As we observe the world around us, our attention is drawn to things that move and change, and we are affected by them as we go about our daily activities. The sun makes its journey from East to West across the sky every day, and by night the moon, stars, and planets trace their luminous paths across the heaven. Drops of rain that fall to the earth are collected into small streams that then join together to form rivers that rush to the sea that never appears too tired os sending waves crashing against the shore. Birds circle overhead while squirrels dare to jump across the branches of trees. Bees and butterflies busily collect nectar and pollen from flowers that open their colored petals to the warm sun. A fragile seedling, over many years, grows into a towering oak. In the same way a human infant somehow manages to transform itself into an independent individual doing what he chose to be.
In our attempt to understand the motion and changes that the physical world perform, the first idea that comes to our mind is that everything contain an animistic, supernatural, spiritual, or mystical force. The second idea rejects the first idea and sees all motion and change as the result of processes involving only matter, energy and physical laws that govern them. The third idea takes a dualistic middle ground, combining both physical and spiritual entities to account for all forms of behavior.
Humans possess self-awareness, consciousness, intentions and desires that are not easily explained in terms of physical processes. The study of the mind or soul of the individual has become the root to the understanding behavioral patterns involving humans, animals and plants. This understanding do not deny the existence of a physical or mechanical component in it.
It has been stated that animist explanations of behavior characterized humankind's earliest attempts to make sense of the world, developing awareness of their own existence. Therefore they developed their minds with the belief in a soul or spirit that gave life to bodies and it was also accounted for human consciousness, thought, desires, and behavior. Dreams were understood as a phenomena in which one experienced a detachment from the physical world and encounter its position in the non visible one.
Such animistic interpretations of the behavior of the physical forces allowed their mind to make better sense of their surroundings. Such beliefs served as a purpose to the understanding and attempting to control these natural events.
Greek pre-Socratic philosophical era considered souls necessary to explain both the movement of heavenly bodies and the behavior of plants, animals, and humans. Plato was struck by the orderly movements of stars, planets, sun, and moon and considered it as an evidence of a type of "World Soul" provided by the Creator. Socrates insisted that only materialistic explanations simply cannot provided enough answers to the reason or intention of human action, so he decided to sustain his vision by staying in Athens and face death rather than flee and save his life. Both of them saw a reason in the afterlife and the intention of the human behavior in the world of the living determined its journey in the unseen world. Aristotle provided the most ambitious account of motion and change, dealing explicitly with both inanimate objects and living organisms. Even the actions of animals were ultimately due to outside causes. He explained that many motions are produced in the body by its environment and some of these set in motion the intellect, intention or the appetite, setting the whole animal in motion. Aristotle's cause- effect reasoning led to notion of a stimulus. But whereas Aristotle considered the environment ultimately responsible for the behavior of living organisms, he also realized important distinctions between inanimate objects and living organisms and therefore attributed a soul to all forms of life, including plants, animals, and humans. For him, all movement had to be cause by a mover, and the existence of an unmoved mover that was eternal and immaterial, was in "the outermost heaven."
Aristotle saw the human soul as quite distinct in its rational powers from the souls of plants and other animals, but he placed plants, animals, and humans on the same plane of continuity showing an appreciation of the relationship existing among all living organisms that was not seeing again until the time of Charles Darwin some 22 centuries later.
Aristotle said: Nature, like "Mind", always does whatever it does for the sake of something, which something is its end."
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