The ancient idea of the anima mundi, the world soul. This is how Plato put it:

Therefore, we may consequently state that: 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.

It’s an idea that you find repeatedly in history. In modern times we have had Jung’s collective unconscious and James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. Plato lived around 400 BC. Five Hundred years later the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was one of the Stoic philosophers, put it like this:

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the structure of the web.

The philosopher Friedrich Schelling published a treatise entitled ‘On the world soul’ in 1798.

More recently, we have James Lovelock: Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

And: The Gaia hypothesis proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.