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Updated: September 15, 2025
From the lungs was absorbed the pneuma, or spiritus, which was conveyed to the heart by the pulmonary vessels one to the right, and one to the left side. These vessels in the lungs, "through mutual contact" with the branches of the trachea, took in the pneuma. It was the air-tube, disseminating the breath through the lungs.
In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions, to say "wit" when we say "ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word "psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St.
Here is the doctrine of the "pneuma," the product of the philosophical mould into which the animism of primitive men ran in Greece, in full force. Nor did its strength abate for long after Harvey's time.
The pneuma and the juice concentrate the power of the plant below so that it becomes denser. Then the lower end erupts and gives forth tender roots.
The Greeks distinguished three sorts of souls +psychê+, which signified the sensitive soul, the soul of the senses; and that is why Love, child of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and why Psyche loved him so tenderly: +pneuma+, the breath which gives life and movement to the whole machine, and which we have translated by spiritus, spirit; vague word to which have been given a thousand different meanings: and finally +nous+, the intelligence.
"If," he says, "we assume a difference between soul and spirit, and coin the word soulical as the antithesis of spiritual, we present his exact idea. The Greek word psyche, soul or life, when used as antithetical to pneuma, spirit, signifies that animating, formative, and thinking soul or anima which belongs to the animal, and which man, as animal, shares as his lower nature with other animals.
There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe, something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the Pneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue Soul of the Unknown.
The old philosopher had so just a suspicion of the real state of affairs that you could make use of his language in many cases, if you substituted the word "oxygen," which we now-a-days use, for the word 'pneuma'. Then he imagined that the blood, further concocted or altered by contact with the 'pneuma', passed to a certain extent to the left side of the heart.
More profitable was his doctrine that breathing takes place not only through what are now known as the respiratory passages but also through the pores of the skin. His teaching led to a belief in the heart as the centre of the vascular system and the chief organ of the 'pneuma' which was distributed by the blood vessels. This pneuma was equivalent to both soul and life, but it was something more.
We shall see in a few minutes how the term came to be applied to the arteries, as we know them. The pulsation of the heart and arteries was regarded by Aristotle as a sort of ebullition in which the liquids were inflated by the vital or innate heat, the fires of which were cooled by the pneuma taken in by the lungs and carried to the heart by the pulmonary vessels.
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