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The modern world owes so much to the early Greeks that it is difficult to describe more than one or two issues in any depth. One of the key areas where Greek philosophy has influenced Western ideas is in religion, and one of the most strongly contested is the meaning of the human soul. When science and philosophy started to grow in Greece, many different ideas about souls developed: Thales, the founder of Greek philosophy, believed that any object that moved itself under its own power showed evidence that it had a soul.Democritus, who introduced the idea of atoms, proposed that the soul is made of very mobile spherical atoms.Others thought that the soul was a gas or liquid. The weakness of these early attempts to explain the soul in natural terms allowed more spiritual explanations to be proposed: The early Greek cult of Orphism taught that a person is a combination of a soul of divine origin and a body of a much lower nature.During the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Socrates greatly increased the importance of the soul by treating it, rather than the body, as the real personPlato, possibly influenced by Orphism and Pythagoras, maintained that the soul is spiritual, immortal, and has no parts. He believed the soul is the source of one's mental activities and that it causes the body's movements. He regarded the soul as superior to the body and the most important part of a person. His ideas about the soul had a great influence on early Christian theologians.For Aristotle, body and soul are more of a unity. Christianity has long debated the nature of humanity and the relationship of body and soul. This debate has been strongly influenced by the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle. Augustine, one of the most influential Christian theologians, was strongly affected by Plato's ideas on the soul. But, around the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas adopted Aristotle's ideas and introduced a more unified picture of body and soul, rather than the easily separable body and soul advocated by Augustine and Plato. Then, In the seventeenth century René Descartes shifted church thinking back towards Plato's position of a dual human nature. It is the Descartes model that most now associate with the human body-soul relationship.

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