Human spirit is a component of human philosophy, psychology and religion - the spiritual or mental part of humanity. While the term can be used with the same meaning as "human soul", human spirit is sometimes used to refer to the impersonal, universal or higher component of human nature in contrast to soul or psyche which can refer to the ego or lower element.
In the models of Daniel A. Helminiak and Bernard Lonergan, human spirit is considered to be the mental functions of awareness, insight, understanding, judgement and other reasoning powers. It is distinguished from the separate component of psyche which comprises the entities of emotion, images, memory and personality.
John Teske views human spirit as a social construct representing the qualities of purpose and meaning which transcend the individual human.
Read more about Human Spirit: Distinction Between The Human Spirit and Soul, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or spirit:
“Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was failure, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,—
Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
The vast sweet visage of space.”
—Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)