Soul

Thus, it will be argued, the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to the soul: hence the Soul may feel sorrow and pain and every other affection that belongs to the body; and from this again will spring desire, the Soul seeking the mending of its instrument. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof and warp community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body — as light goes always free of all it floods — and all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in Soul, how the soul lack sensation? ENNEADS: I. I. 6

By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself [Divine-Mind]. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

The objection would be valid if what the soul takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. ENNEADS: I. II. 1

That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of the vision it has come to. ENNEADS: I. II. 4

Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own place. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

For the Supreme is not self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme is self-standing, independent. ENNEADS: I. II. 6

The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. ENNEADS: I. III. 5

Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions — collections of words — but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises. ENNEADS: I. III. 5

The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely... ENNEADS: I. IV. 5

But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul. ENNEADS: I. IV. 6

And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest. ENNEADS: I. IV. 8

To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul. ENNEADS: I. IV. 8

It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable soul. ENNEADS: I. IV. 8

No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception? ENNEADS: I. IV. 10

For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods. ENNEADS: I. IV. 14

It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul — and not of all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the body. ENNEADS: I. IV. 14

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry enter here? ENNEADS: I. VI. 1

The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the soul's faculties or purposes? ENNEADS: I. VI. 1

Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it. ENNEADS: I. VI. 2

But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it. ENNEADS: I. VI. 2

Our interpretation is that the soul — by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being — when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity. ENNEADS: I. VI. 2

And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty — one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement. ENNEADS: I. VI. 3

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision. ENNEADS: I. VI. 3

So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul. ENNEADS: I. VI. 3

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being. ENNEADS: I. VI. 3

In the sense-bound life we are no longer granted to know them, but the soul, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. ENNEADS: I. VI. 4

For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love — just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers. ENNEADS: I. VI. 4

Beholding this Being — the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes — resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack? ENNEADS: I. VI. 7

But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness? ENNEADS: I. VI. 9

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful. ENNEADS: I. VI. 9

If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death will be no evil but a good; Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own Act. ENNEADS: I. VII. 3

What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we came to be; the Evil which holds men down binds them against their will; and for those that have the strength — not found in all men, it is true — there is a deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in the soul. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 5

And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but Vice? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 9

There is not one place for Matter and another for Soul-Matter, for instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air: the soul's "separate place" is simply its not being in Matter; that is, its not being united with it; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of Soul and Matter; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this is the Soul's apartness. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and body or by soul only or by body only. ENNEADS: II I. 2

Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the desired permanence at once; no need, then, to call on a soul or on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued maintenance of a living being. ENNEADS: II I. 2

In our own constitution, again, there is a ceaseless shifting of particles — and that with outgoing loss — and yet the individual persists for a long time: where there is no question of an outside region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as against the identity and endless duration of the living thing. ENNEADS: II I. 3

Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. ENNEADS: II I. 4

In other words, the celestial soul — and our souls with it — springs directly next from the Creator, while the animal life of this earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul and may be said to flow downwards from it. ENNEADS: II I. 5

A soul, then, of the minor degree — reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region — the substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be of strength to last for ever; the material constituents are not as firmly held and controlled as if they were ruled immediately by a Principle of higher potency. ENNEADS: II I. 5

Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that [inferior] soul, given forth [not directly from God but] from the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way of that inferior soul that we are associated with the body [which therefore will not be persistent]; for the higher soul which constitutes the We is the principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also of our existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine Reason in support of the existence. ENNEADS: II I. 5

Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different from body left to itself; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference. ENNEADS: II I. 8

We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here represent a slipping-away from the being [a phenomenon not incident to the celestial sphere] and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an ENNEADS: II I. 8

But perhaps the circular movement [of the Kosmos as soul and body] is not spatial or is spatial not primarily but only incidentally. ENNEADS: II II. 1

What, by this explanation, would be the essential movement of the kosmic soul? ENNEADS: II II. 1

If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving [wearing it down at last]; the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for "Nature" is no other than the custom the All-Soul has established. ENNEADS: II II. 1

If the soul were stationary, that is if [instead of presiding over a Kosmos] it dwelt wholly and solely in the realm in which every member is at rest, motion would be unknown; but, since the Soul is not fixed in some one station There, the Kosmos must travel to every point in quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle, therefore. ENNEADS: II II. 1

While body and soul stand one combined thing, there is a joint nature, a definite entity having definite functions and employments; but as soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept apart, its very own: it ceases to take the body's concerns to itself: it has vision now: body and soul stand widely apart. ENNEADS: II III. 15

Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the entire enchainment. ENNEADS: II III. 16

And there is a qualifying that is nothing more, [not constituting but simply] giving some particular character to the real thing; in this second case the qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which — whether in soul or body — merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing. ENNEADS: II VI. 1

Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls — yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. ENNEADS: II IX. 5

Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements together when it is a later thing and rises from them? ENNEADS: II IX. 5

And this element — soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest — what can we think? ENNEADS: II IX. 5

Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system — an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul's need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

As for Things of Process — or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable — we must hold that these are due to Cause; Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for unwarranted "slantings," for sudden movement of bodies apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a soul with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. ENNEADS: III I. 1

"Atoms" or "elements" — it is in either case an absurdity, an impossibility, to hand over the universe and its contents to material entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order, reasoning, and the governing soul into being; but the atomic origin is, if we may use the phrase, the most impossible. ENNEADS: III I. 3

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under compulsion to yield to whatsoever the atoms may bring: but would anyone pretend that the acts and states of a soul or mind could be explained by any atomic movements? ENNEADS: III I. 3

How can we imagine that the onslaught of an atom, striking downwards or dashing in from any direction, could force the soul to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? ENNEADS: III I. 3

And what of the soul's resistance to bodily states? ENNEADS: III I. 3

The School that erects other material forces into universal causes is met by the same reasoning: we say that while these can warm us and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of nothing that is done in the sphere of mind or soul: all this must be traceable to quite another kind of Principle. ENNEADS: III I. 3

A soul which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. ENNEADS: III I. 8

The soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence. ENNEADS: III I. 8

The passage continues — "Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place" — the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form — and this means that in each "place" the phase of the soul there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle. ENNEADS: III IV. 2

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily — he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! ENNEADS: III V. 5

What is known as the Impressionable faculty of the soul — to pathetikon — would need to be identified: we must satisfy ourselves as to whether this too, like the Soul as a unity, is to be classed as immune or, on the contrary, as precisely the only part susceptible of being affected; this question, however, may be held over; we proceed to examine its preliminaries. ENNEADS: III VI. 1

Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a light, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all. ENNEADS: III VI. 5

In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. [ ENNEADS: III VI. 19

Things and Beings in the Time order — even when to all appearance complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a soul — are still bound to sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which they need: let them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete; completeness is attributed to them only by an accident of language. ENNEADS: III VII. 6

But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and withdraw from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and unending activity of an ever-existent soul not self-contained or self-intent but concerned about doing and engendering: imagine it no longer accomplishing any Act, setting a pause to this work it has inaugurated; let this outgoing phase of the Soul become once more, equally with the rest, turned to the Supreme, to Eternal Being, to the tranquilly stable. ENNEADS: III VII. 12

You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the man's soul. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing; we cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity. ENNEADS: III VIII. 8

The Fourth Ennead First tractate — On the essence of the soul (1). ENNEADS: IV I. 3

In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division. ENNEADS: IV I. 1

In that the secession is not of the soul entire; something of it holds its ground, that in it which recoils from separate existence. ENNEADS: IV I. 1

The entity, therefore, described as "consisting of the undivided soul and of the soul divided among bodies," contains a soul which is at once above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this sphere, like a radius from a centre. ENNEADS: IV I. 1

Even here it is not exclusively the partible soul: it is still the impartible as well: what in it knows partition is parted without partibility; undivided as giving itself to the entire body, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective in every part. ENNEADS: IV I. 1

Second tractate — On the essence of the soul (2). ENNEADS: IV II. 1

In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony. ENNEADS: IV II. 1

In that allocation we were distinguishing things as they fall under the Intellectual or the sensible, and we placed the soul in the former class; now, taking its membership of the Intellectual for granted, we must investigate by another path the more specific characteristics of its nature. ENNEADS: IV II. 1

The nature, at once divisible and indivisible, which we affirm to be soul has not the unity of an extended thing: it does not consist of separate sections; its divisibility lies in its presence at every point of the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in the total and entire in any part. ENNEADS: IV II. 1

To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and its power, the divinity and wonder of its being, as a nature transcending the sphere of Things. ENNEADS: IV II. 1

Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass: it exists here and yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered identity: thus it is "parted and not parted," or, better, it has never known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a self-gathered integral, and is "parted among bodies" merely in the sense that bodies, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot receive it unless in some partitive mode; the partition, in other words, is an occurrence in body not in soul. ENNEADS: IV II. 1

It can be demonstrated that soul must, necessarily, be of just this nature and that there can be no other soul than such a being, one neither wholly partible but both at once. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

If it had the nature of body it would consist of isolated members each unaware of the conditions of every other; there would be a particular soul — say a soul of the finger — answering as a distinct and independent entity to every local experience; in general terms, there would be a multiplicity of souls administering each individual; and, moreover, the universe would be governed not by one soul but by an incalculable number, each standing apart to itself. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

In the first place, it affirms without investigation a "leading" phase of the soul. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

What can justify this assigning of parts to the soul, the distinguishing one part from another? ENNEADS: IV II. 2

If a given experience bears only on that "leading principle," it would not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism; if, on the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul — one not constituted for sensation — that phase cannot transmit any experience to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

In that second case, one sensitive phase will declare "I had this sensation primarily"; others will have to say "I felt the sensation that rose elsewhere"; but either the site of the experience will be a matter of doubt to every phase except the first, or each of the parts of the soul will be deceived into allocating the occurrence within its own particular sphere. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

If, on the contrary, the sensation is vested not merely in the "leading principle," but in any and every part of the soul, what special function raises the one rather than the other into that leading rank, or why is the sensation to be referred to it rather than elsewhere? ENNEADS: IV II. 2

On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity — utterly strange to part, a self-gathered whole — if it continuously eludes all touch of multiplicity and divisibility — then, no whole taken up into it can ever be ensouled; soul will stand as circle-centre to every object [remote on the circumference], and the entire mass of a living being is soulless still. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

There is, therefore, no escape: soul is, in the degree indicated, one and many, parted and impartible. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

We cannot question the possibility of a thing being at once a unity and multi-present, since to deny this would be to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the universe; there must be a Kind which encircles and supports all and conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence is multiple, and yet is one soul always since a container must be a unity: by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the multiplicity of the series of an all; by its impartible unity, it will conduct a total to wise ends. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the "leading-principle" is their mere unity — a lower reproduction of the soul's efficiency. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

Third tractate — Problems of the soul (1). ENNEADS: IV III. 2

The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt — with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us — this is matter well worth attention. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself springs. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

Now even in the universal Intellect [Divine Mind] there was duality, so that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which soul comes to occupy body. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be offshoots from the soul of the universe [parts and an identity modally parted]. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the All-Soul — the considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that equality of intellection. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says "As our body is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the soul of the All." ENNEADS: IV III. 1

It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that — taking character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it — we must derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within ourselves every part absorbs from our soul so, analogically, we, standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the Soul of the All as parts of it. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

They will urge also that the dictum "The collective soul cares for all the unensouled," carries the same implication and could be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be there to concern itself with the unensouled. ENNEADS: IV III. 1

To this our first answer is that to place certain things under one identical class — by admitting an identical range of operation — is to make them of one common species, and puts an end to all mention of part; the reasonable conclusion would be, on the contrary, that there is one identical soul, every separate manifestation being that soul complete. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

Our opponents after first admitting the unity go on to make our soul dependent on something else, something in which we have no longer the soul of this or that, even of the universe, but a soul of nowhere, a soul belonging neither to the kosmos, nor to anything else, and yet vested with all the function inherent to the kosmic soul and to that of every ensouled thing. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

The soul considered as an entirety cannot be a soul of any one given thing — since it is an Essence [a divine Real-Being] — or, at least, there must be a soul which is not exclusively the soul of any particular thing, and those attached to particulars must so belong merely in some mode of accident. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

Now in such a sense as this, part cannot be affirmed of the soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the All-Soul as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent units. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

Again, it is admitted that the particular soul — this "part of the All-Soul — is of one ideal-form with it, but this does not entail the relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts there is nothing inevitably making any portion uniform with the total: take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we may divide it in different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided into triangles; all sorts of different figures are possible: yet an absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

In a line, no doubt, the part is inevitably a line; but even here there is a necessary difference in size; and if, in the case of the soul we similarly called upon magnitude as the distinction between constituents and collective soul, then soul, thus classed by magnitude becomes quantitative, and is simply body. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

But it is admitted that all souls are alike and are entireties; clearly, soul is not subject to part in the sense in which magnitudes are: our opponents themselves would not consent to the notion of the All-Soul being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they would be doing, annulling the All-Soul — if any collective soul existed at all — making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being described as a portion of the total thing, wine. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the sense in which we speak of some single proposition as a part of the science entire. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

No; in such a relationship the All-Soul, of which the particular souls are to be a part, would not be the soul of any definite thing, but an entity standing aloof; that means that it would not even be the soul of the Kosmos; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls; thus all alike would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there would be no reason for making any such distinction. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being, the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire? ENNEADS: IV III. 3

This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside of body, or that — no soul being within body — the thing described as the soul of the universe is, none the less, outside the body of the universe. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

That is a point to be investigated, but for the present we must consider what kind of soul this parallel would give us. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

If the particular soul is a part of the All-Soul only in the sense that this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing, multi-present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul that is a part against a soul that is an all — especially where an identical power is present. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

But again: "Everywhere, Unity": in the variety of functions if each "part of the soul" were as distinct as are the entrant sensations, none of those parts could have knowledge; awareness would belong only to that judging faculty — or, if local, every such act of awareness would stand quite unrelated to any other. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

But since the soul is a rational soul, by the very same title by which it is an All-Soul, and is called the rational soul, in the sense of being a whole [and so not merely "reasoning locally"], then what is thought of as a part must in reality be no part but the identity of an unparted thing. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly, the difficulty of soul in body as against soul not embodied. ENNEADS: IV III. 4

We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul, while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human soul can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they are one and the same? ENNEADS: IV III. 4

There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing. ENNEADS: IV III. 4

A possible solution may be offered: The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls — the All-Soul, with the others — issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. ENNEADS: IV III. 4

They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. ENNEADS: IV III. 4

The one — the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul — would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth — for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe — while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by ENNEADS: IV III. 4

The one — the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul — would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth — for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe — while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick ENNEADS: IV III. 4

The one — the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul — would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth — for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe — while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound. ENNEADS: IV III. 4

At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest. ENNEADS: IV III. 5

By their succession they are linked to the several Intellectual-Principles, for they are the expression, the Logos, of the Intellectual-Principles, of which they are the unfolding; brevity has opened out to multiplicity; by that point of their being which least belongs to the partial order, they are attached each to its own Intellectual original: they have already chosen the way of division; but to the extreme they cannot go; thus they keep, at once, identification and difference; each soul is permanently a unity [a self] and yet all are, in their total, one being. ENNEADS: IV III. 5

Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all; those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which abides in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles, partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the Supreme. ENNEADS: IV III. 5

But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a kosmos, the soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and contains, it too, all things in itself? ENNEADS: IV III. 6

The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already prepared habitations for them. ENNEADS: IV III. 6

The "secondary and tertiary souls," of which we hear, must be understood in the sense of closer or remoter position: it is much as in ourselves the relation to the Supreme is not identical from soul to soul; some of us are capable of becoming Uniate, others of striving and almost attaining, while a third rank is much less apt; it is a matter of the degree or powers of the soul by which our expression is determined — the first degree dominant in the one person, the second, the third [the merely animal life] in others while, still, all of us contain all the powers. ENNEADS: IV III. 6

The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the heavens are ensouled — a teaching which he maintains in the observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul; how, he asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total. ENNEADS: IV III. 7

He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the other souls brought into existence after the All-Soul, but compounded from the same mixing bowl"; secondary and tertiary are duly marked off from the primal but every form of soul is presented as being of identical ideal-nature with the All-Soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 7

All that is soul cares for all that is soulless," this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be controlled — fashioned, set in place or brought into being — by anything but the Soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 7

And we cannot think that there is one soul whose nature includes this power and another without it. " ENNEADS: IV III. 7

The perfect soul, that of the All," we read, "going its lofty journey, operates upon the kosmos not by sinking into it, but, as it were, by brooding over it"; and "every perfect soul exercises this governance"; he distinguishes the other, the soul in this sphere as "the soul when its wing is broken." ENNEADS: IV III. 7

We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over something from the All-Soul; we do not deny the influence of the Kosmic Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul in us [the Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalizing] proven to be distinct by that power of opposition. ENNEADS: IV III. 7

As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother's. ENNEADS: IV III. 7

These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question, are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between soul and soul is due to the mere fact that all spring from that self-same soul [the next to Divine Mind] from which springs the Soul of the All. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

We have already stated that the one soul is also multiple; and we have dealt with the different forms of relationship between part and whole: we have investigated the different degrees existing within soul; we may now add, briefly, that differences might be induced, also, by the bodies with which the soul has to do, and, even more, by the character and mental operations carried over from the conduct of the previous lives. " ENNEADS: IV III. 8

The life-choice made by a soul has a correspondence" — we read — "with its former lives." ENNEADS: IV III. 8

As regards the nature of soul in general, the differences have been defined in the passage in which we mentioned the secondary and tertiary orders and laid down that, while all souls are all-comprehensive, each ranks according to its operative phase — one becoming Uniate in the achieved fact, another in knowledge, another in desire, according to the distinct orientation by which each is, or tends to become, what it looks upon. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

Even supposing Real-Beings [such as soul] to be produced by some other principle, they are certainly not made from Matter; or, if they were, the creating principle must infuse into them, from within itself, something of the nature of Real-Being; but, at this, it would itself suffer change, as it created more or less. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

Moreover the produced total, variable from more to less, could not be an eternal: yet the soul, it stands agreed, is eternal. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

But what becomes of the soul's infinity if it is thus fixed? ENNEADS: IV III. 8

The infinity is a matter of power: there is question, not of the soul's being divisible into an infinite number of parts, but of an infinite possible effectiveness: it is infinity in the sense in which the Supreme God, also, is free of all bound. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

This means that it is no external limit that defines the individual being or the extension of souls any more than of God; on the contrary each in right of its own power is all that it chooses to be: and we are not to think of it as going forth from itself [losing its unity by any partition]: the fact is simply that the element within it, which is apt to entrance into body, has the power of immediate projection any whither: the soul is certainly not wrenched asunder by its presence at once in foot and in finger. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

For the body of the All is a unit, and soul is everywhere present to it as to one thing. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the Life-Principle now present is not the particular soul that was in the larger body; that body has ceased to be receptive of soul, or there would have been no death; what happens is that whatsoever in the product of the decay is apt material for animal existence of one kind or another becomes ensouled by the fact that soul is nowhere lacking, though a recipient of soul may be. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

This new ensouling does not mean, however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one or, rather, all remains one: it is as with ourselves; some elements are shed, others grow in their place; the soul abandons the discarded and flows into the newcoming as long as the one soul of the man holds its ground; in the All the one soul holds its ground for ever; its distinct contents now retain soul and now reject it, but the total of spiritual beings is unaffected. ENNEADS: IV III. 8

But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body — the manner and the process — a question certainly of no minor interest. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

Firstly, there is the entry — metensomatosis — of a soul present in body by change from one [wholly material] frame to another or the entry — not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier habitacle is not certainly definable — of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature? ENNEADS: IV III. 9

Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use such words as "entry" and "ensoulment," though never was this All unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which must in fact be co-existent. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

The true doctrine may be stated as follows: In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

While the Soul [as an eternal, a Divine Being] is at rest — in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute — yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to its Being — as far as it can share in Being — or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the kosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

The soul bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature — a thing unbounded — as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea [the Divine forming power] which it conveys. ENNEADS: IV III. 9

It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul's own Real-Being. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies — toys, things of no great worth — and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world [under the soul but above the material] the entire shape [as well as the idea] comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within outwards towards the new production. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

All existence has this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains all. ENNEADS: IV III. 10

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. ENNEADS: IV III. 11

But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises — as far as, through soul, anything can — from the lower to the highest. ENNEADS: IV III. 11

These Beings [the Reason-Principles of this sphere] are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being. ENNEADS: IV III. 11

Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase [the World-Soul] maintaining the unvarying march [of the kosmic circuit] the other [the soul of the Individual] adopting itself to times and season. ENNEADS: IV III. 12

The depth of the descent, also, will differ — sometimes lower, sometimes less low — and this even in its entry into any given Kind: all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or animal. ENNEADS: IV III. 12

In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image [the thing in the world of copy] to which its individual constitution inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender or leader acting at the right moment to bring it at the right moment whether into body or into a definitely appropriate body: of its own motion it descends at the precisely true time and enters where it must. ENNEADS: IV III. 13

To every Soul its own hour; when that strikes it descends and enters the body suitable to it as at the cry of a herald; thus all is set stirring and advancing as by a magician's power or by some mighty traction; it is much as, in any living thing, the soul itself effects the fulfillment of the natural career, stirring and bringing forth, in due season, every element — beard, horn, and all the successive stages of tendency and of output — or, as it leads a tree through its normal course within set periods. ENNEADS: IV III. 13

If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect, self-sufficing, in peril from no outside influence the soul now spoken of as indwelling would not occupy the body; it would infuse life while clinging, entire, within the Supreme. ENNEADS: IV III. 17

There remains still something to be said on the question whether the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it has left the body. ENNEADS: IV III. 18

Reasoning is for this sphere; it is the act of the soul fallen into perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength: the need of deliberation goes with the less self-sufficing intelligence; craftsmen faced by a difficulty stop to consider; where there is no problem their art works on by its own forthright power. ENNEADS: IV III. 18

Are we to think of the indivisible phase of the soul and the divided as making one thing in a coalescence; or is the indivisible in a place of its own and under conditions of its own, the divisible being a sequent upon it, a separate part of it, as distinct as the reasoning phase is from the unreasoning? ENNEADS: IV III. 19

The indivisible phase is mentioned [in the passage of Plato] without further qualification; but not so the divisible; "that soul" we read "which becomes divisible in bodies" — and even this last is presented as becoming partible, not as being so once for all. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

"In bodies": we must then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is required to produce life in the corporeal, and what there must be of soul present throughout such a body, such a completed organism. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

Similarly the vegetative function in the soul, with that of growth, indicates divisibility; and, admitting such locations as that of desire at the liver and emotional activity at the heart, we have the same result. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

It is to be noted, however, as regards these [the less corporeal] sensations, that the body may possibly not experience them as a fact of the conjoint thing but in another mode, as rising within some one of the elements of which it has been participant [as inherent, purely, in some phase of the associated soul]: reasoning and the act of the intellect, for instance, are not vested in the body; their task is not accomplished by means of the body which in fact is detrimental to any thinking on which it is allowed to intrude. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the divisible; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole consisting of parts, each part a self-standing thing having its own peculiar virtue. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power, then this one same thing [the soul in body] may be at once indivisible and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its own divisible self with, in addition, the quality that it derives from above itself. ENNEADS: IV III. 19

do not allot to each of the parts of the Soul some form of Place, but leave all unallocated — no more within the body than outside it — we leave the body soulless, and are at a loss to explain plausibly the origin of acts performed by means of the bodily organs: if, on the other hand, we suppose some of those phases to be [capable of situation] in place but others not so, we will be supposing that those parts to which we deny place are ineffective in us, or, in other words, that we do not possess our entire soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

This simply shows that neither the soul entire nor any part of it may be considered to be within the body as in a space: space is a container, a container of body; it is the home of such things as consist of isolated parts, things, therefore, in which at no point is there an entirety; now, the soul is not a body and is no more contained than containing. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

If we are to think of some passing-over from the soul — that self-gathered thing — to the containing vessel, then soul is diminished by just as much as the vessel takes. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Space, again, in the strict sense is unembodied, and is not, itself, body; why, then, should it need soul? ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Besides [if the soul were contained as in space] contact would be only at the surface of the body, not throughout the entire mass. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Many other considerations equally refute the notion that the soul is in body as [an object] in space; for example, this space would be shifted with every movement, and a thing itself would carry its own space about. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Of course if by space we understand the interval separating objects, it is still less possible that the soul be in body as in space: such a separating interval must be a void; but body is not a void; the void must be that in which body is placed; body [not soul] will be in the void. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum: anything in a substratum is a condition affecting that — a colour, a form — but the soul is a separate existence. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Nor is it present as a part in the whole; soul is no part of body. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

If we are asked to think of soul as a part in the living total we are faced with the old difficulty: How it is in that whole. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Nor can the presence be that of a whole in its part: It would be absurd to think of the soul as a total of which the body should represent the parts. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

It is not present as Form is in Matter; for the Form as in Matter is inseparable and, further, is something superimposed upon an already existent thing; soul, on the contrary, is that which engenders the Form residing within the Matter and therefore is not the Form. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

If the reference is not to the Form actually present, but to Form as a thing existing apart from all formed objects, it is hard to see how such an entity has found its way into body, and at any rate this makes the soul separable. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

How comes it then that everyone speaks of soul as being in body? ENNEADS: IV III. 20

Because the soul is not seen and the body is: we perceive the body, and by its movement and sensation we understand that it is ensouled, and we say that it possesses a soul; to speak of residence is a natural sequence. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full force to the very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in body; we would say the minor was within the major, the contained within the container, the fleeting within the perdurable. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

And what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase? ENNEADS: IV III. 21

Of the modes currently accepted for the presence of one thing in another, none really meets the case of the soul's relation to the body. ENNEADS: IV III. 21

Thus we are given as a parallel the steersman in the ship; this serves adequately to indicate that the soul is potentially separable, but the mode of presence, which is what we are seeking, it does not exhibit. ENNEADS: IV III. 21

We can imagine it within the body in some incidental way — for example, as a voyager in a ship — but scarcely as the steersman: and, of course, too, the steersman is not omnipresent to the ship as the soul is to the body. ENNEADS: IV III. 21

May we, perhaps, compare it to the science or skill that acts through its appropriate instruments — through a helm, let us say, which should happen to be a live thing — so that the soul effecting the movements dictated by seamanship is an indwelling directive force? ENNEADS: IV III. 21

Is it any help to adopt the illustration of the steersman taking the helm, and to station the soul within the body as the steersman may be thought to be within the material instrument through which he works? ENNEADS: IV III. 21

May we think that the mode of the soul's presence to body is that of the presence of light to the air? ENNEADS: IV III. 22

This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit area it is dark; under the light it is lit: we have a true parallel to what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the light quite as much as the light in the air. ENNEADS: IV III. 22

Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body in its soul, and not its soul in the body, and says that, while there is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region to which body does not enter — certain powers, that is, with which body has no concern. ENNEADS: IV III. 22

For the purposes of sensation the sensitive phase of the soul is present to the entire sensitive being: for the purposes of act, differentiation begins; every soul phase operates at a point peculiar to itself. ENNEADS: IV III. 22

I explain: A living body is illuminated by soul: each organ and member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to itself; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle of the soul-faculty under which the function is performed; thus the seeing faculty acts through the eyes, the hearing faculty through the ears, the tasting faculty through the tongue, the faculty of smelling through the nostrils, and the faculty of sentient touch is present throughout, since in this particular form of perception the entire body is an instrument in the soul's service. ENNEADS: IV III. 23

But it would be wiser to say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating faculty: the power to be exercised by the operator — in keeping with the particular instrument — must be considered as concentrated at the point at which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the soul's faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act. ENNEADS: IV III. 23

Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the Reason-Principle immediately above itself; downward, it is in contact with an inferior of its own: on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat; they lodged it in the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the brain. ENNEADS: IV III. 23

They saw that something must be definitely allocated to body — at the point most receptive of the act of reason — while something, utterly isolated from body must be in contact with that superior thing which is a form of soul [and not merely of the vegetative or other quasi-corporeal forms but] of that soul apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle. ENNEADS: IV III. 23

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. ENNEADS: IV III. 23

Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it go? ENNEADS: IV III. 24

The space open to the soul's resort is vast and diverse; the difference will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the justice reigning in things. ENNEADS: IV III. 24

Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of body — there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be. ENNEADS: IV III. 24

For the same reason memory, in the current sense, cannot be attributed to the soul in connection with the ideas inherent in its essence: these it holds not as a memory but as a possession, though, by its very entrance into this sphere, they are no longer the mainstay of its Act. ENNEADS: IV III. 25

It might be doubted whether that recollection, that memory, really belongs to the highest soul and not rather to another, a dimmer, or even to the Couplement, the Living-Being. ENNEADS: IV III. 25

And if to that dimmer soul, when and how has it come to be present; if to the Couplement, again when and how? ENNEADS: IV III. 25

We are driven thus to enquire into these several points: in which of the constituents of our nature is memory vested — the question with which we started — if in the soul, then in what power or part; if in the Animate or Couplement — which has been supposed, similarly to be the seat of sensation — then by what mode it is present, and how we are to define the Couplement; finally whether sensation and intellectual acts may be ascribed to one and the same agent, or imply two distinct principles. ENNEADS: IV III. 25

Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of that double nature. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the body to the tool employed: the body is passive and menial; the soul is active, reading such impressions as are made upon the body or discerned by means of the body, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the bodily experiences. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

In such a process it is at once clear that the sensation is a shared task; but the memory is not thus made over to the Couplement, since the soul has from the first taken over the impression, either to retain or to reject. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily constitution determines our memories good or bad; but the answer would come that, whether the body happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

And in the case of matters learned [and not merely felt, as corporeal experiences], how can we think of the Couplement of soul and body as the remembering principle? ENNEADS: IV III. 26

Here, surely, it must be soul alone? ENNEADS: IV III. 26

We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of something entirely distinct formed from the two elements [so that it might have memory though neither soul nor body had it]. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

But, to begin with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither body nor soul; these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the animate whole. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness will be due to the honey. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body, it may reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in such a manner as to retain them [thus in some sense possessing memory]. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

If the soul is to have any significance — to be a definite principle with a function of its own — we are forced to recognize two orders of fact, an order in which the body is a means but all culminates in soul, and an order which is of the soul alone. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

This being admitted, aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a consequence, will that memory of the aspiration and of its attainment or frustration, without which the soul's nature would fall into the category of the unstable [that is to say of the undivine, unreal]. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

Deny this character of the soul and at once we refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of comparison, almost any understanding. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

The soul is a stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering — Lethe stream may be understood in this sense — and memory is a fact of the soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 26

But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All? ENNEADS: IV III. 27

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told: what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would recount? ENNEADS: IV III. 27

The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. ENNEADS: IV III. 27

The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty of the soul memory resides. ENNEADS: IV III. 27

The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for objects of sense and objects of the Intellectual-Kind; but if these stand in definite duality, then, for all we can say or do, we are left with two separate principles of memory; and, supposing each of the two orders of soul to possess both principles, then we have four. ENNEADS: IV III. 29

This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking faculty does its intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions. ENNEADS: IV III. 30

But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said, possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there must be two such faculties. ENNEADS: IV III. 31

If each soul has its own imaging faculty the images must in all cases be duplicated, since we cannot think that one faculty deals only with intellectual objects, and the other with objects of sense, a distinction which inevitably implies the co-existence in man of two life-principles utterly unrelated. ENNEADS: IV III. 31

And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what difference is there in the souls; and how does the fact escape our knowledge? ENNEADS: IV III. 31

The answer is that, when the two souls chime each with each, the two imaging faculties no longer stand apart; the union is dominated by the more powerful of the faculties of the soul, and thus the image perceived is as one: the less powerful is like a shadow attending upon the dominant, like a minor light merging into a greater: when they are in conflict, in discord, the minor is distinctly apart, a self-standing thing — though its isolation is not perceived, for the simple reason that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation. ENNEADS: IV III. 31

All these, the one [the lower man] retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from which, however, the best of such impressions pass over to the graver soul in the degree in which the two are in communication. ENNEADS: IV III. 32

The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is itself of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are better from the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher. ENNEADS: IV III. 32

In any case the more urgent the intention towards the Supreme, the more extensive will be the soul's forgetfulness, unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with: in this world itself, all is best when human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore, it must be with the memory of them. ENNEADS: IV III. 32

In this sense we may truly say that the good soul is the forgetful. ENNEADS: IV III. 32

Thus it is that even in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. ENNEADS: IV III. 32

Fourth tractate — Problems of the soul (2). ENNEADS: IV IV. 32

Admitting that the Highest, as a self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the soul which has attained to the Supreme from exerting its own characteristic Act: it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part. ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

No: there has already been discrimination within the Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a reading of this. ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not bring time into the soul's intuition of earlier and later among them. ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how explain this grasping first of the unity and later of the rest? ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the soul], to which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like its essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually become all things. ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the borders of the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change; it has, for example, its inward advance, and obviously anything that attains position near to something motionless does so by a change directed towards that unchanging goal and is not itself motionless in the same degree. ENNEADS: IV IV. 2

None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own? ENNEADS: IV IV. 2

No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the Intellectual-Principle — but not to its own destruction: the two are one, and two. ENNEADS: IV IV. 2

In such a state there is no question of stage and change: the soul, without motion [but by right of its essential being] would be intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the Supreme. ENNEADS: IV IV. 2

In this self-memory a distinction is to be made; the memory dealing with the Intellectual Realm upbears the soul, not to fall; the memory of things here bears it downwards to this universe; the intermediate memory dealing with the heavenly sphere holds it there too; and, in all its memory, the thing it has in mind it is and grows to; for this bearing-in-mind must be either intuition [i. ENNEADS: IV IV. 3

In that realm it has also vision, through the Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance — and, indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the tertiaries. ENNEADS: IV IV. 4

If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the same principle of penetration comes into play, and it possesses itself, by memory and imagination, of the thing it desired: and hence the memory, even dealing with the highest, is not the highest. ENNEADS: IV IV. 4

There is such a thing as possessing more powerfully without consciousness than in full knowledge; with full awareness the possession is of something quite distinct from the self; unconscious possession runs very close to identity, and any such approach to identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the soul. ENNEADS: IV IV. 4

If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in abeyance: they could not be in the nature of impressions permanently adopted — a notion which would entail absurdities — but were no more than a potentiality realized after return. ENNEADS: IV IV. 4

When that energy of the Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it sees what it saw in the earlier state before it revisited the Supreme. ENNEADS: IV IV. 4

Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher spheres; it is first known in the celestial period. ENNEADS: IV IV. 5

A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said, it retains recollection of much that it knew here. ENNEADS: IV IV. 5

The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. ENNEADS: IV IV. 6

Still: the space traversed is different; there are the various sections of the Zodiac: why, then, should not the soul say "I have traversed that section and now I am in this other?" ENNEADS: IV IV. 7

The soul does not take into its deeper recesses such differences as do not meet any of its needs, or serve any of its purposes. ENNEADS: IV IV. 8

Above all, when the soul's act is directed towards another order, it must utterly reject the memory of such things, things over and done with now, and not even taken into knowledge when they were present. ENNEADS: IV IV. 8

But Zeus — ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished — would it not seem inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities? ENNEADS: IV IV. 9

Yes: for what must be stands shaped before the kosmos, and is ordered without any setting in order: the ordered things are merely the things that come to be; and the principle that brings them into being is Order itself; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

It is an unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away from it — and in doubt because it has turned away — but an unremitting soul performing an unvarying task. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

But observe: no perplexity need follow upon any development of this soul essentially a unity. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

The All stands a multiple thing no doubt, having parts, and parts dashing with parts, but that does not imply that it need be in doubt as to its conduct: that soul does not take its essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals; it has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

To suppose it pursuing one new object after another is to raise the question whence that novelty comes into being; the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to its action; its very work, the kosmos, would be the less well done by reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

And in the case of the universe, the administration is all the less complicated from the fact that the soul actually circumscribes, as parts of a living unity, all the members which it conducts. ENNEADS: IV IV. 11

This Wisdom is a first [within the All-Soul] while Nature is a last: for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul, possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle: we may imagine a thick waxen seal, in which the imprint has penetrated to the very uttermost film so as to show on both sides, sharp cut on the upper surface, faint on the under. ENNEADS: IV IV. 13

For Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything; imagination [the imaging faculty] has consciousness of the external, for it enables that which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience encountered, while Nature's function is to engender — of itself though in an act derived from the active principle [of the soul]. ENNEADS: IV IV. 13

Thus the Intellectual-Principle possesses: the Soul of the All eternally receives from it; this is the soul's life; its consciousness is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it; what proceeds from it into Matter and is manifested there is Nature, with which — or even a little before it — the series of real being comes to an end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual order and the beginnings of the imitative. ENNEADS: IV IV. 13

There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul, and receives from it: soul, near to Nature but superior, operates towards Nature but without receiving in turn; and there is the still higher phase [the purely Intellectual] with no action whatever upon body or upon Matter. ENNEADS: IV IV. 13

But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement: Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the soul — for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity of the soul, and springs from soul — and, since time is a thing of division and comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that past must imply that even the All-Soul has memory? ENNEADS: IV IV. 15

We repeat, identity belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity; otherwise there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the activities of the soul can themselves experience change. ENNEADS: IV IV. 15

For a soul is eternal, and is before time; and what is in time is of a lower order than time itself: time is folded around what is in time exactly as — we read — it is folded about what is in place and in number. ENNEADS: IV IV. 15

But if in the soul thing follows thing, if there is earlier and later in its productions, if it engenders or creates in time, then it must be looking towards the future; and if towards the future, then towards the past as well? ENNEADS: IV IV. 16

Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the Intellectual-Principle: and because the succession is a fact of the things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity. ENNEADS: IV IV. 16

The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it still, an outspreading without interval. ENNEADS: IV IV. 16

The total scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a centre, the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration: the Intellectual-Principle possesses and has ever embraced that which is beyond being; the soul must seek it still: the sphere of the universe, by its possession of the soul thus aspirant, is moved to the aspiration which falls within its own nature; this is no more than such power as body may have, the mode of pursuit possible where the object pursued is debarred from entrance; it is the motion of coiling about, with ceaseless return upon the same path — in other words, it is circuit. ENNEADS: IV IV. 16

But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but that here the later of order is converted into a later of time — bringing in all these doubts? ENNEADS: IV IV. 17

The same disturbance is caused by passion urging revenge and by the needs of the body; every other sensation or experience effects its own change upon our mental attitude; then there is the ignorance of what is good and the indecision of a soul [a human soul] thus pulled in every direction; and, again, the interaction of all these perplexities gives rise to yet others. ENNEADS: IV IV. 17

There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of its own — so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some individuality — or whether all it has is this Nature we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with it. ENNEADS: IV IV. 18

Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the body holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without emotion. ENNEADS: IV IV. 18

By "us, the true human being" I mean the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason: "attached," for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is an accessory and dependent of the human being; "we" means the master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an "ours"; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment. ENNEADS: IV IV. 18

Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary between soul and body and made up of both. ENNEADS: IV IV. 18

A unity is independent: thus body alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt — in its dissolution there is no damage to the body, but merely to its unity — and soul in similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very nature is immune from evil. ENNEADS: IV IV. 18

Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. ENNEADS: IV IV. 19

The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain [non-material] conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels ENNEADS: IV IV. 19

the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain [non-material] conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity. ENNEADS: IV IV. 19

But [this does not mean that the soul is affected] we cannot describe the perception itself as distress; it is the knowledge of the distress and, being knowledge, is not itself affected, or it could not know and convey a true message: a messenger, affected, overwhelmed by the event, would either not convey the message or not convey it faithfully. ENNEADS: IV IV. 19

Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter: all this must belong to what is specifically body but chooses to be something else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects, to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained untouched by life. ENNEADS: IV IV. 20

In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction. ENNEADS: IV IV. 20

Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the sensation [the sensitive phase of the soul] and in the next lower phase, that described as the "Nature" which carries the imprint of the soul to the body; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is the culmination of the less formed desire in body; sensation knows the image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that which subsequently entertained it. ENNEADS: IV IV. 20

In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and because of, that living body; granting or withholding belongs to another again, the higher soul. ENNEADS: IV IV. 20

Or are we to think that, while the earth [which nourishes them] contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire? ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth. ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

Is it one coming from the sphere of the All, a radiation upon earth from that which Plato seems to represent as the only thing possessing soul primarily? ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

Or are we to go by that other passage where he describes earth as the first and oldest of all the gods within the scope of the heavens, and assigns to it, as to the other stars, a soul peculiar to itself? ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

It is difficult to see how earth could be a god if it did not possess a soul thus distinct: but the whole matter is obscure since Plato's statements increase or at least do not lessen the perplexity. ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the vegetation upon it. ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

We cannot think of it as sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one appropriate to itself. ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul, and the earthly globe not? ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

Feeling does not belong to fleshy matter: soul to have perception does not require body; body, on the contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its efficiency, judgement [the foundation of perception] belongs to the soul which overlooks the body, and, from what is experienced there, forms its decisions. ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul? ENNEADS: IV IV. 22

A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated, self-acting, or to soul in conjunction with some other entity. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

Suppose something visible lying at a distance: the soul sees it; now, admitting to the full that at first only the pure idea of the thing is seized — a total without discerned part — yet in the end it becomes to the seeing soul an object whose complete detail of colour and form is known: this shows that there is something more here than the outlying thing and the soul; for the soul is immune from experience; there must be a third, something not thus exempt; and it is this intermediate that accepts the impressions of shape and the like. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the material object so as to be an exact reproduction of its states, and it must be of the one elemental-stuff: it, thus, will exhibit the condition which the higher principle is to perceive; and the condition must be such as to preserve something of the originating object, and yet not be identical with it: the essential vehicle of knowledge is an intermediary which, as it stands between the soul and the originating object, will, similarly, present a condition midway between the two spheres, of sense and the intellectual-linking the extremes, receiving from one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to assimilate itself to each. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of sense. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the body. ENNEADS: IV IV. 23

The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with the body; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the body to which the sensations are due; it must be something brought about by association with the body. ENNEADS: IV IV. 24

Thus either sensation occurs in a soul compelled to follow upon bodily states — since every graver bodily experience reaches at last to soul — or sensation is a device by which a cause is dealt with before it becomes so great as actually to injure us or even before it has begun to make contact. ENNEADS: IV IV. 24

But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception of any kind: there must be a state of the soul inclining it towards the sphere of sense. ENNEADS: IV IV. 25

Now it is the soul's character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere, and even though it were apt to sense-perception, this could not accompany that intention towards the highest; to ourselves when absorbed in the Intellectual, vision and the other acts of sense are in abeyance for the time; and, in general, any special attention blurs every other. ENNEADS: IV IV. 25

Smelling, tasting flavours [and such animal perceptions] may perhaps be described as mere accessories, distractions of the soul, while seeing and hearing would belong to the sun and the other heavenly bodies as incidentals to their being. ENNEADS: IV IV. 25

Because those gravest movements could not possibly remain unknown where there is an immanent soul. ENNEADS: IV IV. 26

There is, thus, no longer any absurdity or impossibility in the notion that the soul in the earth has vision: we must, further, consider that it is the soul of no mean body; that in fact it is a god since certainly soul must be everywhere good. ENNEADS: IV IV. 26

If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things — or retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal principle in them — at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing: this phase of the soul is immanent in the body of the growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere lump of material. ENNEADS: IV IV. 27

But does the entire body of the earth similarly receive anything from the soul? ENNEADS: IV IV. 27

We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries its vestige of this principle of growth, an under-phase of that entire principle which belongs not to this or that member but to the earth as a whole: next in order is the nature [the soul-phase], concerned with sensation, this not interfused [like the vegetal principle] but in contact from above: then the higher soul and the Intellectual-Principle, constituting together the being known as Hestia [Earth-Mind] and Demeter [Earth-Soul] — a nomenclature indicating the human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a divine name and nature. ENNEADS: IV IV. 27

Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in this case — the passionate element being one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient faculty? ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal, pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it — there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed — but in general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver and body — the seat, because the spring. ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

But in this other case, of passion, we have to settle what it is, what form of soul it represents: does it act by communicating a lower phase of itself to the regions round the heart, or is it set in motion by the higher soul-phase impinging upon the Conjoint [the animate-total], or is there, in such conditions no question of soul-phase, but simply passion itself producing the act or state of [for example] anger? ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

Our conclusion [reconciling with these corporeal facts the psychic or mental element indicated] will identify, first, some suffering in the body answered by a movement in the blood or in the bile: sensation ensues and the soul, brought by means of the representative faculty to partake in the condition of the affected body, is directed towards the cause of the pain: the reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above the phase not inbound with body-acts in its own mode when the breach of order has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of that ready passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil disclosed. ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring faculty and a passionate faculty — the first identical with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the blood or bile or upon the entire living organism — such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the relation of earlier phase to derivative. ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

And that derivative which culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought of as a vestige-phase lodged about the heart, since the heart is not the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the blood which is concerned in the movements of passion. ENNEADS: IV IV. 28

But — keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it — how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle? ENNEADS: IV IV. 29

But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the secondary phases follow their priors — the derivatives their sources — or whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from its predecessors and able to stand alone; in a word, whether no part of the soul is sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously one soul and many, and, if so, by what mode; this question, however, is treated elsewhere. ENNEADS: IV IV. 29

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living body: if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting upon the remote object. ENNEADS: IV IV. 29

As for the arts: Such as look to house building and the like are exhausted when that object is achieved; there are again those — medicine, farming, and other serviceable pursuits — which deal helpfully with natural products, seeking to bring them to natural efficiency; and there is a class — rhetoric, music and every other method of swaying mind or soul, with their power of modifying for better or for worse — and we have to ascertain what these arts come to and what kind of power lies in them. ENNEADS: IV IV. 31

It is abundantly evident that the Circuit is a cause; it modifies, firstly, itself and its own content, and undoubtedly also it tells on the terrestrial, not merely in accordance with bodily conditions but also by the states of the soul it sets up; and each of its members has an operation upon the terrestrial and in general upon all the lower. ENNEADS: IV IV. 31

An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from any corporeal quality that could enter the body and soul of a living thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. ENNEADS: IV IV. 31

The secret is: firstly, that this All is one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul, which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each; secondly, that every separate thing is an integral part of this All by belonging to the total material fabric — unrestrictedly a part by bodily membership, while, in so far as it has also some participation in the All. ENNEADS: IV IV. 32

Soul, it possesses in that degree spiritual membership as well, perfect where participation is in the All-Soul alone, partial where there is also a union with a lower soul. ENNEADS: IV IV. 32

In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we can but believe that though the heavenly body is intent upon the Supreme yet — to keep to the sun — its warming of terrestrial things, and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of Nature. ENNEADS: IV IV. 35

Some such power, not necessarily accompanied by reason, every single item possesses; for each has been brought into being and into shape within a universe; each in its kind has partaken of soul through the medium of the ensouled All, as being embraced by that definitely constituted thing: each then is a member of an animate being which can include nothing that is less than a full member [and therefore a sharer in the total of power] — though one thing is of mightier efficacy than another, and, especially members of the heavenly system than the objects of earth, since they draw upon a purer nature — and these powers are widely productive. ENNEADS: IV IV. 37

But productivity does not comport intention in what appears to be the source of the thing accomplished: there is efficacy, too, where there is no will: even attention is not necessary to the communication of power; the very transmission of soul may proceed without either. ENNEADS: IV IV. 37

Love is given in Nature; the qualities inducing love induce mutual approach: hence there has arisen an art of magic love-drawing whose practitioners, by the force of contact implant in others a new temperament, one favouring union as being informed with love; they knit soul to soul as they might train two separate trees towards each other. ENNEADS: IV IV. 40

The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns or tragic sounds — for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the performers. ENNEADS: IV IV. 40

In the soul he is immune from magic; his reasoning part cannot be touched by it, he cannot be perverted. ENNEADS: IV IV. 43

Philtre-Love, however, he will not know, for that would require the consent of the higher soul to the trouble stiffed in the lower. ENNEADS: IV IV. 43

We have learned, further, something of our human standing; we know that we too accomplish within the All a work not confined to the activity and receptivity of body in relation to body; we know that we bring to it that higher nature of ours, linked as we are by affinities within us towards the answering affinities outside us; becoming by our soul and the conditions of our kind thus linked — or, better, being linked by Nature — with our next highest in the celestial or demonic realm, and thence onwards with those above the Celestials, we cannot fail to manifest our quality. ENNEADS: IV IV. 45

A soul, which neither chooses the highest that is here, nor has lent itself to the lowest, is one which has abandoned another, a purer, place, taking this sphere in free election. ENNEADS: IV IV. 45

Fifth tractate — Problems of the soul (3). [ ENNEADS: IV V. 45

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. ENNEADS: IV V. 1

Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap. ENNEADS: IV V. 1

The knowledge, then, is realized by means of bodily organs: through these, which [in the embodied soul] are almost of one growth with it, being at least its continuations, it comes into something like unity with the alien, since this mutual approach brings about a certain degree of identity [which is the basis of knowledge]. ENNEADS: IV V. 1

For the present one matter must occupy us: If, in the act of vision, that linked light becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding — which is what vision really is — then the intervening light is not a necessity: the process of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light; all that intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which the vision ranges. ENNEADS: IV V. 4

If [as by the theory of an intervenient] the percipient mind or soul remains within itself and needs the light only as one might need a stick in the hand to touch something at a distance, then the perception will be a sort of tussle: the light must be conceived as something thrusting, something aimed at a mark, and similarly, the object, considered as an illuminated thing, must be conceived to be resistant; for this is the normal process in the case of contact by the agency of an intervenient. ENNEADS: IV V. 4

Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when anything — the human body, for instance — comes in its path to be affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it to modify: surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of whatever luminary source there be [i. ENNEADS: IV V. 6

So it is with the soul considered as the activity of another and prior soul: as long as that prior retains its place, its next, which is its activity, abides. ENNEADS: IV V. 7

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity — as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body to be — is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held in material things? ENNEADS: IV V. 7

No; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of the active element [the light being alloyed with Matter]; whereas the life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul closely present to it. ENNEADS: IV V. 7

But when the body perishes — by the fact that nothing without part in soul can continue in being — when the body is perishing, no longer supported by that primal life-giving soul, or by the presence of any secondary phase of it, it is clear that the life-principle can no longer remain; but does this mean that the life perishes? ENNEADS: IV V. 7

And the objects are thus perceived as related because the mind itself has related them in order to make them amenable to its handling: in other words the causative soul or mind in that other sphere is utterly alien, and the things there, supposed to be related to the content of this living whole, can be nothing to our minds.] ENNEADS: IV V. 8

At one and the same moment it postulates and denies a soul, it tells of an All that is partial, of a something which is at once distinct and not distinct, of a nothingness which is no nothingness, of a complete thing that is incomplete: the hypothesis therefore must be dismissed; no deduction is possible where a thesis cancels its own propositions. ENNEADS: IV V. 8

Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of as seal-impressions on soul or mind: accepting this statement, there is one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected. ENNEADS: IV VI. 1

Since we reject equally the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that the sensible object striking upon soul or mind makes a mark upon it, and that the retention of this mark is memory. ENNEADS: IV VI. 1

The knowing of the things belonging to the Intellectual is not in any such degree attended by impact or impression: they come forward, on the contrary, as from within, unlike the sense-objects known as from without: they have more emphatically the character of acts; they are acts in the stricter sense, for their origin is in the soul, and every concept of this Intellectual order is the soul about its Act. ENNEADS: IV VI. 2

Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views itself as from the outside — while seeing the Intellectual-Principal as a unity, and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity — this question is investigated elsewhere. ENNEADS: IV VI. 2

That the soul, or mind, having taken no imprint, yet achieves perception of what it in no way contains need not surprise us; or rather, surprising though it is, we cannot refuse to believe in this remarkable power. ENNEADS: IV VI. 3

All these considerations testify to an evocation of that faculty of the soul, or mind, in which remembrance is vested: the mind is strengthened, either generally or to this particular purpose. ENNEADS: IV VI. 3

That memory is a power of the Soul [not a capacity for taking imprint] is established at a stroke by the consideration that the soul is without magnitude. ENNEADS: IV VI. 3

And — one general reflection — it is not extraordinary that everything concerning soul should proceed in quite other ways than appears to people who either have never enquired, or have hastily adopted delusive analogies from the phenomena of sense, and persist in thinking of perception and remembrance in terms of characters inscribed on plates or tablets; the impossibilities that beset this theory escape those that make the soul incorporeal equally with those to whom it is corporeal. ENNEADS: IV VI. 3

Seventh tractate — The immortality of the soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body: this is the first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and essential being of these two constituents. ENNEADS: IV VII. 1

Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its constituents going its own way, one part working against another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 1

The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation be, the soul is the man. ENNEADS: IV VII. 1

But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since such the soul is to be, can dissolve. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

Now: of necessity life is inherent to soul: this material entity, then, which we call soul must have life ingrained within it; but [being a composite as by hypothesis, material] it must be made up of two or more bodies; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of those bodies or in one of them to the exclusion of the other or others; if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

But what sort of an entity have we there; what is this body which of its own nature possesses soul? ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless — whenever soul is in any of them, that life is borrowed — and there are no other forms of body than these four: even the school that believes there are has always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give such results: some regulating principle would be necessary, some Cause directing the admixture: that guiding principle would be — soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

Body — not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex — could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for body owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and only from soul can a Reason-Principle come. ENNEADS: IV VII. 2

Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

Bodily materials, in nature repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being [by hypothesis] outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body would simply force us to repeat our former analysis. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

It is no help to erect some one mode of body into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul body would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist: the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of "soul," remains air, fleeting breath [the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, "spirit" in the lower sense], whose very unity is not drawn from itself. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

This pneuma — orderless except under soul — how can it contain order, reason, intelligence? ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

But: given soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts. ENNEADS: IV VII. 3

Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or form of soul; their "pneuma" [finer-body or spirit] is intelligent, and they speak of an "intellectual fire"; this "fire" and "spirit" they imagine to be necessary to the existence of the higher order which they conceive as demanding some base, though the real difficulty, under their theory, is to find a base for material things whose only possible base is, precisely, the powers of soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this "pneuma," what is the import of that repeated qualification of theirs "in a certain state," their refuge when they are compelled to recognize some acting principle apart from body? ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this "certain state" is soul, what follows? ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any form of body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

For the added material must be either soul or soulless body: if soul, whence and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined [to the soul which by hypothesis is body]; if soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up before? ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul? ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body, characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being; soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a quality quite independent of quantity. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal? ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

Is every part of the soul, in any one body, soul entire, soul perfectly true to its essential being? ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

If so, the magnitude makes no contribution to the soul's essential nature, as it must if soul [as corporeal] were a definite magnitude: it is, as body cannot be, an "all-everywhere," a complete identity present at each and every point, the part all that the whole is. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

To deny that every part is soul is to make soul a compound from soulless elements. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

Further, if a definite magnitude, the double limit of larger or smaller, is to be imposed upon each separate soul, then anything outside those limits is no soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

The only possible ratio of divisibility would be that of the number of diverse elements in the impinging sensation: are we then to suppose that each part of the soul, and every part of each part, will have perception? ENNEADS: IV VII. 6

That is impossible: every part, then, has perception; the [hypothetical] magnitude, of soul and each part of soul, is infinitely divisible; there will therefore be in each part an infinite number of perceptions of the object, and therefore an infinitude of representations of it at our centre of consciousness. ENNEADS: IV VII. 6

If memory implies fresh sensations imposed upon former ones, the earlier not barring their way, the soul cannot be a material entity. ENNEADS: IV VII. 6

It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the soul were any form of body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul's employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

When such non-magnitudes come before the soul, it receives them by means of its partless phase and they will take position there in partless wise. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Then consider the objects of the soul's contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes? ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul's contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

sometimes appearing as 9] There are those who insist on the activities observed in bodies — warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing — and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

This ignores the double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers operating in them, and that these are not the powers we attribute to soul: intellection, perception, reasoning, desire, wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very different form of being. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are many other things of which none could possibly be soul: and neither pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being; but soul is. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire body-mass, still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the bodies; it could but be latent; it will have lost that by which it is soul, just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears: we have, thus, no soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

by hypothesis, the soul and the human body] are blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture: the one body thus inblended can have left in the other nothing undivided. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

But soul does this. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has been tempered by cold: still that is the theory — the soul has an earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external accidents. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and has sprung from the soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and always the later inferior, as the system actually stands. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle — as later, engendered and deriving intellection from without — soul and intellect and God may prove to have no existence: this would follow if a potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual, unless the corresponding actuality exists. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our body is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing upon the bodily total. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the lyre. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its own accord or note], so that there would be many souls to each person. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered becomes orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul, soul itself owes its substantial existence to order — which is self-caused. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or accord. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body — not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural organic body having the potentiality of life. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go with it. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Moreover if the soul is an Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to the desires; the total [of body and Entelechy-Soul] must have one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal contradiction. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe immortality. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy — if the word is to be used at all — in some other mode. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The principle of every growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another: how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being? ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come into being by finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the soul of some particular, for example, of a living being, whose body would by this doctrine be the author of its soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

What, then, is the soul's Being? ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

(14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 9

(15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material: besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it tangible. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses a life beneficent and wise, we take the next step and begin with working out the nature of our own soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as possible has no commerce with the bodily. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native store. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal? ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated with body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity. ENNEADS: IV VII. 10

This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in the mode of the heat in fire — for if heat is characteristic of the fire proper, it certainly is adventitious to the Matter underlying the fire; or fire, too, would be everlasting — it is not in any such mode that the soul has life: this is no case of a Matter underlying and a life brought into that Matter and making it into soul [as heat comes into matter and makes it fire]. ENNEADS: IV VII. 11

(17) A further consideration is that if every soul is to be held dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be: if it is pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is mortal, and another, that of the All, let us suppose, is immortal, we demand to know the reason of the difference alleged. ENNEADS: IV VII. 12

Again: the soul's understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal. ENNEADS: IV VII. 12

Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment, must in the nature of things be broken apart by that very mode which brought it together: but the soul is one and simplex, living not in the sense of potential reception of life but by its own energy; and this can be no cause of dissolution. ENNEADS: IV VII. 12

No: the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity. ENNEADS: IV VII. 12

(18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual? ENNEADS: IV VII. 13

In this new zest it strains towards the realm of sense: thus, while this primal soul in union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its concern: yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is not wholly and exclusively held by body: it is still in possession of the unembodied; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. ENNEADS: IV VII. 13

As a whole it is partly in body, partly outside: it has plunged from among the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the universe with beauty and penetrant order — immortal mind, eternal in its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul. ENNEADS: IV VII. 13

And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order. ENNEADS: IV VII. 14

If we are told that man's soul being tripartite must as a compound entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at birth, all that increment which the others will long retain. ENNEADS: IV VII. 14

Eighth tractate — The soul's descent into body. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 15

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of the soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul after it has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities driving other souls down to this order. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

There is a reason, then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God: in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the realm of sense. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 1

Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general — to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

No doubt the individual body — though in all cases appropriately placed within the universe — is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but the body inhabited by the World-Soul — complete, competent, self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature — this needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

The soul's care for the universe takes two forms: there is the supervising of the entire system, brought to order by deedless command in a kindly presidence, and there is that over the individual, implying direct action, the hand to the task, one might say, in immediate contact: in the second kind of care the agent absorbs much of the nature of its object. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul's method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no longer be charged with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been deprived of its natural standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither failing ever nor ever beginning. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as the All to the material forms within it — for these starry bodies are declared to be members of the soul's circuit — we are given to understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of transcendence and immunity that becomes them. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

And so we might expect: commerce with the body is repudiated for two only reasons, as hindering the soul's intellective act and as filling with pleasure, desire, pain; but neither of these misfortunes can befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into the body, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an order as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor fear. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 2

Now this does not clash with the first theory [that of the impassivity of soul as in the All]; for the descent of the human Soul has not been due to the same causes [as that of the All-Soul.] ENNEADS: IV VIII. 3

We may think of it as a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms of life; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living quality: or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the great fire and the minor fires; yet all have the one common essence, that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from which the essence of the universal fire proceeds. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 3

No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 3

This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it ENNEADS: IV VIII. 4

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 4

On the other hand these experiences and actions are determined by an external law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a being which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve the needs of another: hence there is no inconsistency or untruth in saying that the soul is sent down by God; final results are always to be referred to the starting point even across many intervening stages. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 5

Still there is a twofold flaw: the first lies in the motive of the Soul's descent [its audacity, its Tolma], and the second in the evil it does when actually here: the first is punished by what the soul has suffered by its descent: for the faults committed here, the lesser penalty is to enter into body after body — and soon to return — by judgement according to desert, the word judgement indicating a divine ordinance; but any outrageous form of ill-doing incurs a proportionately greater punishment administered under the surveillance of chastising daimons. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 5

Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as well never ENNEADS: IV VIII. 5

is a god, a later phase of the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known that suppressed and inhibited total. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 5

The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat; but there is the lower phase, begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the Supreme. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 6

The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the Intellectual against the sensible: better for the soul to dwell in the Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to participate in the sense-realm also. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 7

There is no grievance in its not being, through and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in turn whenever — instead of employing in its government only its safeguarded phase — it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the Supreme, and more clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost their direct antithesis. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 7

The outgoing that takes place in the Intellectual-Principle is a descent to its own downward ultimate: it cannot be a movement to the transcendent; operating necessarily outwards from itself, wherein it may not stay inclosed, the need and law of Nature bring it to its extreme term, to soul — to which it entrusts all the later stages of being while itself turns back on its course. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 7

The soul's operation is similar: its next lower act is this universe: its immediate higher is the contemplation of the Authentic Existences. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 7

To individual souls such divine operation takes place only at one of their phases and by a temporal process when from the lower in which they reside they turn towards the noblest; but that soul, which we know as the All-Soul, has never entered the lower activity, but, immune from evil, has the property of knowing its lower by inspection, while it still cleaves continuously to the beings above itself; thus its double task becomes possible; it takes thence and, since as soul it cannot escape touching this sphere, it gives hither. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 7

And — if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of a personal conviction clashing with the general view — even our human soul has not sunk entire; something of it is continuously in the Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of sense, hold the mastery, or rather be mastered here and troubled, it keeps us blind to what the upper phase holds in contemplation. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 8

The object of the Intellectual Act comes within our ken only when it reaches downward to the level of sensation: for not all that occurs at any part of the soul is immediately known to us; a thing must, for that knowledge, be present to the total soul; thus desire locked up within the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours by the central faculty of perception, or by the individual choice or by both at once. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 8

Once more, every soul has something of the lower on the body side and something of the higher on the side of the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 8

In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and so in the forms of vegetal life the vegetal soul is entire at each several point throughout the organism. ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one, and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate items, but an omnipresent identity? ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

If the soul in me is a unity, why need that in the universe be otherwise seeing that there is no longer any question of bulk or body? ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

And if that, too, is one soul and yours, and mine, belongs to it, then yours and mine must also be one: and if, again, the soul of the universe and mine depend from one soul, once more all must be one. ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

What then in itself is this one soul? ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

It must, no doubt, seem strange that my soul and that of any and everybody else should be one thing only: it might mean my feelings being felt by someone else, my goodness another's too, my desire, his desire, all our experience shared with each other and with the (one-souled) universe, so that the very universe itself would feel whatever I felt. ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul and vegetal? ENNEADS: IV IX. 1

Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. ENNEADS: IV IX. 2

That one identical soul should be virtuous in me and vicious in someone else is not strange: it is only saying that an identical thing may be active here and inactive there. ENNEADS: IV IX. 2

We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity — only of the Supreme can that be affirmed — we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that Order which suffers no division. ENNEADS: IV IX. 2

Again, if spells and other forms of magic are efficient even at a distance to attract us into sympathetic relations, the agency can be no other than the one soul. ENNEADS: IV IX. 3

A quiet word induces changes in a remote object, and makes itself heard at vast distances — proof of the oneness of all things within the one soul. ENNEADS: IV IX. 3

But how reconcile this unity with the existence of a reasoning soul, an unreasoning, even a vegetal soul? [ ENNEADS: IV IX. 3

The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described, similarly, as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of growth is at work where there is no sensation — and yet all these powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside. ENNEADS: IV IX. 3

Let us suppose, even, the first soul to be corporeal. ENNEADS: IV IX. 4

But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity — much as a multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. ENNEADS: IV IX. 4

By that first mode the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second mode it is incorporeal. ENNEADS: IV IX. 4

Similarly if the soul were a condition or modification of body, we could not wonder that this quality — this one thing from one source — should be present in many objects. ENNEADS: IV IX. 4

The same reasoning would apply if soul were an effect [or manifestation] of the Conjoint. ENNEADS: IV IX. 4

A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine. ENNEADS: V I. 1

There is the method, which we amply exhibit elsewhere, declaring the dishonour of the objects which the Soul holds here in honour; the second teaches or recalls to the soul its race and worth; this latter is the leading truth, and, clearly brought out, is the evidence of the other. ENNEADS: V I. 1

It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to which it is the natural preliminary: the seeker is soul and it must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which soul may undertake the search; it must study itself in order to learn whether it has the faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the object proposed, whether in fact we ought to seek; for if the object is alien the search must be futile, while if there is relationship the solution of our problem is at once desirable and possible. ENNEADS: V I. 1

Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings ENNEADS: V I. 2

Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it ENNEADS: V I. 2

every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being. ENNEADS: V I. 2

truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being. ENNEADS: V I. 2

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. ENNEADS: V I. 2

Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. ENNEADS: V I. 2

As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body — clay and water — or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, "the execration of the Gods." ENNEADS: V I. 2

The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously interdependent; the soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. ENNEADS: V I. 2

By the power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for "dead is viler than dung." ENNEADS: V I. 2

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. ENNEADS: V I. 2

For what is body but earth, and, taking fire itself, what [but soul] is its burning power? ENNEADS: V I. 2

If, then, it is the presence of soul that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things? ENNEADS: V I. 2

But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward neighbour of the soul, its prior and source. ENNEADS: V I. 3

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. ENNEADS: V I. 3

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign [traceable to Matter] and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task. ENNEADS: V I. 3

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded. ENNEADS: V I. 3

For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but is Divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every soul. ENNEADS: V I. 4

And the soul is such a number or quantity. ENNEADS: V I. 5

In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. ENNEADS: V I. 6

The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it — the soul, for example, being an utterance and act of the Intellectual-Principle as that is an utterance and act of The One. ENNEADS: V I. 6

But in soul the utterance is obscured, for soul is an image and must look to its own original: that Principle, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation — thus becoming what it is — and has that vision not as from a distance but as the immediate next with nothing intervening, close to the One as Soul to it. ENNEADS: V I. 6

Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of soul, but [above the life-principle] there is the soul perfected as containing Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. ENNEADS: V I. 10

The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated — this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. ENNEADS: V I. 10

This is why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the soul around it from without — understand that phase of soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual — and of ourselves that the charioteer's head reaches upwards towards the heights. ENNEADS: V I. 10

The admonition to sever soul from body is not, of course, to be understood spatially — that separation stands made in Nature — the reference is to holding our rank, to use of our thinking, to an attitude of alienation from the body in the effort to lead up and attach to the over-world, equally with the other, that phase of soul seated here and, alone, having to do with body, creating, moulding, spending its care upon it. ENNEADS: V I. 10

Since there is a Soul which reasons upon the right and good — for reasoning is an enquiry into the rightness and goodness of this rather than that — there must exist some permanent Right, the source and foundation of this reasoning in our soul; how, else, could any such discussion be held? ENNEADS: V I. 11

Further, since the soul's attention to these matters is intermittent, there must be within us an Intellectual-Principle acquainted with that Right not by momentary act but in permanent possession. ENNEADS: V I. 11

The answer is that all the Divine Beings are unceasingly about their own act, the Intellectual-Principle and its Prior always self-intent; and so, too, the soul maintains its unfailing movement; for not all that passes in the soul is, by that fact, perceptible; we know just as much as impinges upon the faculty of sense. ENNEADS: V I. 12

Any activity not transmitted to the sensitive faculty has not traversed the entire soul: we remain unaware because the human being includes sense-perception; man is not merely a part [the higher part] of the soul but the total. ENNEADS: V I. 12

None the less every being of the order of soul is in continuous activity as long as life holds, continuously executing to itself its characteristic act: knowledge of the act depends upon transmission and perception. ENNEADS: V I. 12

Hoping to hear a desired voice, we let all others pass and are alert for the coming at last of that most welcome of sounds: so here, we must let the hearings of sense go by, save for sheer necessity, and keep the soul's perception bright and quick to the sounds from above. ENNEADS: V I. 12

Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual-Principle — which itself sprang from its own motionless prior — but the soul's operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its movement. ENNEADS: V II. 1

In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in soul entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general. ENNEADS: V II. 2

But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or topmost boughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the soul that was present in them? ENNEADS: V II. 2

Simply, whence it came: soul never knew spatial separation and therefore is always within the source. ENNEADS: V II. 2

In the soul, which never went outside of itself. ENNEADS: V II. 2

No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: V II. 2

Of course nothing here must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from soul as being still more free. ENNEADS: V II. 2

If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. ENNEADS: V II. 2

It would be already absurd enough to deny this power to the soul or mind, but the very height of absurdity to deny it to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, presented thus as knowing the rest of things but not attaining to knowledge, or even awareness, of itself. ENNEADS: V III. 1

We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating. ENNEADS: V III. 2

The reasoning-principle in the Soul acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the impressions, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming impressions [those of sense] and adapts them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before — the act which may be described as the soul's Reminiscence. ENNEADS: V III. 2

If we accord self-knowing to this phase of the soul we make it an Intellectual-Principle and will have to show what distinguishes it from its prior; if we refuse it self-knowing, all our thought brings us step by step to some principle which has this power, and we must discover what such self-knowing consists in. ENNEADS: V III. 2

If, again, we do allow self-knowledge in the lower we must examine the question of degree; for if there is no difference of degree, then the reasoning principle in soul is the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed. ENNEADS: V III. 2

We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior and inferior, which it receives. ENNEADS: V III. 2

It is, itself, of the nature of the good and it has been strengthened still towards the perception of all that is good by the irradiation of the Intellectual-Principle upon it; for this pure phase of the soul welcomes to itself the images implanted from its prior. ENNEADS: V III. 3

But why may we not distinguish this understanding phase as Intellectual-Principle and take soul to consist of the later phases from the sensitive downwards? ENNEADS: V III. 3

Because all the activities mentioned are within the scope of a reasoning faculty, and reasoning is characteristically the function of soul. ENNEADS: V III. 3

Because we have allotted to soul the function of dealing — in thought and in multiform action — with the external, and we hold that observation of self and of the content of self must belong to Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: V III. 3

If any one says, "Still; what precludes the reasoning soul from observing its own content by some special faculty?" ENNEADS: V III. 3

But what precludes the Intellectual-Principle from being present, unalloyed, within the soul? ENNEADS: V III. 3

Nothing, we admit; but are we entitled therefore to think of it as a phase of soul? ENNEADS: V III. 3

We cannot describe it as belonging to the soul though we do describe it as our Intellectual-Principle, something distinct from the understanding, advanced above it, and yet ours even though we cannot include it among soul-phases: it is ours and not ours; and therefore we use it sometimes and sometimes not, whereas we always have use of the understanding; the Intellectual-Principle is ours when we act by it, not ours when we neglect it. ENNEADS: V III. 3

No: our reasoning is our own; we ourselves think the thoughts that occupy the understanding — for this is actually the We — but the operation of the Intellectual-Principle enters from above us as that of the sensitive faculty from below; the We is the soul at its highest, the mid-point between two powers, between the sensitive principle, inferior to us, and the intellectual principle superior. ENNEADS: V III. 3

Thus the self-knower is a double person: there is the one that takes cognisance of the principle in virtue of which understanding occurs in the soul or mind; and there is the higher, knowing himself by the Intellectual-Principle with which he becomes identical: this latter knows the self as no longer man but as a being that has become something other through and through: he has thrown himself as one thing over into the superior order, taking with him only that better part of the soul which alone is winged for the Intellectual Act and gives the man, once established There, the power to appropriate what he has seen. ENNEADS: V III. 4

The difference is that, while the soul knows itself as within something else, the Intellectual-Principle knows itself as self-depending, knows all its nature and character, and knows by right of its own being and by simple introversion. ENNEADS: V III. 6

No: it brings compulsion not persuasion; compulsion belongs to the Intellectual-Principle, persuasion to the soul or mind, and we seem to desire to be persuaded rather than to see the truth in the pure intellect. ENNEADS: V III. 6

As long as we were Above, collected within the Intellectual nature, we were satisfied; we were held in the intellectual act; we had vision because we drew all into unity — for the thinker in us was the Intellectual-Principle telling us of itself — and the soul or mind was motionless, assenting to that act of its prior. ENNEADS: V III. 6

But now that we are once more here — living in the secondary, the soul — we seek for persuasive probabilities: it is through the image we desire to know the archetype. ENNEADS: V III. 6

Our way is to teach our soul how the Intellectual-Principle exercises self-vision; the phase thus to be taught is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent soul, indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an Intellectual-Principle or that it holds its peculiar power through and from that Principle. ENNEADS: V III. 6

The soul therefore [to attain self-knowledge] has only to set this image [that is to say, its highest phase] alongside the veritable Intellectual-Principle which we have found to be identical with the truths constituting the objects of intellection, the world of Primals and Reality: for this Intellectual-Principle, by very definition, cannot be outside of itself, the Intellectual Reality: self-gathered and unalloyed, it is Intellectual-Principle through all the range of its being — for unintelligent intelligence is not possible — and thus it possesses of necessity self-knowing, as a being immanent to itself and one having for function and essence to be purely and solely ENNEADS: V III. 6

Once more, then; the Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but soul has the double phase, one inner, intent upon the Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces Ideal-forms — divine intellections perfectly wrought out — so that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer more true, the very ENNEADS: V III. 7

The seed principles are invisible and the beings of the Intellectual still more characteristically so; the Intellectuals are of one same nature with the Intellectual Realm which contains them, just as the Reason-Principle in the seed is identical with the soul, or life-principle, containing it. ENNEADS: V III. 8

But the Soul (considered as apart from the Intellectual-Principle) has no vision of what it thus contains, for it is not the producer but, like the Reason-Principles also, an image of its source: that source is the brilliant, the authentic, the primarily existent, the thing self-sprung and self-intent; but its image, soul, is a thing which can have no permanence except by attachment, by living in that other; the very nature of an image is that, as a secondary, it shall have its being in something else, if at all it exist apart from its original. ENNEADS: V III. 8

Hence this image (soul) has not vision, for it has not the necessary light, and, if it should see, then, as finding its completion elsewhere, it sees another, not itself. ENNEADS: V III. 8

This light shining within the soul enlightens it; that is, it makes the soul intellective, working it into likeness with itself, the light above. ENNEADS: V III. 8

Think of the traces of this light upon the soul, then say to yourself that such, and more beautiful and broader and more radiant, is the light itself; thus you will approach to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Realm, for it is this light, itself lit from above, which gives the soul its brighter life. ENNEADS: V III. 8

It is not the source of the generative life of the soul which, on the contrary, it draws inward, preserving it from such diffusion, holding it to the love of the splendour of its Prior. ENNEADS: V III. 8

This means in sum that the life the soul takes thence is an intellective life, a trace of the life in the [divine] Intellect, in which alone the authentic exists. ENNEADS: V III. 8

In the strength of such considerations we lead up our own soul to the Divine, so that it poses itself as an image of that Being, its life becoming an imprint and a likeness of the Highest, its every act of thought making it over into the Divine and the Intellectual. ENNEADS: V III. 8

If the soul is questioned as to the nature of that Intellectual-Principle — the perfect and all-embracing, the primal self-knower — it has but to enter into that Principle, or to sink all its activity into that, and at once it shows itself to be in effective possession of those priors whose memory it never lost: thus, as an image of the Intellectual-Principle, it can make itself the medium by which to attain some vision of it; it draws upon that within itself which is most closely resemblant, as far as resemblance is possible between divine Intellect and any phase of soul. ENNEADS: V III. 8

In order, then, to know what the Divine Mind is, we must observe soul and especially its most God-like phase. ENNEADS: V III. 9

One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the body — yourself, that is, from your body — next to put aside that soul which moulded the body, and, very earnestly, the system of sense with desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left is the phase of the soul which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that sun, while it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes [that is, of Matter] the light playing about itself which is generated from its own nature. ENNEADS: V III. 9

The Soul, on the contrary — a light springing from the Divine Mind and shining about it — is in closest touch with that source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in likeness to that principle, it has no place: the light of the sun is actually in the air, but the soul is clean of all such contact so that its immunity is patent to itself and to any other of the same order. ENNEADS: V III. 9

And by its own characteristic act, though not without reasoning process, it knows the nature of the Intellectual-Principle which, on its side, knows itself without need of reasoning, for it is ever self-present whereas we become so by directing our soul towards it; our life is broken and there are many lives, but that principle needs no changings of life or of things; the lives it brings to being are for others not for itself: it cannot need the inferior; nor does it for itself produce the less when it possesses or is the all, nor the images when it possesses or is the prototype. ENNEADS: V III. 9

Anyone not of the strength to lay hold of the first soul, that possessing pure intellection, must grasp that which has to do with our ordinary thinking and thence ascend: if even this prove too hard, let him turn to account the sensitive phase which carries the ideal forms of the less fine degree, that phase which, too, with its powers, is immaterial and lies just within the realm of Ideal-principles. ENNEADS: V III. 9

One may even, if it seem necessary, begin as low as the reproductive soul and its very production and thence make the ascent, mounting from those ultimate ideal principles to the ultimates in the higher sense, that is to the primals. ENNEADS: V III. 9

The Supreme in its progress could never be borne forward upon some soulless vehicle nor even directly upon the soul: it will be heralded by some ineffable beauty: before the great King in his progress there comes first the minor train, then rank by rank the greater and more exalted, closer to the King the kinglier; next his own honoured company until, last among all these grandeurs, suddenly appears the Supreme Monarch himself, and all — unless indeed for those who have contented themselves with the spectacle before his coming and gone away — prostrate themselves and hail him. ENNEADS: V V. 3

We can imagine the Soul as a double light, a lesser corresponding to the soul proper, a purer representing its intellective phase; if now we suppose this intellective light equal to the light which is to be its object, we no longer distinguish between them; the two are recognised as one: we know, indeed, that there are two, but as we see them they have become one: this gives us the relation between the intellective subject and the object of intellection [in the duality and unity required by that primal intellection]: in our thought we have made the two into one; but on the other hand the one thing has become two, making itself into ENNEADS: V VI. 1

If Socrates, Socrates' soul, is external then the Authentic Socrates — to adapt the term — must be There; that is to say, the individual soul has an existence in the Supreme as well as in this world. ENNEADS: V VII. 1

If there is no such permanent endurance and what was Socrates may with change of time become another soul and be Pythagoras or someone else — then the individual Socrates has not that existence in the Divine. ENNEADS: V VII. 1

But if the Soul of the individual contains the Reason-Principles of all that it traverses, once more all men have their [archetypic] existence There: and it is our doctrine that every soul contains all the Reason-Principles that exist in the Kosmos: since then the Kosmos contains the Reason-Principles not merely of man, but also of all individual living things, so must the Soul. ENNEADS: V VII. 1

But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly in soul or mind. ENNEADS: V VIII. 2

In the proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the soul and bringing to it a light from that greater light which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting upon the quality of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself alone, and thus is not even to be called a Reason-Principle but is the creative source of the very first Reason-Principle which is the Beauty to which Soul serves as Matter. ENNEADS: V VIII. 3

We cannot therefore think that the divine Beings of that sphere, or the other supremely blessed There, need look to our apparatus of science: all of that realm, all is noble image, such images as we may conceive to lie within the soul of the wise — but There not as inscription but as authentic existence. ENNEADS: V VIII. 5

One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else; of that prior — since there is no obstacle, all being continuous within the realm of reality — there has suddenly appeared a sign, an image, whether given forth directly or through the ministry of soul or of some phase of soul, matters nothing for the moment: thus the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine world, in greater beauty There because There unmingled but mingled here. ENNEADS: V VIII. 7

To those that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account; but those drunken with this wine, filled with the nectar, all their soul penetrated by this beauty, cannot remain mere gazers: no longer is there a spectator outside gazing on an outside spectacle; the clear-eyed hold the vision within themselves, though, for the most part, they have no idea that it is within but look towards it as to something beyond them and see it as an object of vision caught by a direction of the will. ENNEADS: V VIII. 10

Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any surer ground, they fall back in virtue's name, upon those actions and options of the lower from which they sought to escape. ENNEADS: V IX. 1

It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose beauty is of the soul — such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom — and thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the Soul, thence to whatever be above that again, until the uttermost is reached. ENNEADS: V IX. 2

We ask then is soul, of itself, a thing of beauty: we find it is not since differences are manifest, one Soul wise and lovely, another foolish and ugly: soul-beauty is constituted by wisdom. ENNEADS: V IX. 2

The question thus becomes, "What principle is the giver of wisdom to the soul? ENNEADS: V IX. 2

Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. ENNEADS: V IX. 3

Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle — since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless — you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else — the Intellectual-Principle in it — representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. ENNEADS: V IX. 3

This other is Soul which, hovering over the Four [the elements], imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for which it has itself received from the Intellectual-Principle as the soul or mind of the craftsman draws upon his craft for the plan of his work. ENNEADS: V IX. 3

The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the soul, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape — the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given — imparting to soul nearly the authentic reality while what body receives is but image and imitation. ENNEADS: V IX. 3

But, soul reached, why need we look higher; why not make this The First? ENNEADS: V IX. 4

For it is certainly not true, as people imagine, that the soul, brought to perfection, produces Intellect. ENNEADS: V IX. 4

And if, further, soul is passible while something impassible there must be or by the mere passage of time all wears away, here too we are led to something above soul. ENNEADS: V IX. 4

We may be told that Reason-Principles suffice [to the subsistence of the All]: but then these, clearly, must be eternal; and if eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an Intellectual-Principle such as we have indicated, a principle earlier than condition, than nature, than soul, than anything whose existence is potential for contingent]. ENNEADS: V IX. 5

Thus each of the powers in the seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher. ENNEADS: V IX. 6

Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can scarcely be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surface-knowing; it is of later origin than the objects since it is a reflection from them: but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning soul from the Intellectual-Principle and has no dealing with anything in sense. ENNEADS: V IX. 7

Being true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognisance; it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual object since it carries the Intellectual-Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote — for all such experience belongs to soul — but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things by the act of knowing them. ENNEADS: V IX. 7

It must be stated at the outset that we cannot take all that is here to be image of archetype, or Soul to be an image of Absolute-Soul: one soul, doubtless, ranks higher than another, but here too, though perhaps not as identified with this realm, is the Absolute-Soul. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

Every soul, authentically a soul, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the Supreme, as in the sense-world, but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

For those Beings are not set apart in some defined place; wherever there is a soul that has risen from body, there too these are: the world of sense is one — where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

Whatever the freed soul attains to here, that it is There. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

It need hardly be said that we are not to affirm Relation where one thing is simply an attribute of another, as a habit is an attribute of a soul or of a body; it is not Relation when a soul belongs to this individual or dwells in that body. ENNEADS: VI I. 7

Qualities in the true sense — those, that is, which determine qualia — being in accordance with our definition powers, will in virtue of this common ground be a kind of Reason-Principle; they will also be in a sense Forms, that is, excellences and imperfections whether of soul or of body. ENNEADS: VI I. 10

Beauty or health of soul or body, very well: but surely not ugliness, disease, weakness, incapacity. ENNEADS: VI I. 10

We must examine whether qualities may not prove to be divisible on the principle that some belong to the body and others to the soul. ENNEADS: VI I. 12

Those of the soul would presumably be allotted to appetite, emotion, reason; though, again, they may be distinguished by the differences of the activities they condition, in so far as activities are engendered by these qualities; or according as they are beneficial or injurious, the benefits and injuries being duly classified. ENNEADS: VI I. 12

And in the case of the other arts — or most of them — investigation would probably warrant the assertion that in so far as they affect the soul they are qualities, while in so far as they look outward they are active and as being directed to an external object are relatives. ENNEADS: VI I. 12

It is no less paradoxical that the living form should owe existence not to its soul but to its Matter only, the soul being but an affection of Matter and posterior to it. ENNEADS: VI I. 27

Whence, in short, is soul's entity derived? ENNEADS: VI I. 27

But Matter does not speak; anyone who says that it does proclaims the predominance of Matter in himself; he may have a soul, but he is utterly devoid of Intellect, and lives in ignorance of himself and of the faculty alone capable of uttering the truth in these things. ENNEADS: VI I. 29

We believed that the division of the living being into body and soul was final: body indeed was manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt, supposing that we had come to the limit of our course. ENNEADS: VI II. 4

Let us examine this soul, presented to us from the Intellectual realm as body from the Sensible. ENNEADS: VI II. 4

Are we to assign this beauty — and the same question applies to deformity in the soul — to the Intellectual order, or to the Sensible? ENNEADS: VI III. 16

Are we, then, to rank the individual soul, as containing these Reason-Principles, with Sensible Substance? ENNEADS: VI III. 16

As for Qualities, we hold that they are invariably bodiless, being affections arising within Soul; but, like the Reason-Principles of the individual soul, they are associated with Soul in its apostasy, and are accordingly counted among the things of the lower realm: such affections, torn between two worlds by their objects and their abode, we have assigned to Quality, which is indeed not bodily but manifested in body. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

How are we to explain the omnipresence of the soul? ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

Does it depend upon the definite magnitude of the material universe coupled with some native tendency in soul to distribute itself over material mass, or is it a characteristic of soul apart from body? ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

In the latter case, soul will not appear just where body may bring it; body will meet soul awaiting it everywhere; wheresoever body finds place, there soul lay before ever body was; the entire material mass of the universe has been set into an existent soul. ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before there was any All? ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence of extension, extending over a universe? ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an accidental attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the move of accident? ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say sweetness or colour, for while these are actual states of the masses affected so that they show that quality at every point, none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of body and known only as in body; such quality is necessarily of a definite extension. ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

Further, the colour at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts of perception show. ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence. ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

Obviously, we must take hold of the question from the very beginning in the hope of finding some clear and convincing theory as to how soul, immaterial and without magnitude, can be thus broad-spread, whether before material masses exist or as enveloping them. ENNEADS: VI IV. 1

There is nothing disquieting in omnipresence after this mode where there is no appropriation: in the same accidental way, we may reasonably put it, soul concurs with body, but it is soul self-holding, not inbound with Matter, free even of the body which it has illuminated through and through. ENNEADS: VI IV. 3

But how explain beings by the side of Being, and the variety of intelligences and of souls, when Being has the unity of omnipresent identity and not merely that of a species, and when intellect and soul are likewise numerically one? ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

We certainly distinguish between the soul of the All and the particular souls. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

But if the Authentic Being is to be kept unattached in order to remove the difficulty of integral omnipresence, the same considerations must apply equally to the souls; we would have to admit that they cannot be integrally omnipresent in the bodies they are described as occupying; either, soul must be distributed, part to body's part, or it is lodged entire at some one point in the body giving forth some of its powers to the other points; and these very powers, again, present the same difficulty. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

A further objection is that some one spot in the body will hold the soul, the others no more than a power from it. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

For soul is not articulated, section of soul to section of body; there is integral omnipresence manifesting the unity of that principle, its veritable partlessness. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

Now as in soul unity does not debar variety, so with Being and the Beings; in that order multiplicity does not conflict with unity. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

This is not due to the need of flooding the universe with life; nor is the extension of the corporeal the cause of the multiplicity of souls; before body existed, soul was one and many; the many souls fore-existed in the All not potentially but each effectively; that one collective soul is no bar to the variety; the variety does not abrogate the unity; the souls are apart without partition, present each to all as never having been set in opposition; they are no more hedged off by boundaries than are the multiple items of knowledge in one mind; the one soul so exists as to include all souls; the nature of such a principle must be utterly free of boundary. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

is not due to the need of flooding the universe with life; nor is the extension of the corporeal the cause of the multiplicity of souls; before body existed, soul was one and many; the many souls fore-existed in the All not potentially but each effectively; that one collective soul is no bar to the variety; the variety does not abrogate the unity; the souls are apart without partition, present each to all as never having been set in opposition; they are no more hedged off by boundaries than are the multiple items of knowledge in one mind; the one soul so exists as to include all souls; the nature of such a principle must be utterly free of boundary. ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

This greatness is not to be thought of in terms of quantity; the greater and less of body have nothing to do with soul. ENNEADS: VI IV. 5

The nature of the greatness of soul is indicated by the fact that as the body grows, the larger mass is held by the same soul that sufficed to the smaller; it would be in many ways absurd to suppose a corresponding enlargement in the soul. ENNEADS: VI IV. 5

But why does not one same soul enter more than one body? ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

Are we to think that this second body, in keeping its soul with a like care, is keeping the same soul as the first? ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

Merely some additions [from the experiences of life, none in the soul itself]. ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

We ask further why one soul in foot and hand and not one soul in the distinct members of the universe. ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

Sensations no doubt differ from soul to soul but only as do the conditions and experiences; this is difference not in the judging principle but in the matters coming to judgement; the judge is one and the same soul pronouncing upon various events, and these not its own but belonging to a particular body; it is only as a man pronounces simultaneously upon a pleasant sensation in his finger and a pain in his head. ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

But why is not the soul in one man aware, then, of the judgement passed by another? ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

Because it is a judgement made, not a state set up; besides, the soul that has passed the judgement does not pronounce but simply judges: similarly a man's sight does not report to his hearing, though both have passed judgement; it is the reason above both that reports, and this is a principle distinct from either. ENNEADS: VI IV. 6

These firsts, seconds, thirds, of participance are determined by rank, by power, not by place but by differentiation; and difference is no bar to coexistence, witness soul and Intellectual-Principle: similarly our own knowledge, the trivial next the gravest; one and the same object yields colour to our sight, fragrance to smell, to every sense a particular experience, all presented simultaneously. ENNEADS: VI IV. 11

Being is bound up with the unity which is never apart from it; wheresoever Being appears, there appears its unity; and the unity of Being is self-standing, for presence in the sensible does not abrogate independence: things of sense are present to the Intellectual — where this occurs — otherwise than as the Intellectual is present within itself; so, too, body's presence to soul differs from that of knowledge to soul; one item of knowledge is present in a different way than another; a body's presence to body is, again, another form of relation. ENNEADS: VI IV. 11

In the same way, what is apt for soul will possess itself of soul, while from the one identical presence another will derive something else. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

Why, then, need we hesitate to think of soul as a thing not extended in broken contact, part for part, but omnipresent within the range of its presence, indwelling in totality at every point throughout the All? ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

Entered into such bodies as are apt to it, the soul is like the spoken sound present in the air, before that entry, like the speaker about to speak — though even embodied it remains at once the speaker and the silent. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

No doubt these illustrations are imperfect, but they carry a serviceable similitude: the soul belongs to that other Kind, and we must not conceive a part of it embodied and a part intact; it is at once a self-enclosed unity and a principle manifested in diversity. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

Further, any newcoming entity achieving soul receives mysteriously that same principle which was equally in the previously ensouled; for it is not in the dispensation that a given part of soul situate at some given point should enter here and there; what is thought of as entering was always a self-enclosed entire and, for all the seeming entry, so remains; no real entry is conceivable. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

If, then, the soul never entered and yet is now seen to be present — present without waiting upon the participant — clearly it is present, here too, without breach of its self-inclusion. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

This can mean only that the participant came to soul; it lay outside the veritable reality but advanced towards it and so established itself in the kosmos of life. ENNEADS: VI IV. 12

If, then, the participant mass in its entirety is to contain that principle entire, the universe must hold that one soul present at its every point. ENNEADS: VI IV. 13

But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a particular soul of the individual and how the good soul and the bad? ENNEADS: VI IV. 14

The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a unity and an infinity; it holds all its content as one yet with each item distinct, though not to the point of separation. ENNEADS: VI IV. 14

Except by thus holding all its content as one-life entire, soul entire, all intelligence — it could not be infinite; since the individualities are not fenced off from each other, it remains still one thing. ENNEADS: VI IV. 14

In its nature it was capable of soul: but what is unfitted to receive soul entire — present entire but not for it — takes what share it may; such are the members of the animal and vegetal order. ENNEADS: VI IV. 15

A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound with Reality entire; it possesses also a body; but this body is not a husk having no part in soul, not a thing that earlier lay away in the soulless; the body had its aptitude and by this draws near: now it is not body merely, but living body. ENNEADS: VI IV. 15

By this neighboring it is enhanced with some impress of soul — not in the sense of a portion of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul entire: at once there is the ground of desire, pleasure, pain; the body of the living form that has come to be was certainly no unrelated thing. ENNEADS: VI IV. 15

The soul, sprung from the divine, lay self-enclosed at peace, true to its own quality; but its neighbour, in uproar through weakness, instable of its own nature and beaten upon from without, cries, at first to itself and afterwards upon the living total, spreading the disorder at large. ENNEADS: VI IV. 15

But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul's entry or presence to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that communion. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that communion. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

The various rankings of the universe will determine various degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the Intellectual, will give forth freely to body as being more nearly of the one power and standing closer, as distance holds in that order. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

The soul's evil will be this association, its good the release. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

Because, even unmerged, a soul in any way to be described as attached to this universe is in some degree fallen from the All into a state of partition; essentially belonging to the All, it no longer directs its act Thither: thus, a man's knowledge is one whole, but he may guide himself by no more than some single item of it, where his good would lie in living not by some such fragment but by the total of his knowing. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

So long as the soul remains utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when it has accepted separation — not that of place but that of act determining individualities — it is a part, no longer the soul entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when, on the contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly the All-Soul, the partial in it latent. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its release; if into some lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the body is, in place with the body. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary, the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the image-soul may very well go alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that image but nonetheless the soul entire. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

Let the image-offspring of the individuality — fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its light upon itself, chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a substance entire and that in which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the body: it is in this latter mode that Being is omnipresent. ENNEADS: VI V. 6

It is in this understanding that the soul has been taken to be a numerical principle, while others think of it as in its nature a self-increasing number; this latter notion is probably designed to meet the consideration that the soul at no point fails but, retaining its distinctive character, is ample for all, so much so that were the kosmos vaster yet the virtue of soul would still compass it — or rather the kosmos still be sunk in soul entire. ENNEADS: VI V. 9

Of course, we must understand this adding of extension not as a literal increase but in the sense that the soul, essentially a unity, becomes adequate to omnipresence; its unity sets it outside of quantitative measurement, the characteristic of that other order which has but a counterfeit unity, an appearance by participation. ENNEADS: VI V. 9

These are the gods who "in many guises seek our cities"; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and heaven, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to soul and life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which by its very lack of extension is infinite. ENNEADS: VI V. 12

This is the very nature of the Intellectual-Principle as we may know from soul which reproduces it and from what we call Nature under which and by which the things of process are brought into their disjointed being while that Nature itself remains indissolubly one. ENNEADS: VI VI. 7

Against doubters we cite the fact of participation; the greatness and beauty of the Intellectual-Principle we know by the soul's longing towards it; the longing of the rest towards soul is set up by its likeness to its higher and to the possibility open to them of attaining resemblance through it. ENNEADS: VI VI. 7

No; knowledge, known and knower are an identity; so with all the rest; every member of Intellectual-Principle is therefore present to it primally; justice, for example, is not accidental to it as to soul in its character as soul, where these virtues are mainly potential becoming actual by the intention towards Intellectual-Principle and association with it. ENNEADS: VI VI. 15

Neither body nor magnitude," someone says: soul, then, is Number since it is essence. ENNEADS: VI VI. 16

The number belonging to body is an essence of the order of body; the number belonging to soul constitutes the essences of souls. ENNEADS: VI VI. 16

To us, existence is before the good; all this world desires life and wisdom in order to Being; every soul and every intellect seeks to be its Being, but Being is sufficient to itself. ENNEADS: VI VI. 18

Surely it is untenable on the one hand that sense-perception should exist There, from eternity, and on the other that only upon the debasement of the soul should there be sense-perception here and the accomplishment in this realm of the Act of what was always a power in that? ENNEADS: VI VII. 3

We ask first whether man as here is a Reason-Principle different to that soul which produces him as here and gives him life and thought; or is he that very soul or, again, the [yet lower] soul using the human body? ENNEADS: VI VII. 4

Now if man is a reasonable living being and by "living being" is meant a conjoint of soul and body, the Reason-Principle of man is not identical with soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 4

But if the conjoint of soul and body is the reason-principle of man, how can man be an eternal reality, seeing that it is only when soul and body have come together that the Reason-Principle so constituted appears? ENNEADS: VI VII. 4

The living being corresponds to a reasoning life in the Reason-Principle; man therefore is a reasoning life: but there is no life without soul; either, then, the soul supplies the reasoning life — and man therefore is not an essence but simply an activity of the soul — or the soul is the man. ENNEADS: VI VII. 4

But if reasoning soul is the man, why does it not constitute man upon its entry into some other animal form? ENNEADS: VI VII. 4

Man, thus, must be some Reason-Principle other than soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

But why should he not be some conjoint — a soul in a certain Reason-Principle — the Reason-Principle being, as it were, a definite activity which however could not exist without that which acts? ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

This is the case with the Reason-Principles in seed which are neither soulless nor entirely soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

For these productive principles cannot be devoid of soul and there is nothing surprising in such essences being Reason-Principles. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

But these principles producing other forms than man, of what phase of soul are they activities? ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

Of the vegetal soul? ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

Rather of that which produces animal life, a brighter soul and therefore one more intensely living. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

The soul of that order, the soul that has entered into Matter of that order, is man by having, apart from body, a certain disposition; within body it shapes all to its own fashion, producing another form of Man, man reduced to what body admits, just as an artist may make a reduced image of that again. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

It is soul, then, that holds the pattern and Reason-Principles of Man, the natural tendencies, the dispositions and powers — all feeble since this is not the Primal Man — and it contains also the Ideal-Forms of other senses, Forms which themselves are senses, bright to all seeming but images, and dim in comparison with those of the earlier order. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

The higher Man, above this sphere, rises from the more godlike soul, a soul possessed of a nobler humanity and brighter perceptions. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

This must be the Man of Plato's definition ["Man is Soul"], where the addition "Soul as using body" marks the distinction between the soul which uses body directly and the soul, poised above, which touches body only through that intermediary. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

The Man of the realm of birth has sense-perception: the higher soul enters to bestow a brighter life, or rather does not so much enter as simply impart itself; for soul does not leave the Intellectual but, maintaining that contact, holds the lower life as pendant from it, blending with it by the natural link of Reason-Principle to Reason-Principle: and man, the dimmer, brightens under that illumination. ENNEADS: VI VII. 5

But how can that higher soul have sense-perception? ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul's perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials [Daimons], who are of one Form with the soul that makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is giving forth the Reason-Principle — necessarily in it — of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the activity has been to the lower. ENNEADS: VI VII. 6

But if it is by becoming evil and inferior that the soul produces the animal nature, the making of ox or horse was not at the outset in its character; the reason-principle of the animal, and the animal itself, must lie outside of the natural plan? ENNEADS: VI VII. 7

The power of the All-Soul, as Reason-Principle of the universe, may be considered as laying down a pattern before the effective separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something like a tentative illumining of Matter; the elaborating soul would give minute articulation to these representations of itself; every separate effective soul would become that towards which it tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer adapts himself to the action set down for him. ENNEADS: VI VII. 7

That means that it could not be one Intellect; it must be Intellect agglomerate including all the particular intellects, a thing therefore as multiple as all the Intellects and more so; and the life in it would nat be that of one soul but of all the souls with the further power of producing the single souls: it would be the entire living universe containing much besides man; for if it contained only man, man would be alone here. ENNEADS: VI VII. 8

If in the plant the Reason-Principle, entering Matter and constituting the plant, is a certain form of life, a definite soul, then, since every Reason-Principle is a unity, then either this of plant-life is the primal or before it there is a primal plant, source of its being: that first plant would be a unity; those here, being multiple, must derive from a unity. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

Matter does not in its own character possess this fire-power: the true cause is something informing the Matter, that is to say, a Reason-Principle, obviously therefore a soul having the power of bringing fire into being; that is, a life and a Reason-Principle in one. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

It is with this in mind that Plato says there is soul in everything of this sphere. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

That soul is the cause of the fire of the sense-world; the cause of fire here is a certain Life of fiery character, the more authentic fire. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

The particular fire, rising only to be quenched, eludes the soul animating the universe; it slips away from the magnitude which would manifest the soul within it; so with air and water. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

If these Kinds could somehow be fastened down to magnitude they would exhibit the soul within them, now concealed by the fact that their function requires them to be loose or flowing. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

It is much as in the case of the fluids within ourselves; the flesh and all that is formed out of the blood into flesh show the soul within, but the blood itself, not bringing us any sensation, seems not to have soul; yet it must; the blood is not subject to blind force; its nature obliges it to abstain from the soul which nonetheless is indwelling in it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

But just as air, so long as it remains itself, eludes the light which is and remains unyielding, so too, by the effect of its circular movement, it eludes soul — and, in another sense, does not. ENNEADS: VI VII. 11

For Intellectual-Principle is not a simplex, nor is the soul that proceeds from it: on the contrary things include variety in the degree of their simplicity, that is to say in so far as they are not compounds but Principles and Activities; — the activity of the lowest is simple in the sense of being a fading-out, that of the First as the total of all activity. ENNEADS: VI VII. 13

And it takes position towards the soul, becoming a light to the soul as itself finds its light in the First; whenever Intellectual-Principle becomes the determinant of soul it shapes it into Reasoning Soul, by communicating a trace of what itself has come to possess. ENNEADS: VI VII. 17

Are we to rest all on pursuit and on the soul? ENNEADS: VI VII. 19

Is it enough to put faith in the soul's choice and call that good which the soul pursues, never asking ourselves the motive of its choice? ENNEADS: VI VII. 19

Thus virtue and Intellectual-Principle and life and soul — reasoning soul, at least — belong to the idea of good and so therefore does all that a reasoned life aims at. ENNEADS: VI VII. 20

The soul aiming only at that Principle would need a further lessoning; it must be taught that Intellectual-Principle is not the ultimate, that not all things look to that while all do look to the good. ENNEADS: VI VII. 20

The soul taking that outflow from the divine is stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love. ENNEADS: VI VII. 22

Before that, even Intellectual-Principle with all its loveliness did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the light of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all, unquickened even to Intellectual-Principle there before it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 22

It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this because there is soul there, because there is more of the Idea of The Good, because there is some glow of the light of The Good and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won over to goodness, and in the fullest measure stirred to life. ENNEADS: VI VII. 22

That which soul must quest, that which sheds its light upon Intellectual-Principle, leaving its mark wherever it falls, surely we need not wonder that it be of power to draw to itself, calling back from every wandering to rest before it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 23

We may recall what we have said of the nature of the light shining from it into Intellectual-Principle and so by participation into the soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 24

Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. ENNEADS: VI VII. 25

There is a Form to which Matter aspires: to soul, moral excellence is this Form. ENNEADS: VI VII. 27

But if universally the good is Form and the higher the ascent the more there is of Form-Soul more truly Form than body is and phases of soul progressively of higher Form and Intellectual-Principle standing as Form to soul collectively — then the Good advances by the opposite of Matter and, therefore, by a cleansing and casting away to the utmost possible at each stage: and the greatest good must be there where all that is of Matter has disappeared. ENNEADS: VI VII. 28

Now to found the good upon the Intellect and upon that state of soul or mind which springs from wisdom does not imply that the end or the absolute good is the conjunction [of Intellect and state]: it would follow merely that Intellect is the good and that we feel happy in possession of that good. ENNEADS: VI VII. 30

Bodily pleasure no one, certainly, would think capable of blending in with Intellect; the unreasoning satisfactions of soul [or lower mind] are equally incompatible with it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 30

But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 31

Soul too, that soul which as possessing knowledge and vision was capable, clung to what it saw; and as its vision so its rapture; it saw and was stricken; but having in itself something of that principle it felt its kinship and was moved to longing like those stirred by the image of the beloved to desire of the veritable presence. ENNEADS: VI VII. 31

In the same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. ENNEADS: VI VII. 31

The soul which has never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love — perhaps unawares — it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter, befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could never venture into the mud of body to be soiled, annulled. ENNEADS: VI VII. 31

The Intellectual-Principle is the less for seeing things as distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the multiple content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual shape; but, even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us still with the question how we are to envisage that which stands beyond this all-lovely, beyond this principle at once multiple and above multiplicity, the Supreme for which the soul hungers though unable to tell why such a being should stir its longing-reason, however, urging that This at last is the Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. ENNEADS: VI VII. 33

Take an example from love: so long as the attention is upon the visible form, love has not entered: when from that outward form the lover elaborates within himself, in his own partless soul, an immaterial image, then it is that love is born, then the lover longs for the sight of the beloved to make that fading image live again. ENNEADS: VI VII. 33

Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws upon Form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable; Intellectual-Principle, nearer still, is even more to be loved: by these steps we are led to know that the First Principle, principle of Beauty, must be formless. ENNEADS: VI VII. 33

The very soul, once it has conceived the straining love towards this, lays aside all the shape it has taken, even to the Intellectual shape that has informed it. ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

There is no vision, no union, for those handling or acting by any thing other; the soul must see before it neither evil nor good nor anything else, that alone it may receive the Alone. ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

Suppose the soul to have attained: the highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision — she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision — she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will give herself no foreign name, not "man," not "living being," not "being," not "all"; any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision — she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will give herself no foreign name, not "man," not "living being," not "being," not "all"; any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

In this happiness she knows beyond delusion that she is happy; for this is no affirmation of an excited body but of a soul become again what she was in the time of her early joy. ENNEADS: VI VII. 34

Such in this union is the soul's temper that even the act of Intellect, once so intimately loved, she now dismisses; Intellection is movement and she has no wish to move; she has nothing to say of this very Intellectual-Principle by means of which she has attained the vision, herself made over into Intellectual-Principle and becoming that principle so as to be able to take stand in that Intellectual space. ENNEADS: VI VII. 35

And our comparison would be closer if instead of a man appearing to the visitor who had been admiring the house it were a god, and not a god manifesting to the eyes but one filling the soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 35

As for soul, it attains that vision by — so to speak — confounding and annulling the Intellectual-Principle within it; or rather that Principle immanent in soul sees first and thence the vision penetrates to soul and the two visions become one. ENNEADS: VI VII. 35

The soul now knows no movement since the Supreme knows none; it is now not even soul since the Supreme is not in life but above life; it is no longer Intellectual-Principle, for the Supreme has not Intellection and the likeness must be perfect; this grasping is not even by Intellection, for the Supreme is not known Intellectively. ENNEADS: VI VII. 35

To us intellection is a boon since the soul needs it; to the Intellectual-Principle it is appropriate as being one thing with the very essence of the principle constituted by the intellectual Act so that principle and act coincide in a continuous self-consciousness carrying the assurance of identity, of the unity of the two. ENNEADS: VI VII. 41

The Forms are in that passage secondaries, their sequels being attached to them as dependent thirds: it is clear thus that by "the products of the thirds" is meant this world, dependent upon soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 42

Soul dependent upon Intellectual-Principle and Intellectual-Principle upon the Good, all is linked to the Supreme by intermediaries, some close, some nearing those of the closer attachment, while the order of sense stands remotest, dependent upon soul. ENNEADS: VI VII. 42

My own reading is that, moving as we do amid adverse fortunes, compulsions, violent assaults of passion crushing the soul, feeling ourselves mastered by these experiences, playing slave to them, going where they lead, we have been brought by all this to doubt whether we are anything at all and dispose of ourselves in any particular. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 1

Where the appetites are dictated by the very nature they are the desires of the conjoint of soul and body and then soul lies under physical compulsions: if they spring in the soul as an independent, then much that we take to be voluntary is in reality outside of our free act. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 2

We may be reminded that the Living Form and the soul know what they do. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 2

Are we, however, to make freedom and self-disposal exclusive to Intellectual-Principle as engaged in its characteristic Act, Intellectual-Principle unassociated, or do they belong also to soul acting under that guidance and performing act of virtue? ENNEADS: VI VIII. 5

If freedom is to be allowed to soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours? ENNEADS: VI VIII. 5

Are we to put it that virtue comes in to restore the disordered soul, taming passions and appetites? ENNEADS: VI VIII. 5

If then virtue is, as it were, a second Intellectual-Principle, and heightens the soul to Intellectual quality, then, once more, our freedom is found to lie not in act but in Intellectual-Principle immune from act. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 5

If what we have been saying is true and our former statement is consistent with it, the case must stand thus: Virtue and Intellectual-Principle are sovereign and must be held the sole foundation of our self-disposal and freedom; both then are free; Intellectual-Principle is self-confined: Virtue, in its government of the soul which it seeks to lift into goodness, would wish to be free; in so far as it does so it is free and confers freedom; but inevitably experiences and actions are forced upon it by its governance: these it has not planned for, yet when they do arise it will watch still for its sovereignty calling these also to judgement. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 6

That principle of Good is the sole object of desire and the source of self-disposal to the rest, to soul when it fully attains, to Intellectual-Principle by connate possession. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 7

The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered: In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we participate in reality, are in some degree real. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 12

Thus any given man is distinct from essential man though belonging to the order Man: a soul and a soul's essence are the same — that is, in case of soul pure and unmingled — Man as type is the same as man's essence; where the thing, man, and the essence are different, the particular man may be considered as accidental; but man, the essence, cannot be so; the type, Man, has Real Being. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 14

With all his courage he would stand astounded, unable at any venture to speak of This, with the vision everywhere before the eyes of the soul so that, look where one may, there it is seen unless one deliberately look away, ignoring God, thinking no more upon Him. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 19

Moral excellence is of a soul acting as a concordant total, brought to unity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Come thus to soul — which brings all to unity, making, moulding, shaping, ranging to order — there is a temptation to say "Soul is the bestower of unity; soul therefore is the unity." ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

But soul bestows other characteristics upon material things and yet remains distinct from its gift: shape, Ideal-Form and the rest are all distinct from the giving soul; so, clearly, with this gift of unity; soul to make things unities looks out upon the unity just as it makes man by looking upon Man, realizing in the man the unity belonging to Man. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Absolute unity it is not: it is soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul's unity as there is body with body's unity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are furthest from unity, the more compact are the nearer; soul is nearer yet but still a participant. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Is soul to be identified with unity on the ground that unless it were one thing it could not be soul? ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Besides, the soul, even the collective soul for all its absence of part, is a manifold: it has diverse powers — reasoning, desiring, perceiving — all held together by this chain of unity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Itself a unity, soul confers unity, but also accepts it. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. ENNEADS: VI IX. 3

We shape ourselves into Intellectual-Principle; we make over our soul in trust to Intellectual-Principle and set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul will waken to see; it is through the Intellectual-Principle that we have this vision of The Unity; it must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even of soul to enter into Intellectual-Principle: with Intellect pure, and with the summit of Intellect, we are to see the All-Pure. ENNEADS: VI IX. 3

Generative of all, The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it is the self-defined, unique in form or, better, formless, existing before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are attachments of Being and make Being the manifold it is. ENNEADS: VI IX. 3

In knowing, soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is taking account of things; that accounting is multiple; the mind, thus plunging into number and multiplicity, departs from unity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 4

The soul has not come to know the splendour There; it has not felt and clutched to itself that love-passion of vision known to lover come to rest where he loves. ENNEADS: VI IX. 4

Or struck perhaps by that authentic light, all the soul lit by the nearness gained, we have gone weighted from beneath; the vision is frustrate; we should go without burden and we go carrying that which can but keep us back; we are not yet made over into unity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 4

Failure to attain may be due to such impediment or to lack of the guiding thought that establishes trust; impediment we must charge against ourselves and strive by entire renunciation to become emancipate; where there is distrust for lack of convincing reason, further considerations may be applied: Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here addressing them but only such as accept another nature than body and have some conception of soul. ENNEADS: VI IX. 5

Next this Intellect must be apprehended, an Intellect other than the reasoning faculty known as the rational principle; with reasoning we are already in the region of separation and movement: our sciences are Reason-Principles lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly acquired their character by the presence in the soul of Intellectual-Principle, source of all knowing. ENNEADS: VI IX. 5

Thus we come to see Intellectual-Principle almost as an object of sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is perceptible as standing above soul, father to soul: we know Intellectual-Principle as the motionless, not subject to change, containing, we must think, all things; a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting difference. ENNEADS: VI IX. 5

Now a plurality thus concentrated like the Intellectual Kosmos is close upon The First — and reason certifies its existence as surely as that of soul — yet, though of higher sovereignty than soul, it is not The First since it is not a unity, not simplex as unity, principle over all multiplicity, must be. ENNEADS: VI IX. 5

As Matter, it is agreed, must be void of quality in order to accept the types of the universe, so and much more must the soul be kept formless if there is to be no infixed impediment to prevent it being brimmed and lit by the Primal Principle. ENNEADS: VI IX. 7

Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing line; its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own centre, the point to which it owes its rise. ENNEADS: VI IX. 8

The soul's movement will be about its source; to this it will hold, poised intent towards that unity to which all souls should move and the divine souls always move, divine in virtue of that movement; for to be a god is to be integral with the Supreme; what stands away is man still multiple, or beast. ENNEADS: VI IX. 8

The soul is not a circle in the sense of the geometric figure but in that it at once contains the Primal Nature [as centre] and is contained by it [as circumference], that it owes its origin to such a centre and still more that the soul, uncontaminated, is a self-contained entity. ENNEADS: VI IX. 8

In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being, fount of Good, root of Soul. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

Here is the soul's peace, outside of evil, refuge taken in the place clean of wrong; here it has its Act, its true knowing; here it is immune. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

Life in the Supreme is the native activity of Intellect; in virtue of that converse it brings forth gods, brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, brings forth all moral good; for of all these the soul is pregnant when it has been filled with God. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the soul; hence the constant linking of the Love-God with the Psyches in story and picture; the soul, other than God but sprung of Him, must needs love. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

So long as it is There, it holds the heavenly love; here its love is the baser; There the soul is Aphrodite of the heavens; here, turned harlot, Aphrodite of the public ways: yet the soul is always an Aphrodite. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

Any that have seen know what I have in mind: the soul takes another life as it approaches God; thus restored it feels that the dispenser of true life is There to see, that now we have nothing to look for but, far otherwise, that we must put aside all else and rest in This alone, This become, This alone, all the earthly environment done away, in haste to be free, impatient of any bond holding us to the baser, so that with our being entire we may cling about This, no part in us remaining but through it we have touch with God. ENNEADS: VI IX. 9

But how comes the soul not to keep that ground? ENNEADS: VI IX. 10

Not that those hindrances beset that in us which has veritably seen; it is the other phase of the soul that suffers and that only when we withdraw from vision and take to knowing by proof, by evidence, by the reasoning processes of the mental habit. ENNEADS: VI IX. 10

It is not in the soul's nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into non-being: but to utter nothing, never. ENNEADS: VI IX. 11

When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme. ENNEADS: VI IX. 11