I learned mainly from James Hillman and Robert Sardello to see the soul of the world in particular objects and situations. For example, a house may have a palpable soul if it is beautiful in some ways, has a personality and presence, has a visible history, shows interest beyond functionality, and has a degree of complexity. You can love such a house and miss it when you're away or if it's torn down. This kind of love is a sign that soul is present.
— Thomas Moore
Moore is quietly reversing a very old hierarchy. Soul, in the dominant inheritance, belongs to interiority — to depth, hidden dimension, the going-inward. The house, as physical object, is where soul arrives after it has finished working somewhere more important. What Moore describes here, following Hillman and Sardello, refuses that vertical arrangement. The house is not a symbol of something else; it is not a projection screen for inner states. Its soul is *there*, in the grain of the wood, the worn threshold, the way light moves through a particular window at four o'clock. You miss the house when you are away from it — not because it reminded you of yourself, but because something real was in relationship with you, and now it is absent.
This matters because the grief you feel when a building is torn down has nowhere to go in a psychology that locates soul exclusively inside persons. The demolition of a neighborhood registers as loss but can't quite be mourned, because officially nothing that matters has died. Moore is giving that grief its proper address. Love, here, is not a subjective feeling that happens to attach to an object; it is the soul's recognition of another soul. The direction of encounter is outward, not downward.
Thomas Moore·Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide·1992