeates everything. A rock, a river, a lion, and a human: all were tethered by sympatheia (mutual interdependence). When you hurt the world, you hurt yourself. When the world breathed, you breathed. With the rise of mechanical philosophy in the 17th century, the Anima Mundi was effectively killed. René Descartes famously declared that animals were automata—clockwork machines. The natural world, stripped of soul and purpose, became a resource to be measured, dissected, and owned. It is, in the cold language of property, “standing reserve