This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.
I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things
The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
From the early days of the telegraph, to be a telegrapher was a job, and there weren't many of those folks. They could recognize each other's style by their dots and dashes. They called that the "fist." St. George, they have a fist. You taste something from St. George, even across categories - the gin, the whisky - it tastes like something from St. George. It's the same as going to a great bar: You get the soul of the person making it.
The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.