spirit

(Lat., spiritus : breath, life, soul, mind) When we describe things in terms of spirited responses, mean-spirited behaviour, a spirited waltz, and so on, we are characterizing them purely as lively or animated. It is a short, but perhaps philosophically fatal, step to thinking of the spirit as that which animates them: the principle or immaterial source from which the animation flows. One's own spirit becomes a soul or mind or Ego; while the principle from which all natural events emanate becomes the animating principle of the cosmos, or world-spirit. The notion of a Geist is that of a spirit that breathes through things, and in Hegel the highest level of spirit, distinguished from the individual spirit and the social or political spirit, is the absolute spirit to whose realization world history is directed. See also absolute idealism.