Mens

The Seba library treats Mens in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Jung, C.G., Moore, Thomas, Pauli, Wolfgang).

In the library 9 passages

Where does that notion of the mens (reason, spirit) as a light come from? Mens equals lux equals lumen aeternum? This notion was derived by Peucer from Marsilius Ficinus, who himself had originally taken it from the Hermeticum.

Jung directly interrogates the identification of mens with eternal light, tracing the concept from the Corpus Hermeticum through Ficino to early modern dream theory, establishing the Hermetic-Neoplatonic genealogy of the term.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis

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animus is mind and reason (mens), and no one doubts that it is more divine than the anima… we have a spirit, anima, imprisoned in the body, cut off from the divine mens.

Macrobius’s hierarchy — in which mens names the highest divine intellect from which anima is separated by embodiment — is presented as the cosmological framework structuring the Ciceronian and Platonic doctrine of the soul’s origin.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis

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Mathematical reasoning is ‘inborn in the human soul’ (eius inerant animae)… the word ‘instinct.’ For quantity is known to the human mind, and to the other souls, by instinct even though it were lacking all the senses.

Pauli’s reading of Kepler presents the mind’s innate mathematical knowledge as an expression of the soul’s archetypal conformity with the Creator, linking mens to a priori rational-instinctual structures that anticipate Jungian archetypes.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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fationes creandorum corporum mathematicas Deo coaeternas fuisse Deumque animam et mentem esse superexcellenter, animas vero humanas esse Dei creatoris imagines.

Kepler’s Latin, as quoted by Pauli, asserts that God is mind (mens) in a supremely transcendent sense and that human souls are images of this divine mind, foregrounding the cosmological dimension of mens in scientific-archetypal thought.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting

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he notes that for Descartes ‘soul’ refers only to the intellectual faculty, the mind (‘mens’). Henceforth he addresses him only as ‘Mens.’

Gassendi’s ironic reduction of Descartes to the appellative ‘Mens’ crystallises the Cartesian identification of person with pure intellect, against which depth psychology’s richer articulation of soul and anima defines itself.

Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting

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With strong mind [mente] I travel through the pathless haunts of the Pierides… it is a joy to pluck new flowers… first because I teach about great things and hasten to free the mind from the tight bonds of religion.

Lucretius’s invocation of mente as the philosophically liberated intellect — cited in Nussbaum’s study of Hellenistic therapy — shows the classical rhetorical deployment of mens as the faculty whose freedom is the goal of rational-therapeutic inquiry.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting

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bearing especially on mental and emotional states… It will give the medical profession the intimate view of these mens [sic] minds they so much desire.

A scribal sic in the AA manuscript draft preserves a colloquial plural ‘mens’ for ‘men’s,’ a marginal philological curiosity rather than a substantive engagement with the intellectual concept.

Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside

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