And, a cheerful fiddle-de-dum to you, dear lady.
grannymh;5480365:
Do you consider that only physical or material things are real?
Surely you know me better than that. Perhaps not.
Misuse of language includes the mis-incorporation of technical terms into common speech. The word "physical"means, in the context of physics, something which interacts with some part of the physical universe. “Material” means of or pertaining to matter, which is only one aspect of the physical universe.
Blobs of baby poo are physical. But you cannot directly see or touch a blob of baby poo or anything else. You perceive the existence of the poo because of electromagnetic radiation (light) reflected from the poo. You cannot touch the poo because your fingers are repelled by the electric charges surrounding them and the poo. You interpret these ethereal electric forces as “touch,” just as you interpret reflections of light from a chunk of matter as direct observation of the matter. Do we need to get into how the human sense of smell works?
A decade ago some astrophysicists took a close look at certain deep space observations and inferred the existence of something very mysterious, which they named dark energy. They did not declare something really dumb, like, we’ve just discovered universal soul. They discovered something which they did not (and still do not) understand and immediately declared that it was a part of the physical universe.
Why?
Because it was clearly interacting with the physical universe. That’s what the term “physical” means to a physicist— it is something which interacts with other components of the physical universe. Matter is physical, which means we can observe it, experiment with it, measure it, etc.
Light is physical (not material). It interacts with matter. The universe is full of fascinating components which cannot be observed, but whose existence can be inferred through their interaction with matter. (Gravity, magnetic fields, etc.)
If there is a God Who created this universe, that God is a
physical entity. He cannot have created matter without interacting with matter.
If there is a “soul” that can be regarded as meaningful, it must interact with the material human brain/body system. By definition it must be physical.
The animating principle is neither physical nor material in itself. However, it gives life or fills with life the material body.
This “principle of animation” you speak of does not represent anything real. Principles are neither real nor physical nor spiritual. How does this principle give life? How does it animate?
You’ve watched too many movies in which clever FX people make skeletons appear to move. Any high school biology student knows that critters move because biochemical structures (e.g. muscle) contain cells which can shorten in response to a biochemical trigger, using biochemical energy sources. The cells are part of muscles or related structures which are attached to two ends of a piece of bone, or sections of an exoskeleton, etc. The cells get shorter, the muscle gets shorter, the bones are pulled toward one another. That is the “principle of animation.” Physics, served straight up, describes the “principles of animation” which control bodies. .
But whatever the principle of animation might be, it must have something to animate. A chunk of raw muscle tissue electrochemically stimulated under a microscope might twitch, but won’t animate anything. It needs to be attached to parts of a body’'s skeletal structure.
I asked you what your “animating principle” animated. You’ve dodged that question poorly. Think about it. What part of you do you really expect to survive your physiological death? A surviving “animating principle” is worthless unless there is something tangible for it to animate.
What are the properties of the part of yourself which you expect to be animated post-death? Surely you do not believe that any part of your body survives— or do you?
By assigning meaning to nebulous concepts you serve the growing number of atheists who find religious beliefs to be irrelevant to reality.
Fiddle-de-dee. That’s my attitude speaking.
By the way, I’ve learned a few new things about the soul and the human species since our last encounter on a thread. So I can say with confidence that you and the rest of us are worthy of profound respect – seriously.
Support your confidence with concepts. I don’t know what you’ve learned unless you choose to share it. Explain why, for example, Hitler deserves profound respect, I’m guessing that you’ve adopted an amorphous belief system which declares that all critters deserve “profound respect.” Personally, I reserve the right to make distinctions. I disrespect fools, chronic liars (politicians and lawyers), and child molesters. Any belief system which proposes that I should ignore these distinctions is asking me to be untrue to my sense of right and wrong.
I want no part of such a belief system. I’m not a communist, and “I didn’t vote for him.”
don’t want to be stuck with, “Uh, duh…” as an excuse.
Whereupon St. Pete 
will invite you to peruse Matthew 25:14 onwards, with particular attention to verses 26-30 which will allow you to understand why he is sending you back to planet earth as a nerd 
whose purpose is to graduate from M.I.T. with combined degrees in physics, astronomy, and microbiology, expecting nothing less than straight-A grades.