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[Alexandr Korol]

I begin reading on Wikipedia about the “world soul.” “The anima mundi (Latin for ‘world soul’) in philosophy is the unified inner nature of the world, conceived as the Highest Living Being (God), possessing aspirations, ideas, and feelings. Many philosophical teachings that derived the unity of the world from the eternal realm of the ideal or intelligible being nevertheless also acknowledged the World Soul, which lives in all phenomena, as a subordinate principle that perceives and manifests in the sensory realm and in the temporal process the higher ideal unity that eternally resides in the absolute origin. This view of the World Soul was set forth in Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ and later became one of the fundamental points in the philosophy of Plato and the Neoplatonists.

The World Soul according to Plato
In the “Timaeus” (Timaeus, 34b–36d), Plato gives the soul the meaning of a universal cosmological principle. He describes the creation of the world soul by the demiurge as follows.
The demiurge mixed the indivisible and eternally identical essence with the divisible essence, thereby creating a third (intermediate) kind of essence, partaking in both the nature of the identical and the nature of the different. He then “harmonized” these three types of essence by force, and divided the resulting whole into the required number of parts, with each part henceforth combining the identical, the different, and the essence. The process of division is described as consisting of three stages (approaches):
• First, the demiurge divided the whole using the geometric proportion of the first
numbers 2 (2:4:8) and 3 (3:9:27); the resulting “primary” sequence of numbers
can be represented as 1:2:3:4:8:9:27;
• Then, each of the double and triple intervals was filled with harmonic and
arithmetic means (in the smallest whole numbers 6:8:9:12, etc.); from this arose new sesquialteral (6:9, 8:12; the sesquialteral ratio corresponds to the consonance of a fifth), superparticular (6:8, 9:12; corresponds to fourths), and superoctave (9:8; corresponds to whole tones) intervals;
• Finally, all the superparticular intervals were filled with superoctave ones, after which a residual interval of 256:243 (a semitone, later known by theorists as the limma) was formed in each superparticular interval.