Since some of the resulting entities possess consciousness, so too must their source. Taking all of nature to derive ultimately from a single common substance, they supposed it to have inherent in it a principle of motion and change (which they identified with life, soul). The idea of the microcosm appears in pre-Socratic philosophy in connection with the problem of relating the One and the Many. Nicholas of Cusa's doctrine of individuals as 'contractions' of the form of the universe is a microcosm theory, as is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theory of monads as 'perpetual living mirrors of the universe' similarly, to cite an example from nonphilosophical discourse, the composer B éla Bart ók's collection of piano pieces Mikrokosmos is a little world of modern musical style and technique. 278).īecause the word kosmos can mean order as well as world or world order, 'microcosm' can signify not only man in relation to the universe (or in relation to the state, as in Plato's Republic ) but also any part of a thing, especially a living thing, that reflects or represents the whole it belongs to, whenever there is a mirroring relation between the whole and each of its parts. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. There is in fact one breath pervading the whole cosmos like soul, and uniting us with them' (W. Thus, the followers of Pythagoras and Empedocles held, according to Sextus Empiricus, that 'there is a certain community uniting us not only with each other and with the gods but even with the brute creation. If man is the microcosm of the universe, then not only is everything animated by some soul or other, but there is one world soul by which everything is animated. Animism and panpsychism also regard the world as alive throughout, but the microcosm idea is distinct in emphasizing the unity or kinship of all life and thought in the world. By an imaginative leap, the universe itself was thought to be, like man, living and conscious, a divine creature whose nature is reflected in human existence. According to one version of this ancient analogy, man and the universe are constructed according to the same harmonic proportions, each sympathetically attuned to the other, each a cosmos ordered according to reason. Conversely, a macrocosm is a social body made of smaller compounds.'Macrocosm' and 'microcosm' are philosophical terms referring, respectively, to the world as a whole and to some part, usually man, as a model or epitome of it. A microcosm can be seen as a special kind of epitome. Today, the concept of microcosm has been dominated by sociology to mean a small group of individuals whose behavior is typical of a larger social body encompassing it. Macrocosm/microcosm is a Greek compound of μακρο- 'Macro-' and μικρο- 'Micro-', which are Greek respectively for 'large' and 'small', and the word κόσμος kósmos which means 'order' as well as 'world' or 'ordered world.' In short, it is the recognition that the same traits appear in entities of many different sizes, from one man to the entire human population. The Greeks were philosophically concerned with a rational explanation of everything and saw the repetition of the golden ratio throughout the world and all levels of reality as a step towards this unifying theory.

In the system the mid-point is Man, who summarizes the cosmos.

Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of the cosmos, from the largest scale (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level).

Micro macrocosm