Source Library · working paper · draft
Four ways the books in Source Library describe life: a person feeling alive, the world as alive, made things as alive, and places inhabited by spirits. Every passage links to its page.
People have said that things are alive in at least four different senses, and the books in this library use all four.
The map below places every passage found for each sense by when the work was written, or, with a switch, by the date of the edition the library holds. Below it, each sense is described with examples, followed by how common each one is, when its vocabulary rises and falls, and which traditions it comes from.
Each mark is one passage, placed by when the work was written. Filled marks: something is alive, or in the bottom lane a place has a spirit. Rings: something is dead or lifeless, or the spirit is denied. Tap a mark to read it.
Tap or hover a mark to read the passage.
Passages that describe from the inside what it is like to feel alive are rare: 31 were found, and 15 that describe feeling dead inside. The searches for this sense retrieved 4,503 passages; 929 were read closely, and 41 of the passages above came from them; the rest turned up in searches for the other senses. Most describe joy, grief, rapture or relief without describing the feeling as being alive. None of the 745 random pages describes it.
Swedenborg: “Consequently, all the perceptive and sensitive faculties seemed alive with happiness.” Petrarch, on his melancholy: “…a time not of light or life, but resembles a Tartarean night.”
This is the largest group: 651 passages. What is said to be alive is most often the cosmos as a whole (258 passages), then metals and minerals (167), the heavens and stars (90), the earth (66) and plants (54). The life is credited to a soul or form (267), to seed and growth (109), to God (89) or to a breath or spirit (81). Ficino, translating Plato: “it must be said that this world is an animal, truly constituted by divine providence.” The Theatrum chemicum: “Since, therefore, metals grow and have a beginning, it also follows that they are multiplied.”
The opposite claim, that matter is dead, appears in the same period. Counting phrases across all translated pages, the vocabulary of growing metals runs at 3.7 occurrences per 10,000 pages in editions printed before 1400, 28.1 in the 1600s and 2.9 in the 1800s. Talk of a soul of the world peaks in the 1600s at 74.6 and falls to 24.0. The vocabulary of dead matter (“brute matter”, “inert matter”, “automata”) stands at 2.5 in the 1400s and rises to 9.7 in the 1600s. Henry More, 1662: “Matter is inert, or destitute of vital sympathy and shared activity”. The argument also took place within alchemy. Michael Maier, 1618: “In metals, no nutrition, growth, or extension in all dimensions is found”. These counts describe the editions the library holds, dated by edition; they are not a measure of European thought as a whole. Dated by when the works were written instead, the passages calling matter dead are still late: 33% come from works of the 1600s and 31% from works written after 1700.
111 passages call a made thing alive. Most concern images and statues (60) or other crafted works (29), and the life comes from the maker’s skill (57) or from a consecration (14). The sentence quoted most often, in edition after edition and in Augustine’s City of God, comes from the Hermetic Asclepius: “I mean animated statues, full of sense and spirit, performing such great and such kinds of things.” A life given by a rite can also end. Gaffarel’s talisman, once its hour has passed, “remains void and useless, cold and dead.”
Alexander’s sense, the life of a place, a garden or a building, is almost absent. Searches for living places, gardens, buildings as bodies, wholeness and the spirit of a place retrieved 2,271 passages, and 20 were confirmed.
Here a particular place or natural thing is treated as a person, or as the home of a person tied to that place. This differs from the world as alive: a nāga in a lake is a being who lives there, not a claim that water is alive. Each passage is also marked by who is speaking: the tradition’s own texts (insider), an observer describing other people’s beliefs (outsider: ethnographers, travellers, missionaries, critics), or a poet using a convention (literary).
865 passages were confirmed, from 593 books in 35 edition languages. On a random page it is rare: 1 of 745 random pages (0.1%, 95% interval 0.0–0.8%), against 1.3% for the world as alive. The first pass flagged 108 random pages that mention gods or spirits; the second found a spirit tied to a particular place on one of them.
These beings live in mountains and rocks (208 passages), rivers, lakes and the sea (196), trees and forests (185) and the earth (124). Most are a deity of the place (446) or a nature spirit (221). What people do about them is, in order of frequency: worship them, make offerings, fear them, greet or address them, and appease them.
The Kanjur’s Vinaya, at the gates of Śrāvastī: “They made offerings to the local spirits, secured the gates, and waited.” A Chinese compendium: “When Liu Chong departed from the Western Capital and passed this mountain, the mountain barked loudly at him.” Virgil, in a 1583 edition, on Aeneas at his father’s tomb: “Uncertain whether he should think it the spirit of the place or the servant of his parent.”
Of 168 Tibetan Buddhist passages, 161 come from the tradition’s own rites and narratives, in which nāgas, lords of the soil and mountain gods are addressed, given offerings and bound by oath. African, Native American and Pacific material is almost all reported by outsiders: 46 of 49 African passages, 28 of 30 Native American and 8 of 9 Pacific passages, mostly in 19th- and 20th-century ethnography written in English. Of all dated outsider passages, 81% are in editions printed after 1800. E. B. Tylor, who gave the word “animism” its modern meaning, wrote in 1871: “In Siberia, the Yakuts worship the bear in common with the spirits of the forest, bowing toward his favorite haunts with appropriate phrases of prose and verse in praise of the bravery and generosity of their ‘beloved uncle.’” Greco-Roman passages are mostly literary (98 of 147): nymphs and river gods in poetry. Chinese passages are divided among all three voices. These figures describe what the library holds, not the traditions themselves.
Passages that deny the belief are few: 10. Hegel, in 1837, on the Greek fountain nymph: “the meaning they attached to it was not an objective property of the fountain itself, but a subjective one”.
Tibetan and Bhutanese editions without a printed date are placed by a model’s estimate of when they were printed.
Pages of English translation containing each phrase, across the whole library, with the three edition languages that hold most of them. No model is involved in these counts. A phrase is not a confirmed passage; the second table gives the share of each group’s sample that was confirmed.
These counts use no model. Each panel is one set of phrases, counted across every translated page in the library (in the translation and in the translator’s glosses of words on the page, but not in notes where the translator explains) and divided by the number of translated pages from editions of that century. Green is the world, pink made things, blue the person; the dashed line is the vocabulary of dead matter.
A book in this library is usually a later edition of an older work: a 1532 printing of the Hermetic Asclepius, a 1583 Virgil, a 20th-century reprint of an 18th-century Tibetan woodblock. Of the 1,738 passages on the map, 649 come from works written at least a century before the edition they were read in. Placed by edition, almost nothing on the map is older than 1400. Placed by when the work was written, about a fifth of the passages on the world as alive and on the inhabited world, and a quarter of those on made things as alive, come from works written before 500 CE.
Each work date records what it rests on: a Wikidata record of the work, the author’s lifetime from Wikidata, a date printed on the title page, or a model’s estimate. The estimates were checked against 318 works with Wikidata dates, and 85% fell within the range given. Opening a passage shows its date and what it rests on.
The random columns give the base rate: 745 pages drawn at random from the whole translated library and read by the same two passes. For the first three senses, the first pass flagged 199 of them (26.7%); the second kept 12. The last column counts confirmed passages among those the searches retrieved, which depends on how many searches each sense had, so it is comparable only within a row.
Each passage was also tagged with the qualities it gives to the life it describes, from a fixed list of twenty that includes Alexander’s terms (wholeness, proportion, belonging, interiority). Each bar is the share of confirmed passages naming that quality.
The four senses mostly appear in different books. Of the 657 books with a passage on the first three senses, 643 have passages on one sense only, 14 on two, and none on all three. Of the 593 books with a passage on the inhabited world, 15 also say the world itself is alive. Each row of the table asks: among books with one kind of passage, how many also have another? A book enters this sample through the few passages a search found in it, so “without” means “not found here”, not “absent from the book”.
Tradition is the classifier’s one-word tag for each passage, for the first three senses. These are counts of confirmed passages in a sample of 400 passages per search dimension, so they show where the material lies, not how common it is in each tradition.
All classification was done by models, on English translations. A passage that a translation softened or a model misread may be missing, and a passage on the map may be wrong. Each one links to its page so it can be checked.
Every point on the map, with its quotation, book, date, language, sense, judge’s reason and page link, is in aliveness-data.json; every figure on this page is in aliveness-numbers.json. The pipeline is in the Source Library repository under scripts/analysis/experience-map/ (probes-aliveness.json, retrieve-aliveness-lexical.mjs, classify-aliveness.mjs, judge-aliveness.mjs, build-aliveness.py; for the inhabited world, probes-animism-lexical.json, classify-animism.mjs, judge-animism.mjs and jev-animism.py). The model reading cost about $10, Jev about $0.20; the counts cost nothing.