Authorized King James Version – "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth." Vulgate – Creavitque Deus cete grandia, et omnem animam viventem atque motabilem. The Koine Greek Septuagint uses ψυχή ( psyche) to translate Hebrew נפש ( nephesh), meaning "life, vital breath", and specifically refers to a mortal, physical life, but in English it is variously translated as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion" an example can be found in Genesis 1:21: ( October 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Some teach that even non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) possess souls. Thus if one sees a tiger then there is a self-conscious identity residing in it (the soul), and a physical representative (the whole body of the tiger, which is observable) in the world. The actual self is the soul, while the body is only a mechanism to experience the karma of that life. Other religions (most notably Hinduism and Jainism) believe that all living things from the smallest bacterium to the largest of mammals are the souls themselves ( Atman, jiva) and have their physical representative (the body) in the world. For example, Thomas Aquinas, borrowing directly from Aristotle's On the Soul, attributed "soul" ( anima) to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal.
In Judaism and in some Christian denominations, (except for angels) only human beings have immortal souls (although immortality is disputed within Judaism and the concept of immortality may have been influenced by Plato). Thomas Aquinas took this view into Christianity.
Aristotle reasoned that a man's body and soul were his matter and form respectively: the body is a collection of elements and the soul is the essence. At his defense trial, Socrates even summarized his teachings as nothing other than an exhortation for his fellow Athenians to excel in matters of the psyche since all bodily goods are dependent on such excellence ( Apology 30a–b). Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul (ψυχή psykhḗ) must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions. Depending on the philosophical system, a soul can either be mortal or immortal. Latin 'anima') comprises the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, qualia, memory, perception, thinking, etc. Soul or psyche ( Ancient Greek: ψυχή psykhḗ, of ψύχειν psýkhein, "to breathe", cf. In many religious, philosophical, and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being. For other uses, see Soul (disambiguation).