Hylozoism

Hylozoism is the philosophical point of view that matter is in some sense alive. The concept dates back at least as far as the Milesian school of pre-Socratic philosophers. The term was introduced to English by Ralph Cudworth in 1678.

Although there is a distinction between possessing a mind (hylopsychism) and possessing life (hylozoism); in practice this division is difficult to maintain, because the ancient hylozoists not only regarded the spirits of the material universe and plant world as alive, but also as more or less conscious. Whereas animism tends to view life as taking the form of discrete spirits, and panpsychism tends to refer to strictly philosophical views like that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, hylozoism refers largely to views such as those of the earliest Greek philosophers (6th and 5th centuries BC), who treated the magnet as alive because of its attractive powers (Thales), or air as divine (Anaximenes), perhaps because of its apparently spontaneous power of movement, or because of its role as essential for life in animals. Later this primitive hylozoism reappeared in modified forms. Some scholars have since claimed that the term hylozoism should properly be used only where body and soul are explicitly distinguished, the distinction then being rejected as invalid. Nevertheless, hylozoism remains logically distinct both from early forms of animism, which personify nature, and from panpsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness or sensation to all matter.

Some of the ancient Greek philosophers taught a version of hylozoism, as they, however vaguely, conceived the elemental matter as being in some sense animate if not actually conscious and conative (a directed effort, a striving or tendency; a ).Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus all taught that there is a form of life in all material objects, and the Stoics believed that a world soul was the vital force of the universe. It is important to note that these philosophies did not necessarily hold that material objects had separate life or identity, but only that they had life, either as part of an overriding entity or as living but insensible entities.

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