The Third Hypostasis of the Divinity - the All-Soul, the Universal Life-Principle - includes, and is, all the souls: the human soul is, therefore, the All-Soul: but it is the All-Soul set into touch with the lower: it is the All-Soul particularized for the space, at least, of the mortal life of man.

This particularization is necessarily a limitation: it sets bounds: it comports a provisory application to this rather than that; we may, therefore, discern phases of the All-Soul in us. These phases or images of the Divine-Soul are found to be three; they are:

1 The Intellective-Soul, or Intuitive, Intellectual, or Intelligent Soul, or the Intellectual-Principle of the Soul.
2 The Reasoning-Soul.
3 The Unreasoning-Soul.

1. The Intellective-Soul is impassible, all but utterly untouched by Matter, forever in the nature of things separated from the body: its Act is the act of Intellection, or Intuition, or True-Knowing of Real Existences: it has its being in eternal Contemplation of the Divine: this Act of the Intellective-Soul, identical with the Intellectual-Principle in Man, is, however, not perceived by the Man except when, by a life of philosophical morality (Sanctity or Proficient-hood), he has identified his entire being with this his highest principle.

2. The Reasoning-Soul is the principle of the characteristic human life: to live by the First Soul, the Intellectual-Principle, is to live as a God; in this second Soul we have the principle that constitutes the normal nature of man. This Reasoning-Soul is separable from the body but not separated. Its Act is 'Discursive-Reasoning'; it knows, not in the instantaneous, unmeditated, entirely adequate True-Knowing of the First Soul but step by step, arriving by the way of doubt and of logic at a knowledge which is even at best imperfect: in its lower action we have as its result 'doxa', the untranslatable word usually rendered 'Opinion' - in this translation represented according to context, by 'Surface-Knowledge', by 'Ordinary Mentation', by Sense-Knowing or Sense-Knowledge, or the like.

This second phase of the human soul also possesses the three faculties known as Will, Intellectual-Imagination, and Intellectual-Memory. The Intellectual-Imagination and Intellectual-Memory, distinct from the lower Imagination and Memory, deal with the intellectual element of sensation, presenting sensations, as it were, to the higher faculty for judgement and for the uses of the semi-divine life of philosophic Man.

3. The last phase of the Soul, the Unreasoning-Soul, is the Principle of Animal-Life: it constitutes, in conjunction with the body, the Animal as distinct from the Man; here for reasons of emotional connotation or clearness this phase of the soul conjoined with the body has been said to produce not 'The Animal' but 'The Animate' or 'The Animate-Entity'. This conjunction is also called by Plotinus the 'Two-together', usually translated here as the Couplement.

The faculties of this 'Unreasoning-Soul' or of the 'Couplement' are the Sensible (or sense-grasping) imagination and sensible Memory, the appetites rooted in the flesh, passivity or the faculty of sensation, and the vegetative, nutritive, and generative faculties.

This last soul, or phase of the All-Soul, represents in man the very lowest 'strength' of the Divinity except for the Matter which is organized by the All-Soul into the form of the body: this last soul, in other words, represents the bare fact of life, going as low as the life of the plant.

The word Soul used of man often conveys, in Plotinus' practice, the idea of the highest in man, what we should be apt to call Spirit; sometimes, where the notion is mainly of intellectual operation, Mind will be the nearest translation; very often 'Life-Principle' is the nearest.

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Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. ENNEADS: I. I. 1

This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul — that is whether a distinction is to be made between Soul and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in itself]. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in man] is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that it is a recipient and — if only reason allows — that all the affections and experiences really have their seat in the Soul, and with the affections every state and mood, good and bad alike. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of its own which Reason manifests. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the Soul as an immortal — if the immortal, the imperishable, must be impassive, giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for what it receives from the Existents prior to itself from which Existents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of replenishment and voidance. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture? ENNEADS: I. I. 2

Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul: for sensation is a receiving — whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body — and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections — whether these are to be assigned to the Soul — and as to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary state. ENNEADS: I. I. 2

We may treat of the Soul as in the body — whether it be set above it or actually within it — since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

It may be objected that the Soul must however, have Sense-Perception since its use of its instrument must acquaint it with the external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

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

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to Soul? ENNEADS: I. I. 3

Body may communicate qualities or conditions to another body: but — body to Soul? ENNEADS: I. I. 3

As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct entities; if the Soul uses the body it is separate from it. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

But apart from the philosophical separation how does Soul stand to body? ENNEADS: I. I. 3

There might be a complete coalescence: Soul might be interwoven through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or an Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part of the Soul detached and another part in contact, the disjoined part being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing used. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent, and except in so far as the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the instrument, the body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or through this inferior. ENNEADS: I. I. 3

Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

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

Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul would not be subjected to the body's affections and experiences: it would be present rather as Ideal-Form in Matter. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

Now if — the first possibility — the Soul is an essence, a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be the Using-Principle [and therefore unaffected]. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axe-form on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is still the axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the iron thus modified: on this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination to the body: their natural seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

Compare the passage where we read [NA: "we read" translates "he says" of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name does not appear in the translation except where it was written by Plotinus] that "it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves"; equally absurd to think of it as desiring, grieving. ENNEADS: I. I. 4

Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body: it might be a third and different entity formed from both. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

The Soul in turn — apart from the nature of the Animate — must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for example in the Animate may be something quite distinct from the accompanying movement or state in the desiring faculty. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

But this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to the Couplement? ENNEADS: I. I. 5

Such a statement of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone or in the body alone. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the Soul alone. ENNEADS: I. I. 5

the Soul] which brings life to the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and expressive activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the Animate. ENNEADS: I. I. 6

But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the Soul but to the Couplement; or at least the life of the Couplement would not be the life of the Soul; Sense-Perception would belong not to the Sensitive-Faculty but to the container of the faculty. ENNEADS: I. I. 6

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

The very presence of the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 6

Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in the Sensitive-Faculty, the Soul left out of count and the Soul-Faculty? ENNEADS: I. I. 6

The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other [of that in the Soul] which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 7

in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul]. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul — we read — and that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

The first of these images is Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring — offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which [has no direct action within matter but] produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions. ENNEADS: I. I. 8

That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement. ENNEADS: I. I. 9

But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it: for all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil. ENNEADS: I. I. 9

Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands by itself: the one group has the character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its manifestation belongs peculiarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as passing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the point of the vision of Ideal-Forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i. ENNEADS: I. I. 9

e, with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 9

Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to itself and within itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as have said, the states and experiences of this elusive "Couplement." ENNEADS: I. I. 9

It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 10

The body is brute touched to life; the true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [ ENNEADS: I. I. 10

This Soul constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it. ENNEADS: I. I. 10

If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase does not enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they are aware only of the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of that only by being aware of the body organised and determined by that image. ENNEADS: I. I. 11

If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the All-Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 11

But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? ENNEADS: I. I. 12

Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." " ENNEADS: I. I. 12

And," reading on, "if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it is what it is." ENNEADS: I. I. 12

Such accruement takes place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other [lower] phase of the Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

For the meaning of birth has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in the declension. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

Then the Soul has let this image fall? ENNEADS: I. I. 12

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

And it lets the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme. ENNEADS: I. I. 12

Is it We or the Soul? ENNEADS: I. I. 13

We, but by the Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 13

But how "by the Soul"? ENNEADS: I. I. 13

Does this mean that the Soul reasons by possession [by contact with the matters of enquiry]? ENNEADS: I. I. 13

No; by the fact of being Soul. ENNEADS: I. I. 13

Its Act subsists without movement; or any movement that can be ascribed to it must be utterly distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's own life. ENNEADS: I. I. 13

And Intellection in us is twofold: since the Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon us — for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising. ENNEADS: I. I. 13

Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence. ENNEADS: I. II. 1

in Which, above all, such excellence seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed with a wisdom most wonderful. ENNEADS: I. II. 1

Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an essential constituent of the Principle from which the Soul attaining Likeness absorbs it. ENNEADS: I. II. 1

And, further, these Civic Virtues — measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to their forming — are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to the formless Being There. ENNEADS: I. II. 2

And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the Soul we see God entire. ENNEADS: I. II. 2

As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body's states and to think the body's thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's moods and devoted itself to its own Act — the state of Intellection and Wisdom — never allowed the passions of the body to affect it — the virtue of Sophrosyne — knew no fear at the parting from the body — the virtue of Fortitude — and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled — in which state is Righteousness. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

Such a disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine: of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence. ENNEADS: I. II. 3

The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting strangers. ENNEADS: I. II. 4

The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? ENNEADS: I. II. 4

But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten? ENNEADS: I. II. 4

And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us. ENNEADS: I. II. 4

All passionate action it will check: the suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at that. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely monitory. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord. ENNEADS: I. II. 5

And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul: this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue. ENNEADS: I. II. 6

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle: its Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle; its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion. ENNEADS: I. II. 6

The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: I. II. 7

In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. ENNEADS: I. II. 7

And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must produce all the virtues; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect. ENNEADS: I. II. 7

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts. ENNEADS: I. III. 4

The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards freedom from this sphere: the reason which disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order; it merely resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards the Soul's own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there is rest — and this is the veritably willed state of life. ENNEADS: I. IV. 6

When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists; so in the case of the Soul; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and Intellectual-Principles these images appear. ENNEADS: I. IV. 10

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

Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Term's sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. ENNEADS: I. IV. 16

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul's expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness. ENNEADS: I. V. 10

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul? ENNEADS: I. VI. 1

Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight — and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth. ENNEADS: I. VI. 4

What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self? ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness: what is this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues? ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before us. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark? ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly — by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again — in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away. ENNEADS: I. VI. 5

So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

And it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

The beauty in things of a lower order-actions and pursuits for instance — comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds. ENNEADS: I. VI. 6

Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. ENNEADS: I. VI. 7

So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here. ENNEADS: I. VI. 8

Therefore the Soul must be trained — to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms. ENNEADS: I. VI. 9

So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. ENNEADS: I. VI. 9

For the Soul, then, the Good is its own natural Act. ENNEADS: I. VII. 1

But the Soul itself is natively a "Best"; if, further, its act be directed towards the Best, the achievement is not merely the "Soul's good" but "The Good" without qualification. ENNEADS: I. VII. 1

The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: I. VII. 2

With Soul it is different; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-Principle, since this follows immediately upon the Good. ENNEADS: I. VII. 2

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

And as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil — so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. ENNEADS: I. VII. 3

Life is a partnership of a Soul and body; death is the dissolution; in either life or death, then, the Soul will feel itself at home. ENNEADS: I. VII. 3

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but holding itself apart, even here. ENNEADS: I. VII. 3

The Intellectual-Principle and the Soul, being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms and would have a natural tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 1

The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and Existence and Soul and Life and all Intellective-Act. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 2

And the Soul, outside, circles around the Intellectual-Principle, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It, through It sees God. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 2

Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an evil Kind. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

What, then, is the evil Soul? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil — unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the Soul's seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence but to Process — whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in it but merely looks towards it. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

The Soul that breaks away from this source of its reality to the non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an image, to the loyal Soul. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 4

But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul's evil has its source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause — and at once the Principle of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to Matter. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 5

Thus there may be wickedness in the Soul; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that operate and by the nature of their operation, whether seeing, acting, or merely admitting impression. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 5

But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil — sickness, poverty and so forth — how can they be referred to the principle we have described? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 5

Now, Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The Good, or participation in it. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 8

This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of Evil in the Soul; the Evil, the Vice, will be a Negation and not anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine which denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek elsewhere; we may at once place Evil in the Soul, recognising it as the mere absence of Good. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the Soul, then the Soul produces vice within itself by the operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, Soul though it be, devoid of life: the Soul, if it has no life, is soulless; the Soul is no Soul. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

No; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly apart from the Good. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

But if this were so, part of the Soul must possess The Good, part be without it; the Soul will have a mingled nature and the Evil within it will not be unblended: we have not yet lighted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

The Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the Evil as an Accidental. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the Soul like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil-Absolute. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

And the death of Soul is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our "going down to Hades and slumbering there." ENNEADS: I. VIII. 10

It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the Soul. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy — unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a disease, like a fever. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Matter exists; Soul exists; and they occupy, so to speak, one place. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

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

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Matter appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground is holy, nothing there without part in Soul. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Matter therefore submits, and takes light: but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter: thence its weakness: not all the faculties of its being retain free play, for Matter hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon the Soul's territory and, as it were, crushes the Soul back; and it turns to evil all that it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of Soul and of all its evil is Matter. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

Even though the Soul itself submits to Matter and engenders to it; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is still the presence of Matter: the Soul would never have approached Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its earth-life. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 11

What, then, must Evil be to the Soul? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 12

What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind? ENNEADS: I. VIII. 12

There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear: fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments of the dissolution; desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only because the Soul is not devoid of parts or phases; the Soul takes up false notions through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 12

One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle: this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower. ENNEADS: I. VIII. 12

"You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth..." [ ENNEADS: I. IX. 12

The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds itself free. ENNEADS: I. IX. 12

The separation takes place when nothing of Soul remains bound up with it: the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the Soul was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest. ENNEADS: I. IX. 12

But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the Soul slip from it. ENNEADS: I. IX. 12

To call upon drugs to the release of the Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes. ENNEADS: I. IX. 12

But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence: this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of the union envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary [in the heavens] even Matter must conduce to the scheme of the standing result. ENNEADS: II I. 2

No: but higher is not possible; lower is repugnant to its Kind; all that remains for it is to be tractable and, answering to a need of its nature, to be drawn by the Soul to the activity of life, and so to move to in a glorious place, in the Soul. ENNEADS: II I. 3

Anyone that dreads its falling may take heart; the circuit of the Soul provides against any declination, embracing, sustaining; and since fire has of itself no downward tendency it accepts that guiding without resistance. ENNEADS: II I. 3

Still, the great argument remains, the Soul, moving in its marvellous might second only to the very loftiest Existents: how could anything once placed within this Soul break away from it into non-being? ENNEADS: II I. 4

And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to sustain for a certain space of time, could not so sustain for ever? ENNEADS: II I. 4

This would be to assume that it holds things together by violence; that there is a "natural course" at variance with what actually exists in the nature of the universe and in these exquisitely ordered beings; and that there is some power able to storm the established system and destroy its ordered coherence, some kingdom or dominion that may shatter the order founded by the Soul. ENNEADS: II I. 4

As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul we have already shown the emptiness of that fancy: the administration of the universe entails neither labour nor loss; and, even supposing the possibility of annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better or the worse. ENNEADS: II I. 4

Remember that gold — which is water — becomes dense by the accession not of earth but of denseness or consolidation: in the same way fire, with Soul present within it, may consolidate itself upon the power of the Soul; and there are living beings of fire among the Celestials. ENNEADS: II I. 6

And does this movement belong to the material part or to the Soul? ENNEADS: II II. 1

Can we account for it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once for centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving; or that, being self-centred it is not of unlimited extension [and consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent], and that its revolution carries the material mass with it? ENNEADS: II II. 1

If the Soul had been the moving power [by any such semi-physical action] it would be so no longer; it would have accomplished the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end of this endless revolution. ENNEADS: II II. 1

In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least cannot have spatial movement; how then, having itself a movement of quite another order, could it communicate spatial movement? ENNEADS: II II. 1

If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its content alive, for the life of body is movement. ENNEADS: II II. 1

Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it will be not that of Soul untrammelled but that of a material frame ensouled, an animated organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a thing at once carried forward and at rest. 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

Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it. ENNEADS: II II. 1

If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kosmos, too, brought so far, would halt: but the Soul encompasses all, and so the Kosmos moves, seeking everything. ENNEADS: II II. 1

Or, better; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the Kosmos towards itself: the continuous attraction communicates a continuous movement — not to some outside space but towards the Soul and in the one sphere with it, not in the straight line [which would ultimately bring the moving body outside and below the Soul], but in the curving course in which the moving body at every stage possesses the Soul that is attracting it and bestowing itself upon it. 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

But if, wherever the circling body be, it possesses the Soul, what need of the circling? ENNEADS: II II. 2

Because everywhere it finds something else besides the Soul [which it desires to possess alone]. ENNEADS: II II. 2

The circular movement would be explained, too, if the Soul's power may be taken as resident at its centre. ENNEADS: II II. 2

Here, however, we must distinguish between a centre in reference to the two different natures, body and Soul. ENNEADS: II II. 2

In body, centre is a point of place; in Soul it is a source, the source of some other nature. ENNEADS: II II. 2

The word, which without qualification would mean the midpoint of a spheric mass, may serve in the double reference; and, as in a material mass so in the Soul, there must be a centre, that around which the object, Soul or material mass, revolves. ENNEADS: II II. 2

The Soul exists in revolution around God to whom it clings in love, holding itself to the utmost of its power near to Him as the Being on which all depends; and since it cannot coincide with God it circles about Him. ENNEADS: II II. 2

Every Soul does in its own rank and place. ENNEADS: II II. 2

And it may very well be that even in us the Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus circle about the divinity. ENNEADS: II II. 2

For since God is omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular course: God is not stationed. ENNEADS: II II. 2

The truth may be resumed in this way: There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe: another phase possesses sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned with the objects of sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul and giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital. ENNEADS: II II. 3

The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. ENNEADS: II II. 3

Something of the same kind happens in the case of our bodies: the unspatial movement of the Soul — in happiness, for instance, or at the idea of some pleasant event — sets up a spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in its own region some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases it; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature, it moves the body, in the body's region, that is in space. ENNEADS: II II. 3

As for that phase of the Soul in which sensation is vested, it, too, takes its good from the Supreme above itself and moves, rejoicingly, in quest of it: and since the object of its desire is everywhere, it too ranges always through the entire scope of the universe. ENNEADS: II II. 3

Suppose them, first, to be without Soul. ENNEADS: II III. 2

Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own; alike in its direct course and in its divagation it is the cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the First Principle: thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise, would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as much by the orderliness as by the power of the controlling force. ENNEADS: II III. 8

For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the Universe: once thus sunk and held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall itself and in the lower rank thus entailed upon us: riches and poverty are caused by the combinations of external fact. ENNEADS: II III. 8

That question has been amply discussed elsewhere: in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul; vice is due to the commerce of a Soul with the outer world. ENNEADS: II III. 8

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos [the stars] that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain — and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. ENNEADS: II III. 9

By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul [as total of Principle and affections] takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars' ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions. ENNEADS: II III. 9

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled — the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body — for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. ENNEADS: II III. 9

There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It — unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted. ENNEADS: II III. 9

For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system. ENNEADS: II III. 9

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. ENNEADS: II III. 9

In their efficacy upon the [material] All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon what is partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star's will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest. ENNEADS: II III. 9

But [with every allowance to the lower forces] all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It — we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe — or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul [the divine first Soul] to the other, its Kin [the Soul of any particular being]. ENNEADS: II III. 9

For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. ENNEADS: II III. 9

The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it; "the rest," we read, "is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine." ENNEADS: II III. 9

We must admit that the Soul before entering into birth presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse; we must admit some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit: and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself; it is co-operative, and completes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part. ENNEADS: II III. 10

The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force of the Soul is represented in the All, but, in the parts, Soul is present only in proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial objects. ENNEADS: II III. 13

Secondary in the All are those of its parts which possess a less exalted nature just as in us the members rank lower than the Soul; and so all through, there is a general analogy between the things of the All and our own members — none of quite equal rank. ENNEADS: II III. 13

Or it may carry the weakness through to the sympathetic Soul which by the medium of the material frame, become a power to debasement, has been delivered over, though never in its essence, to the inferior order of being. ENNEADS: II III. 13

Or, in the case of a material frame ill-organized, it may check all such action [of the Soul] upon the material frame as demands a certain collaboration in the part acted upon: thus a lyre may be so ill-strung as to be incapable of the melodic exactitude necessary to musical effect. ENNEADS: II III. 13

Of men, some enter into life as fragments of the All, bound to that which is external to themselves: they are victims of a sort of fascination, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves: but others mastering all this — straining, so to speak, by the head towards the Higher, to what is outside even the Soul — preserve still the nobility and the ancient privilege of the Soul's essential being. ENNEADS: II III. 15

For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a thing whose nature is just a sum of impressions from outside — as if it, alone, of all that exists, had no native character. ENNEADS: II III. 15

No: much more than all else, the Soul, possessing the Idea which belongs to a Principle, must have as its native wealth many powers serving to the activities of its Kind. ENNEADS: II III. 15

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

The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the Living-Being is. ENNEADS: II III. 16

For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul. ENNEADS: II III. 16

One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in succession — man followed by horse and other animals domestic or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all — that it watches these creations acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures. ENNEADS: II III. 16

No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed by the Soul] covers all the action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order. ENNEADS: II III. 16

To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action; they exist and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains the engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought to pass. ENNEADS: II III. 16

For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total. ENNEADS: II III. 16

But: The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence — like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc. ENNEADS: II III. 16

If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable, we are obliged to think that the Reason-Principles themselves foreknew or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw. ENNEADS: II III. 16

The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good. ENNEADS: II III. 16

Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the better; so that out of the total of things — modified by Soul on the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the Reason-Principles — there is, in the end, a Unity. ENNEADS: II III. 16

But these Reason-Principles, contained in the Soul, are they Thoughts? ENNEADS: II III. 17

And if so, by what process does the Soul create in accordance with these Thoughts? ENNEADS: II III. 17

If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul [that which conveys the Reason-Principles] must act by manipulating the other Soul, that which is united with Matter and has the generative function. ENNEADS: II III. 17

If to its own content, there is no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act of creation; creation is the operation of that phase of the Soul which contains Ideal-Principles; for that is its stronger puissance, its creative part. ENNEADS: II III. 17

In sum, then, the Intellectual-Principle gives from itself to the Soul of the All which follows immediately upon it: this again gives forth from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it; and that secondary Soul at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in some of its creations, striving in others against the repugnance of Matter. ENNEADS: II III. 17

This is the Soul's contribution to the All. ENNEADS: II III. 17

If all this is so, then [the secret of creation is that] the Soul of the All abides in contemplation of the Highest and Best, ceaselessly striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God: but, thus absorbing and filled full, it overflows — so to speak — and the image it gives forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the creative puissance. ENNEADS: II III. 18

This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from the Divine Intelligence. ENNEADS: II III. 18

But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third Kind. ENNEADS: II III. 18

For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul: as long as there is a sun, all that streams from it will be some form of Light. ENNEADS: II III. 18

We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form. ENNEADS: II IV. 3

There are no atoms; all body is divisible endlessly: besides neither the continuity nor the ductility of corporeal things is explicable apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up of atoms; and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but atoms: a creative power could produce nothing from a material devoid of continuity. ENNEADS: II IV. 7

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? ENNEADS: II IV. 10

Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn? ENNEADS: II IV. 10

More than this would mean that the Soul is already bestowing Form. ENNEADS: II IV. 10

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever? ENNEADS: II IV. 10

And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being. ENNEADS: II IV. 10

The Soul, for example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended unity; if magnitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in extension. ENNEADS: II IV. 11

But I prefer to use the word phantasm as hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul spills itself when it seeks to communicate with Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither encompassing it nor able to penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which achievements would be an act of delimitation. ENNEADS: II IV. 11

For to suppose them entering into Magnitude and not into Matter — is to represent them as being either without Magnitude and without Real-Existence [and therefore undistinguishable from the Matter] or not Ideal-Forms [apt to body] but Reason-Principles [utterly removed] whose sphere could only be Soul; at this, there would be no such thing as body [i. ENNEADS: II IV. 12

instead of Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so producing body, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling remote in Soul.] ENNEADS: II IV. 12

Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea, just as the Soul, an Idea, is Matter to another [a higher] Being. ENNEADS: II V. 3

But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a potentiality? ENNEADS: II V. 3

No: for the Idea [to which it is Matter] is integral to the Soul and does not look to a future; the distinction between the Soul and its Idea is purely mental: the Idea and the Matter it includes are conceived as a conjunction but are essentially one Kind: remember that Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial. ENNEADS: II V. 3

But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul? ENNEADS: II V. 3

Surely the Soul is potentially the living-being of this world before it has become so? ENNEADS: II V. 3

No: the Soul is not potentially these things; it is a Power towards them. ENNEADS: II V. 3

This applies equally to the Soul, not to that in Matter but to that in the Intellectual Sphere; and even that in Matter, the Soul of Growth, is an actualization in its difference; it possesses actually [and not, like material things, merely in image] the Being that belongs to it. ENNEADS: II V. 3

If that Nature is rightly said to be "Sleepless," and to be Life and the noblest mode of Life, the noblest Activities must be there; all then is actualization there, everything is an Actuality, for everything is a Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life, in the true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the Intellectual Principle. ENNEADS: II V. 3

We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles; this — the One and the Good — is our First; next to it follows the Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. ENNEADS: II IX. 1

Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of Intellectual-Principle and The First; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct. ENNEADS: II IX. 1

With movement — towards it or within it — we are in the realm of the Soul's operation: such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand between the two. ENNEADS: II IX. 1

To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection. ENNEADS: II IX. 1

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. ENNEADS: II IX. 2

It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire. ENNEADS: II IX. 2

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty — the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part — thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. ENNEADS: II IX. 2

There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it. ENNEADS: II IX. 2

It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another: without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself be what it is: the law is, "some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary." ENNEADS: II IX. 3

To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. ENNEADS: II IX. 4

If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some one moment, why not before that? ENNEADS: II IX. 4

Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe? ENNEADS: II IX. 4

We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die. ENNEADS: II IX. 5

Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which they piece together from the elements. ENNEADS: II IX. 5

If all comes to states of the Soul — "Repentance" when it has undergone a change of purpose; "Impressions" when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their simulacra — there is nothing here but a jargon invented to make a case for their school: all this terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt to the ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the ascent from the cave and the gradual advance of souls to a truer and truer vision. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body; as for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm — the Authentic Existent, the Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul — all this is taken over from the Timaeus, where we read: "As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained in this All." ENNEADS: II IX. 6

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe — though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Principle — and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis — which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature — and to recognize Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

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 a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties — how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial be beings. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties — how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial be beings. ENNEADS: II IX. 6

And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We [the human Soul] lies under fetter; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

It is the general fact that an inset [as the Body], necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle [as the Soul], and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life: there, the established rule commanding to permanence is sovereign; here things are like deserters kept to their own place and duty by a double bond; there is no outlet from the All, and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to bounds: all remains where from the beginning the Soul's nature appointed. ENNEADS: II IX. 7

To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. ENNEADS: II IX. 8

We must recognize that other men have attained the heights of goodness; we must admit the goodness of the celestial spirits, and above all of the gods — those whose presence is here but their contemplation in the Supreme, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most blessed Soul. ENNEADS: II IX. 9

The more perfect the man, the more compliant he is, even towards his fellows; we must temper our importance, not thrusting insolently beyond what our nature warrants; we must allow other beings, also, their place in the presence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves alone next after the First in a dream-flight which deprives us of our power of attaining identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the human Soul, that is to say, to the point of likeness to which the Intellectual-Principle leads us; to exalt ourselves above the Intellectual-Principle is to fall from it. ENNEADS: II IX. 9

They first maintain that the Soul and a certain "Wisdom" [Sophia] declined and entered this lower sphere though they leave us in doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or whether the two are the same to them — then they tell us that the other Souls came down in the descent and that these members of Sophia took to themselves bodies, human bodies, for example. ENNEADS: II IX. 10

Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of descent to the others is declared not to have descended. " ENNEADS: II IX. 10

Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be said to have declined? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act towards that end, why should it alone be the illuminant? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

Why must the Soul wait till the representations of the plan be made actual? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

Further, how explain that under this illumination the Matter of the Kosmos produces images of the order of Soul instead of mere bodily-nature? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

An image of Soul could not demand darkness or Matter, but wherever formed it would exhibit the character of the producing element and remain in close union with it. ENNEADS: II IX. 11

By being a distinct form of the Soul? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

But then, since the original is the reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be the vegetative and generative Soul; and then, what becomes of the theory that it is produced for glory's sake, what becomes of the creation in arrogance and self-assertion? ENNEADS: II IX. 11

and next, "How does anything come into being unless the Soul give this Intellection creative power and how, after all, can creative power reside in a created thing?" ENNEADS: II IX. 11

We can only suppose that these people themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator had not wit to do so. ENNEADS: II IX. 12

If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right exists in the Supreme also; evil antedates this world; the cause of evil is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme is the evil to us; instead of the Soul's harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the Soul. ENNEADS: II IX. 12

The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the already existent Darkness. ENNEADS: II IX. 12

If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to decline to; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature of the Soul. ENNEADS: II IX. 12

Even the fact that their material frame is of fire does not make them dreadful; their Movements are in keeping with the All and with the Earth: but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on which these people base their own title to honour. ENNEADS: II IX. 13

If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior. ENNEADS: II IX. 13

In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the Supernal Beings — not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents — they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the idea that these Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from any of us who is in some degree trained to use the appropriate forms in the appropriate way — certain melodies, certain sounds, specially directed breathings, sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic potency upon the Supreme. ENNEADS: II IX. 14

This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of such matters is missing utterly: we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients; we do not learn what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. ENNEADS: II IX. 15

Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest: God on the lips, without a good conduct of life, is a word. ENNEADS: II IX. 15

Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart? ENNEADS: II IX. 16

Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior. ENNEADS: II IX. 17

Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere [the All-Soul] as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer governance: either approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe. ENNEADS: II IX. 17

Now let them set body within it — not in the sense that Soul suffers any change but that, since "In the Gods there can be no grudging," it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing has strength to receive and at once their conception of the Kosmos must be revised; they cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has exercised such a weight of power as to have brought the corporeal-principle, in itself unlovely, to partake of good and beauty to the utmost of its receptivity — and to a pitch which stirs Souls, beings of the divine order. ENNEADS: II IX. 17

And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of process: or, if this were conceded, certainly it could not be towards evil. ENNEADS: II IX. 17

But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul down in it. ENNEADS: II IX. 18

As long as we have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation. ENNEADS: II IX. 18

They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos? ENNEADS: II IX. 18

Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling. ENNEADS: II IX. 18

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of their Being. ENNEADS: II IX. 18

Such causelessness would bind the Soul under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause. ENNEADS: III I. 1

Another theory: The Universe is permeated by one Soul, Cause of all things and events; every separate phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in its place with the general movement; all the various causes spring into action from one source: therefore, it is argued, the entire descending claim of causes and all their interaction must follow inevitably and so constitute a universal determination. ENNEADS: III I. 4

The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or — supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act — within ourselves. ENNEADS: III I. 7

Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would hold rank in a series. ENNEADS: III I. 8

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes [or, by chance-causes]: there will therefore be a compromise; the action of the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. ENNEADS: III I. 8

The nobler Soul will have the greater power; the poorer Soul, the lesser. ENNEADS: III I. 8

Given all the causes, all must happen beyond aye or nay — that is, all the external and whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit — therefore when the Soul has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary: so, too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of action. ENNEADS: III I. 9

But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Principle, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. ENNEADS: III I. 9

Things so done may truly be described as our doing, for they have no other source; they are the issue of the unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus. ENNEADS: III I. 9

To sum the results of our argument: All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by causes; but the causation is of two Kinds; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to other causes, those of the environment. ENNEADS: III I. 10

In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the light of sound reason is the Soul's work, while what is done where they are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered. ENNEADS: III I. 10

Unwisdom, then, is not due to the Soul, and, in general — if we mean by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves — an act is fated when it is contrary to wisdom. ENNEADS: III I. 10

Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence. ENNEADS: III II. 2

And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and with living things of every race, and while the very sea has answered to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air and the ether and the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its conscious movement ever about the one Centre, seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. ENNEADS: III II. 3

For from that Good all the heavens depend, with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge inanimate. ENNEADS: III II. 3

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms — and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one Soul of all. ENNEADS: III II. 4

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason — whose control nothing anywhere eludes — employs that ending to the beginning of something new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction, loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order. ENNEADS: III II. 5

Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings: the Providence must reach to all the details; its functioning must consist in neglecting no point. ENNEADS: III II. 6

Unless the foreplanning power alone is to be charged with the vice in such Souls, we have no ground of accusation, no claim to redress: the blame lies on the Soul exercising its choice. ENNEADS: III II. 7

Even a Soul, we have seen, must have its individual movement; it is not abstract Spirit; the first step towards animal life has been taken and the conduct will naturally be in keeping with that character. ENNEADS: III II. 7

That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules in the lower things: animals and plants have their share in Reason, Soul and Life. ENNEADS: III II. 7

For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. ENNEADS: III II. 15

This Reason-Principle, then — let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth — this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from the pure Soul alone; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the Intellectual Principle and the Soul — the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual Principle engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a certain measure of Reason. ENNEADS: III II. 16

But this Reason-Principle which emanates from the complete unity, divine Mind, and the complete unity Life [= Soul] — is neither a uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete divine Mind, nor does it give itself whole and all-including to its subject. [ ENNEADS: III II. 16

In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors add their own quality, good or bad — for they have more to do than merely repeat the author's words — in the truer drama which dramatic genius imitates in its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part assigned by the creator of the piece. ENNEADS: III II. 17

As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a Soul is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphazard but always under a Reason: it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to it, attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole Principle of the piece: then it speaks out its business, exhibiting at the same time all that a Soul can express of its own quality, as a singer in a song. ENNEADS: III II. 17

Just so the Soul, entering this drama of the Universe, making itself a part of the Play, bringing to its acting its personal excellence or defect, set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the author its entire role — superimposed upon its own character and conduct — just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward. ENNEADS: III II. 17

What is evil in the single Soul will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event — and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not mar the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things are, all is well. ENNEADS: III II. 17

We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade and its third, and that, therefore, its expression may take any one of three main forms. ENNEADS: III II. 18

And, further — unless all Reason-Principles are Souls — why should some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is itself a Soul? ENNEADS: III II. 18

The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its parts [i. ENNEADS: III III. 1

This unity, Soul, has different parts; the Reason-Principles, correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being. ENNEADS: III III. 1

Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. ENNEADS: III III. 3

Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process. ENNEADS: III III. 3

There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul [a lesser phase], not that [the Supreme Soul] from which the Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still more deficient. ENNEADS: III III. 3

We would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum [the responsible source of evil] must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-Principle; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle but Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free Principle in man [which is a phase of the All Soul] the Substratum [the direct inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter but] the Reason-Principle itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is sovereign within us. ENNEADS: III III. 4

The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a former life; we may suppose that previous actions have made the Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior in radiance to that which ruled before; the Soul which later will shine out again is for the present at a feebler power. ENNEADS: III III. 4

It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which we read takes place; the Soul must lose its nature, the Reason-Principle be transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which once was Man. ENNEADS: III III. 4

From the inferior grade downwards is Fate: the upper is Providence alone: for in the Intellectual Kosmos all is Reason-Principle or its Priors-Divine Mind and unmingled Soul-and immediately upon these follows Providence which rises from Divine Mind, is the content of the Unmingled Soul, and, through this Soul, is communicated to the Sphere of living things. ENNEADS: III III. 5

Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to which is due the sensitive faculty — that in any of its expression-forms — Nature and all forms of life down to the vegetable order. ENNEADS: III IV. 1

Even as it is present in human beings the Soul carries its Expression-form [Hypostasis] with it, but is not the dominant since it is not the whole man (humanity including the Intellectual Principal, as well): in the vegetable order it is the highest since there is nothing to rival it; but at this phase it is no longer reproductive, or, at least, what it produces is of quite another order; here life ceases; all later production is lifeless. ENNEADS: III IV. 1

Everything the Soul engenders down to this point comes into being shapeless, and takes form by orientation towards its author and supporter: therefore the thing engendered on the further side can be no image of the Soul, since it is not even alive; it must be an utter Indetermination. ENNEADS: III IV. 1

It is of this Soul especially that we read "All Soul has care for the Soulless" — though the several Souls thus care in their own degree and way. ENNEADS: III IV. 2

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

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself diminished. ENNEADS: III IV. 3

And the Soul of the All — are we to think that when it turns from this sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws? ENNEADS: III IV. 4

But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by the Soul in the overworld, how can anything be left to our independent action here? ENNEADS: III IV. 5

The answer is that very choice in the over-world is merely an allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a total character which it must express wherever it operates. ENNEADS: III IV. 5

But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force and, in the Soul, the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it? ENNEADS: III IV. 5

The Soul's quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life? ENNEADS: III IV. 5

The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the entire decision of a Soul. ENNEADS: III IV. 5

The Timaeus indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves: it is not entirely outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs to us as belonging to our Soul, but not in so far as we are particular human beings living a life to which it is superior: take the passage in this sense and it is consistent; understand this Spirit otherwise and there is contradiction. ENNEADS: III IV. 5

One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit [equivalent in all men] as cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle [the diviner phase of the human Soul] which therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

Not in every respect: the Soul is so constituted that its life-history and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but also to the conditions among which it acts. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Underworld ceases to be its guardian — except when the Soul resumes [in its later choice] the former state of life. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

From the passage [in the Phaedo] which tells how it presents the Soul to judgement we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life — a time not so much of living as of expiation. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic Soul. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

The world Soul is distributed so as to produce the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers: so with our Souls; they must have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul: each must give out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary spirit. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things — animal or vegetal — produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to live. ENNEADS: III IV. 6

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. ENNEADS: III V. 1

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos who is no other than the Intellectual Principle — must be the Soul at its divinest: unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever Above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter — and therefore mythically "the unmothered" justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within itself. ENNEADS: III V. 2

Soul then could never fall from its sphere; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the light it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still. ENNEADS: III V. 2

But following upon Kronos — or, if you will, upon Heaven, the father of Kronos — the Soul directs its Act towards him and holds closely to him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to look towards him. ENNEADS: III V. 2

This Act of the Soul has produced an Hypostasis, a Real-Being; and the mother and this Hypostasis — her offspring, noble Love gaze together upon Divine Mind. ENNEADS: III V. 2

That was the first object of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. ENNEADS: III V. 3

Thus; there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the Soul; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. ENNEADS: III V. 3

The Eros that belongs to the supernal Soul must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as being of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very offspring; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of the Gods. ENNEADS: III V. 3

Once that Soul which is the primal source of light to the heavens is recognized as an Hypostasis standing distinct and aloof it must be admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so loftily celestial a being as the Soul. ENNEADS: III V. 3

Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart; so, we must think of this Love — as essentially resident where the unmingling Soul inhabits. ENNEADS: III V. 3

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love — the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards — like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. ENNEADS: III V. 3

This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe — not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. ENNEADS: III V. 3

For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring. ENNEADS: III V. 3

Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial reality? ENNEADS: III V. 4

Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that of the Universe contain such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal Soul should not. ENNEADS: III V. 4

It implants the characteristic desire; the particular Soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its Being. ENNEADS: III V. 4

As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single Soul holds to the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. ENNEADS: III V. 4

Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will. ENNEADS: III V. 4

In the same way we must conceive many Aphrodites in the All, Spirits entering it together with Love, all emanating from an Aphrodite of the All, a train of particular Aphrodites dependent upon the first, and each with the particular Love in attendance: this multiplicity cannot be denied, if Soul be the mother of Love, and Aphrodite mean Soul, and Love be an act of a Soul seeking good. ENNEADS: III V. 4

This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to The Good, is twofold: the Love in the loftier Soul would be a god ever linking the Soul to the divine; the Love in the mingling Soul will be a celestial spirit. ENNEADS: III V. 4

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

A man is the man's Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! ENNEADS: III V. 5

A Celestial is the representative generated by each Soul when it enters the Kosmos. ENNEADS: III V. 6

And why, by a Soul entering the Kosmos? ENNEADS: III V. 6

Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a God; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite the Pure Soul, as a God. ENNEADS: III V. 6

On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul towards the good and beautiful is an Eros; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other Spirit-Beings, equally born from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul, have other functions: they are for the direct service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire. ENNEADS: III V. 6

The Soul of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function but to its entire charge. ENNEADS: III V. 6

The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, "wine yet not existing"; Love is born before the realm of sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the lower image of that divine Realm had appeared; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly of Form but partly also of that indetermination which belongs to the Soul before she attains the Good and when all her knowledge of Reality is a fore-intimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this state Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love. ENNEADS: III V. 7

Love, then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. ENNEADS: III V. 7

Each human being is set under his own Spirit-Guides, but this is mere blank possession when they ignore their own and live by some other spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the operative part of the Soul in them. ENNEADS: III V. 7

All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good; in a lesser Soul, inferior in rank and in scope; in the greater Soul, superior; but all belong to the order of Being. ENNEADS: III V. 7

Those forms of Love that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations of any Reality; for they are no true issue of Soul; they are merely accompaniments of a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct. ENNEADS: III V. 7

In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence — and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by ENNEADS: III V. 7

In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence — and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form. ENNEADS: III V. 7

We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to explain Zeus and his garden. ENNEADS: III V. 8

We cannot take Zeus to be the Soul, which we have agreed is represented by Aphrodite. ENNEADS: III V. 8

Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader — though elsewhere he seems to rank him as one of three — but in the Philebus he speaks more plainly when he says that there is in Zeus not only a royal Soul, but also a royal Intellect. ENNEADS: III V. 8

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle. ENNEADS: III V. 8

Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite [= the habra, delicate] indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul. ENNEADS: III V. 8

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls — to every Intellectual Principle its companion Soul — we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the Soul of Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call Aphrodite's star the star of Hera. ENNEADS: III V. 8

This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle of all that exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the supreme Intellect; but being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch Soul, be in Soul, [as the next lower principle]. ENNEADS: III V. 9

This means that the Reason-Principle upon "the birth of Aphrodite" left the Intellectual for the Soul, breaking into the garden of Zeus. ENNEADS: III V. 9

A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the Reason-Principle within him; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine Intellect upon the Divine Soul, which it has penetrated. ENNEADS: III V. 9

On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas — the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely — Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. ENNEADS: III V. 10

The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. ENNEADS: III V. 10

And Love — "born at the banquet of the gods" — has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has been. ENNEADS: III V. 10

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. ENNEADS: III V. 10

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very birth, strives towards It. ENNEADS: III V. 10

In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement: the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the judgement resides in the Soul, and is distinct from the state — for, if it is not distinct, another judgement is demanded, one that is distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever. ENNEADS: III VI. 1

For ourselves, it could never be in our system — or in our liking — to bring the Soul down to participation in such modes and modifications as the warmth and cold of material frames. ENNEADS: III VI. 1

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

Even in the superior phase of the Soul — that which precedes the impressionable faculty and any sensation — how can we reconcile immunity with the indwelling of vice, false notions, ignorance? ENNEADS: III VI. 1

Inviolability; and yet likings and dislikings, the Soul enjoying, grieving, angry, grudging, envying, desiring, never at peace but stirring and shifting with everything that confronts it! ENNEADS: III VI. 1

If the Soul were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult, indeed quite impossible, to make it appear to be immune, unchangeable, when any of such emotions lodge in it. ENNEADS: III VI. 1

Let us begin with virtue and vice in the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

In speaking of extirpating evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to replace a former ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

For if virtue is simply a natural concordance among the phases of the Soul, and vice simply a discord, then there is no further question of any foreign presence; harmony would be the result of every distinct phase or faculty joining in, true to itself; discord would mean that not all chimed in at their best and truest. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

Exactly so in the case of the Soul; there will be harmony when each faculty performs its appropriate part. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

Yes: but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the Soul must depend upon a previous virtue, that of each several faculty within itself; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the vice of the single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual presence of vice as they can be good only by the presence of virtue. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

It is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with ignorance in the reasoning faculty of the Soul; ignorance is not a positive thing; but in the presence of false judgements — the main cause of vice — must it not be admitted that something positive has entered into the Soul, something perverting the reasoning faculty? ENNEADS: III VI. 2

And this following of reason is not the acceptance of an imposed shape; it is like using the eyes; the Soul sees by its act, that of looking towards reason. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

The faculty of sight in the performance of its act is essentially what it was when it lay latent; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the relation that belongs to its essential character; it knows — that is, sees — without suffering any change: so, precisely, the reasoning phase of the Soul stands towards the Intellectual Principle; this it sees by its very essence; this vision is its knowing faculty; it takes in no stamp, no impression; all that enters it is the object of vision — possessed, once more, without possession; it possesses by the fact of knowing but "without possession" in the sense that there is no incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the impression of the seal on sealing-wax. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the Reason-Principle or by looking towards some inferior phase of it or by some defect in the organs of action — some lack or flaw in the bodily equipment — or by outside prevention of the natural act or by the mere absence of adequate stimulus: boldness would arise from the reverse conditions: neither implies any change, or even any experience, in the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

So with the faculty of desire: what we call loose living is caused by its acting unaccompanied; it has done all of itself; the other faculties, whose business it is to make their presence felt in control and to point the right way, have lain in abeyance; the Seer in the Soul was occupied elsewhere, for, though not always at least sometimes, it has leisure for a certain degree of contemplation of other concerns. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

Often, moreover, the vice of the desiring faculty will be merely some ill condition of the body, and its virtue, bodily soundness; thus there would again be no question of anything imported into the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 2

Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear — are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the Soul? ENNEADS: III VI. 3

To represent the Soul or Mind as being the seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or turn pale; it is to forget that while the Soul or Mind is the means, the effect takes place in the distinct organism, the animated body. ENNEADS: III VI. 3

At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul; but the body is occupied by the Soul — not to trouble about words — is, at any rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter; and so, is affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. ENNEADS: III VI. 3

So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows. ENNEADS: III VI. 3

When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved — as in desire, reasoning, judging — we do not mean that it is driven into its act; these movements are its own acts. ENNEADS: III VI. 3

To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealing-wax; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the Soul — as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness are importations into body — but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries. ENNEADS: III VI. 3

We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase of the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its choice: but more is required; we must begin by forming a clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

Sometimes the affections take the lead and automatically bring in the notion which thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty: but as we have explained, an act of opinion does not introduce any change into the Soul or Mind: what happens is that from the notion of some impending evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in turn, becomes known in that part of the Mind which is said under such circumstances to harbour fear. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

It should, however, be quite clear that the Soul or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation — both the higher representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the "Nature" of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

The Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

None the less, there is an affective phase of the Soul or Mind and this is not corporeal; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently — and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not — but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. ENNEADS: III VI. 4

But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it is thus immune from the beginning? ENNEADS: III VI. 5

Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts to an affection and Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the well-being of the Soul which by the mere absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present. ENNEADS: III VI. 5

Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances presented before the Soul or Mind from without but taken [for practical purposes] to be actual experiences within it — then Philosophy's task is like that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking condition the mind that is breeding them. ENNEADS: III VI. 5

But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body to which it is essentially a stranger? ENNEADS: III VI. 5

The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company; when it looks to nothing without itself; when it entertains no alien thoughts — be the mode or origin of such notions or affections what they may, a subject on which we have already touched — when it no longer sees in the world of image, much less elaborates images into veritable affections. ENNEADS: III VI. 5

In the particular case of the affective phase of the Soul, purification is its awakening from the baseless visions which beset it, the refusal to see them; its separation consists in limiting its descent towards the lower and accepting no picture thence, and of course in the banning for its part too of all which the higher Soul ignores when it has arisen from the trouble storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by the chains of sensuality and of multiplicity but has subdued to itself the body and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignty, tranquilly, over all. ENNEADS: III VI. 5

And how, it will be asked, can we, on the contrary, attribute Being, and the only Authentic Being, to entities like Soul and Intellect, things having no weight or pressure, yielding to no force, offering no resistance, things not even visible? ENNEADS: III VI. 6

The sphere of sense, the Soul in its slumber; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed; the veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things; for these, belonging to the Kind directly opposed to Soul, present to it what is directly opposed to its essential existence: their origin, their flux, and their perishing are the warning of their exclusion from the Kind whose Being is Authentic. ENNEADS: III VI. 6

Matter is no Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce? ENNEADS: III VI. 7

But there is also a "presence" which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the Soul. ENNEADS: III VI. 9

In that example, no doubt, the mental representation — though it seems to have a wide and unchecked control — is an image, while the Soul [Mind] is in its nature not an image [but a Reality]: none the less the Soul or Mind certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some analogous relation. ENNEADS: III VI. 15

The representation, however, does not cover the Mind over; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there; however urgently it presses in, it never effects such an obliteration as to be taken for the Soul; it is confronted there by indwelling powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack. ENNEADS: III VI. 15

Matter — feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of the Authentic Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity — lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. ENNEADS: III VI. 15

The [Universal] Soul — containing the Ideal Principles of Real-Beings, and itself an Ideal Principle — includes all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is complete and self-contained: it, therefore, sees these principles of sensible things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. ENNEADS: III VI. 18

Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the Soul is: if it were so, it would belong to the Intellective Sphere. ENNEADS: III VI. 18

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

We may, therefore, very well think that it existed before the Soul or Mind that estimates it — if, indeed, it is not to be thought to take its origin from the Soul — for no measurement by anything is necessary to its existence; measured or not, it has the full extent of its being. ENNEADS: III VII. 9

And suppose it to be true that the Soul is the appraiser, using Magnitude as the measuring standard, how does this help us to the conception of Time? ENNEADS: III VII. 9

For the Soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of translating elsewhere what it saw in the Authentic Realm, and it could not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its possession. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

It is so with this faculty of the Soul, when it produces the Kosmos known to sense — the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in the very movement of the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to reproduce that of the Divine. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

To bring this Kosmos into being, the Soul first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time; this world of its fashioning it then gave over to be a servant to Time, making it at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the bournes of Time. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

For the Kosmos moves only in Soul — the only Space within the range of the All open to it to move in — and therefore its Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in Soul. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of novelty, the Soul produces succession as well as act; taking up new purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not existed in that former period when its purpose was still dormant and its life was not as it since became: the life is changed and that change carries with it a change of Time. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another? ENNEADS: III VII. 11

Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the Soul; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be the movement of some partial phase; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts; over against that oneness without extent or interval there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and all-comprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity; over against the Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages ENNEADS: III VII. 11

Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the Soul; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be the movement of some partial phase; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts; over against that oneness without extent or interval there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and all-comprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity; over against the Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of Soul; Eternity is not outside of the Authentic Existent: nor is it to be taken as a sequence or succession to Soul, any more than Eternity is to the Divine. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

It is a thing seen upon Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as Eternity to the Intellectual Realm. ENNEADS: III VII. 11

We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle — Time — a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other — a Principle, then, whose Act is sequent. ENNEADS: III VII. 12

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

What ground would lie ready to the Soul's operation but the Supreme in which it has its Being? ENNEADS: III VII. 12

If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the Soul's tendency towards the production of the sensible universe with the consecutive act ensuing. ENNEADS: III VII. 12

This is how "Time" — as we read — "came into Being simultaneously" with this All: the Soul begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the Soul this Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the Universe is a content of Time. ENNEADS: III VII. 12

No indication of Time could be derived from [observation of] the Soul; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore the Soul brings into being night and day; in their difference is given Duality — from which, we read, arises the concept of Number. ENNEADS: III VII. 12

point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to: but when his purpose is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it sprang into Being simultaneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of Eternity, its image in motion, Time necessarily unresting as the Life with which it must keep pace: and "coeval with the Heavens" because it is this same Life [of the Divine Soul] which brings the Heavens also into being; Time and the Heavens are the work of the one Life. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

It is the height of absurdity to fasten on the succession of earlier and later occurring in the life and movement of this sphere of ours, to declare that it must be some definite thing and to call it Time, while denying the reality of the more truly existent Movement, that of the Soul, which has also its earlier and later: it cannot be reasonable to recognize succession in the case of the Soulless Movement — and so to associate Time with that — while ignoring succession and the reality of Time in the Movement from which the other takes its imitative existence; to ignore, that is, the very Movement in which succession first appears, a self-actuated movement which, engendering its own every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all which, it is the cause of existence, at once, and of every consequent. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

But: — we treat the Kosmic Movement as overarched by that of the Soul and bring it under Time; yet we do not set under Time that Soul-Movement itself with all its endless progression: what is our explanation of this paradox? ENNEADS: III VII. 13

And this is how Time is omnipresent: that Soul is absent from no fragment of the Kosmos just as our Soul is absent from no particle of ourselves. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

But the Movement within the Soul — to what are you to (relate) refer that? ENNEADS: III VII. 13

And, as with Man's Soul, so with the Soul of the All. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

Time in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form in all; for all the Souls are the one Soul. ENNEADS: III VII. 13

It tells: that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence; that, in this immutability accompanied by what may be called Self-Consciousness, it possesses — within the measure of its possibility — a knowledge of the realm of subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and consciousness; and, achieving thus a resplendent and delicious spectacle, has no further aim. ENNEADS: III VIII. 4

This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a Contemplation: we may now take the matter up to the higher Soul; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it — in itself, all one object of Vision — to produce another Vision [that of the Kosmos]: it is just as a given science, complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

The primal phase of the Soul — inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its participation in the Supreme, filled and illuminated — remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

In sum, then: The Soul is to extend throughout the Universe, no spot void of its energy: but, a prior is always different from its secondary, and energy is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act; act, however, is not at this stage existent since it depends upon contemplation: therefore the Soul, while its phases differ, must, in all of them, remain a contemplation and what seems to be an act done under contemplation must be in reality that weakened contemplation of which we have spoken: the engendered must respect the Kind, but in weaker form, dwindled in the descent. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a Soul in vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent — this Principle [of Nature], itself also contemplative but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its prior — a Vision creates the Vision. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

[Such creative contemplation is not inexplicable] for no limit exists either to contemplation or to its possible objects, and this explains how the Soul is universal: where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical thing in every Soul; Vision is not cabined within the bournes of magnitude. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same strength in each and every place and thing — any more than that it is at the same strength in each of its own phases. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

The Charioteer [the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus Myth] gives the two horses [its two dissonant faculties] what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what made that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for — and that was vision, and an object of vision. ENNEADS: III VIII. 5

Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for [mind or] Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or Soul remain idle. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees [in its outgoing act] as a stranger looking upon a strange world. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contemplative. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

The self-indwelling Soul inclines less to such experiences. ENNEADS: III VIII. 6

From this basis we proceed: In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself — the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them; and in the advanced Soul the objects of knowledge, well on the way towards the Intellectual-Principle, are close to identity with their container. ENNEADS: III VIII. 8

Now admitting the existence of a living thing that is at once a Thought and its object, it must be a Life distinct from the vegetative or sensitive life or any other life determined by Soul. ENNEADS: III VIII. 8

Now when we reach a One — the stationary Principle — in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All — we have in every case the most powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the Authentically Existent Beings — their Principle and source and potentiality — shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being-nothing? ENNEADS: III VIII. 10

On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible; division begins with its offspring which, of course, means with Souls: and thus a Soul — with its particular Souls — may be the separative principle. ENNEADS: III IX. 1

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third Principle and begins within the Third: for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the Intellectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division. ENNEADS: III IX. 1

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. ENNEADS: III IX. 2

The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure — they come from the All-Soul — and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun. ENNEADS: III IX. 2

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. ENNEADS: III IX. 2

(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing — with the Intellectual-Principle as the object of its vision — it is undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see: in other words, Soul is Matter to [its determinant] the Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: III IX. 3

Soul, there without distinction and partition, has yet a nature lending itself to divisional existence: its division is secession, entry into body. ENNEADS: IV I. 1

Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many; the Ideal-Form resident in body is many and one; bodies themselves are exclusively many; the Supreme is exclusively one. ENNEADS: IV II. 2

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

Such a conception would entail many absurdities: The Ten could not be [essentially] a unity [the Soul would be an aggregation, not a self-standing Real-Being] and, further — unless every one of the single constituents were itself an All-Soul — the All-Soul would be formed of non-souls. ENNEADS: IV III. 2

A further proof [of the unity of Soul] is that perception demands a common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these impressions must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all that is said and done. ENNEADS: IV III. 3

May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to some individual, but to belong on the higher to that other sphere? 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

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

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

It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All. 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

Thence we come to the [kosmic] Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. 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

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

I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it. ENNEADS: IV III. 11

The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere — let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos — and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. 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

But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt. ENNEADS: IV III. 12

All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. ENNEADS: IV III. 12

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

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

Here a question rises to which we must find an answer: whether these and the other powers which we call "parts" of the Soul are situated, all, in place; or whether some have place and standpoint, others not; or whether again none are situated in place. ENNEADS: IV III. 20

The matter is difficult: if we 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

Soul, whenever and wherever it chooses to operate, does in much that way move the body. ENNEADS: IV III. 21

What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence? ENNEADS: IV IV. 1

There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that the contemplator is the self — Socrates, for example — or that it is Intellect or Soul. ENNEADS: IV IV. 2

The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe. ENNEADS: IV IV. 10

There is [within the Soul] intellection, superior to imagination; and there is imagination standing midway between that intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. 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

Can we escape by the theory that, while human souls — receptive of change, even to the change of imperfection and lack — are in time, yet the Soul of the All, as the author of time, is itself timeless? ENNEADS: IV IV. 15

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

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

The Soul is the Reason-Principle of the universe, ultimate among the Intellectual Beings — its own essential Nature is one of the Beings of the Intellectual Realm — but it is the primal Reason-Principle of the entire realm of sense. 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

If it is nothing, only the pneuma exists, the "certain state" being no more than a word; this leads imperatively to the assertion that Matter alone exists, Soul and God mere words, the lowest alone is. ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy and light. ENNEADS: IV VII. 4

Thus the Soul and the Reason-Principles are without quantity. ENNEADS: IV VII. 5

It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral excellence, nothing of all that is noble. ENNEADS: IV VII. 6

Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues — moral excellence [Sophrosyne], justice, courage and so forth? ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body, and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle and Soul precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of body. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could not do these things. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

Soul is a real being, accord is not. ENNEADS: IV VII. 8

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

The Human Soul, next; Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or cavern. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 3

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

It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 4

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

The Soul of the All, as an entirety, governs the universe through that part of it which leans to the body side, but since it does not exercise a will based on calculation as we do — but proceeds by purely intellectual act as in the execution of an artistic conception — its ministrance is that of a labourless overpoising, only its lowest phase being active upon the universe it embellishes. ENNEADS: IV VIII. 8

That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the fact that it is present entire at every point of the body — the sign of veritable unity — not some part of it here and another part there. ENNEADS: IV IX. 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

The Soul's nature and power will be brought out more clearly, more brilliantly, if we consider next how it envelops the heavenly system and guides all to its purposes: for it has bestowed itself upon all that huge expanse so that every interval, small and great alike, all has been ensouled. ENNEADS: V I. 2

You honour the Soul elsewhere; honour then yourself. ENNEADS: V I. 2

The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between. 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

Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself. ENNEADS: V I. 3

What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior. ENNEADS: V I. 3

Its knowing is not by search but by possession, its blessedness inherent, not acquired; for all belongs to it eternally and it holds the authentic Eternity imitated by Time which, circling round the Soul, makes towards the new thing and passes by the old. ENNEADS: V I. 4

Soul deals with thing after thing — now Socrates; now a horse: always some one entity from among beings — but the Intellectual-Principle is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is; and everything, in that entire content, is Intellectual-Principle and Authentic Existence; and the total of all is ENNEADS: V I. 4

As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle, exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy. ENNEADS: V I. 5

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

This is the meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the [necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within itself, is Soul [the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind]. ENNEADS: V I. 7

Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a substantial existence: such then is that [Soul] which circles about the Divine Mind, its light, its image inseparably attached to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath; of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still with the Divine. ENNEADS: V I. 7

He teaches, also, that there is an author of the Cause, that is of the Intellectual-Principle, which to him is the Creator who made the Soul, as he tells us, in the famous mixing bowl. ENNEADS: V I. 8

Thus Plato knows the order of generation — from the Good, the Intellectual-Principle; from the Intellectual-Principle, the Soul. ENNEADS: V I. 8

Third comes the Principle, Soul. 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

This active power sprung from essence [from the Intellectual-Principle considered as Being] is Soul. ENNEADS: V II. 1

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

This image of Soul is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle. ENNEADS: V II. 1

Thus the human Soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is within its province; but it is not present entire; when it has reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus far downwards it produces — by its outgoing and its tendency towards the less good — another hypostasis or form of being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the Soul) is produced from the Intellectual-Principle which yet remains in untroubled self-possession. ENNEADS: V II. 1

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

Soul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere. ENNEADS: V II. 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

So far as this, the efficacy of the Intellectual-Principle in the Soul certainly reaches; but is there also introversion and self-cognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the Divine Mind? ENNEADS: V III. 2

This self-knowing agent, perfect in the Intellectual-Principle, is modified in the Soul. ENNEADS: V III. 6

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

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

No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. ENNEADS: V III. 17

We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. ENNEADS: V III. 17

Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. ENNEADS: V III. 17

And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle — to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun's own light that we see the sun. ENNEADS: V III. 17

[Interpolation: Zeus (Universal Soul) is in this a symbol of him, Zeus who is not content with the contemplation of his father (Kronos, divine Intellect) but looks to that father's father (to Ouranos, the Transcendent) as what may be called the divine energy working to the establishment of a real being.] ENNEADS: V V. 3

But Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily substance is not a place to the Soul; Soul is contained in Intellectual-Principle and is the container of body. ENNEADS: V V. 9

But the surest way of realizing that its nature demands this combination of unity and duality is to proceed upwards from the Soul, where the distinction can be made more dearly since the duality is exhibited more obviously. ENNEADS: V VI. 1

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 ENNEADS: V VI. 1

We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light from the sun: Soul carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the light which makes it essentially intellective; Intellectual-Principle carries the light as its own though it is not purely the light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character. ENNEADS: V VI. 4

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

There is nothing alarming about such limitlessness in generative forces and in Reason-Principles, when Soul is there to sustain all. ENNEADS: V VII. 3

As in Soul [principle of Life] so in Divine Mind [principle of Idea] there is this infinitude of recurring generative powers; the Beings there are unfailing. ENNEADS: V VII. 3

Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. ENNEADS: V VIII. 3

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

Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original. ENNEADS: V VIII. 13

If Soul is so lovely in its own right, of what quality must that prior be? ENNEADS: V VIII. 13

And since its being is derived, what must that power be from which the Soul takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent? ENNEADS: V VIII. 13

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

Two causes in their degree; the participation in beauty and the power of Soul, the maker, which has imprinted that form. 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

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

A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once something other and something more powerful than Soul and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. ENNEADS: V IX. 4

Again there must be something prior to Soul because Soul is in the world and there must be something outside a world in which, all being corporeal and material, nothing has enduring reality: failing such a prior, neither man nor the Ideas would be eternal or have true identity. ENNEADS: V IX. 4

These and many other considerations establish the necessary existence of an Intellectual-Principle prior to Soul. ENNEADS: V IX. 4

It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an Absolute-Soul differing from Soul and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

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

Thus, if by the content of the sense-world we mean simply the visible objects, then the Supreme contains not only what is in the realm of sense but more: if in the content of the kosmos we mean to include Soul and the Soul-things, then all is here that is There. ENNEADS: V IX. 13

But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea — whether there is an Idea of filth and mud — it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the Soul which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these. ENNEADS: V IX. 14

The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul's inability to bring some other thing to being — something in the order of nature, which, else, it would — but producing where it may. ENNEADS: V IX. 14

And before the particular Soul there is another Soul, a universal, and, before that, an Absolute-Soul, which is the Life existing in the Intellectual-Principle before Soul came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life in the Divine] the Absolute-Soul. ENNEADS: V IX. 14

It must clearly be either Soul or the Present Moment. ENNEADS: VI I. 4

Otherwise, everything will be relative; for anything you think of — even Soul — bears some relationship to something else. ENNEADS: VI I. 17

How does it occur that Matter sometimes turns into bodies, while another part of it turns into Soul? ENNEADS: VI I. 27

Even supposing that Form might come to it from elsewhere, that accession of Quality to Matter would account not for Soul, but simply for organized body soulless. ENNEADS: VI I. 27

If, on the contrary, there is something which both moulds Matter and produces Soul, then prior to the produced there must be Soul the producer. ENNEADS: VI I. 27

And if its assertions were intelligent, we must wonder how it thinks and performs the functions of Soul without possessing either Intellect or Soul. ENNEADS: VI I. 29

But if we take Soul, single, continuous, without extension, of the highest simplicity — as the first effort of the mind makes manifest — how can we expect to find multiplicity here too? ENNEADS: VI II. 4

But the creative principle [in bodies] is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity. ENNEADS: VI II. 5

Certainly Soul itself is one Reason-Principle, the chief of the Reason-Principles, and these are its Act as it functions in accordance with its essential being; this essential being, on the other hand, is the potentiality of the Reason-Principles. ENNEADS: VI II. 5

But, to leave the region of its effect, suppose we take it at the higher non-effecting part of Soul; is not plurality of powers to be found in this part also? ENNEADS: VI II. 5

Being in the case of the stone is not Being pure and simple, but stone-being: so here; Soul's being denotes not merely Being but Soul-being. ENNEADS: VI II. 5

Is then that "being" distinct from what else goes to complete the essence [or substance] of Soul? ENNEADS: VI II. 5

Is it to be identified with Bring [the Absolute], while to some differentia of Being is ascribed the production of Soul? ENNEADS: VI II. 5

No doubt Soul is in a sense Being, and this is not as a man "is" white, but from the fact of its being purely an essence: in other words, the being it possesses it holds from no source external to its own essence. ENNEADS: VI II. 5

But if it is conditioned by a particular character, and this character is external to its essence, its essence does not comprise all that makes it Soul; its individuality will determine it; a part of Soul will be essence, but not Soul entire. ENNEADS: VI II. 6

No: the being must be a form of Being appropriate to a source, so to speak, and a first-principle, or rather must take the forms appropriate to all that is comprised in Soul's being: the being here must, that is, be life, and the life and the being must be one. ENNEADS: VI II. 6

No; it is the substrate of Soul that is one, though one in such a way as to be also two or more — as many as are the Primaries which constitute Soul. ENNEADS: VI II. 6

Soul, then, is one and many — as many as are manifested in that oneness — one in its nature, many in those other things. ENNEADS: VI II. 6

We have found Substance [Essence] and life simultaneously present in Soul. ENNEADS: VI II. 7

Now, this Substance is a common property of Soul, but life, common to all souls, differs in that it is a property of Intellect also. ENNEADS: VI II. 7

As for unity: If the term is to mean a unity in which nothing else is present, neither Soul nor Intellect nor anything else, this can be predicated of nothing, and therefore cannot be a genus. ENNEADS: VI II. 9

Nevertheless, all are representations of the one exemplar, some quite remote, others more effective: the truer likeness is in the Intellectual; Soul is a unity, and still more is Intellect a unity and Being a unity. ENNEADS: VI II. 11

The words apply equally to Soul; Soul is subsequent to Intellect, yet by its very nature it involves Intellect in itself and perceives more clearly in that prior. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

Now Soul has Intellect for its prior, is therefore circumscribed by number down to its ultimate extremity; at that point infinity is reached. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

Soul too is a part of a part, though in the sense of being an Act [actuality] derived from it. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

When the Act of Intellect is directed upon itself, the result is the manifold [particular] intellects; when it looks outwards, Soul is produced. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

If Soul acts as a genus or a species, the various [particular] souls must act as species. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

Their activities [Acts] will be twofold: the activity upward is Intellect; that which looks downward constitutes the other powers imposed by the particular Reason-Principle [the Reason-Principle of the being ensouled]; the lowest activity of Soul is in its contact with Matter to which it brings Form. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

This lower part of Soul does not prevent the rest from being entirely in the higher sphere: indeed what we call the lower part is but an image of Soul: not that it is cut off from Soul; it is like the reflection in the mirror, depending upon the original which stands outside of it. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

The representation, notice, in the portrait or on the water is not of the dual being, but of the one element [Matter] as formed by the other [Soul]. ENNEADS: VI II. 22

True, it involves the parallel existence of Body and Soul, for the Universe is a living form: essentially however Soul is of the Intellectual and does not enter into the structure of what is called Sensible Being. ENNEADS: VI III. 1

Remembering this fact, we must — however great the difficulty — exclude Soul from the present investigation, just as in a census of citizens, taken in the interests of commerce and taxation, we should ignore the alien population. ENNEADS: VI III. 1

As for the experiences to which Soul is indirectly subject in its conjunction with Body and by reason of Body's presence, their classification must be attempted at a later stage, when we enquire into the details of Sensible Existence. ENNEADS: VI III. 1

It may even be doubted whether the arts, as Reason-Principles, can fairly be among Sensible qualities; Reason-Principles, it is true, may reside in Matter, but "matter" for them means Soul. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

Geometry and arithmetic are, we shall maintain, of a twofold character; in their earthly types they rank with Sensible Quality, but in so far as they are functions of pure Soul, they necessarily belong to that other world in close proximity to the Intellectual. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

The arts concerned with material objects and making use of perceptible instruments and sense-perception must be classed with Sensible Quality, even though they are dispositions of the Soul, attendant upon its apostasy. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

There is also every reason for consigning to this category the practical virtues whose function is directed to a social end: these do not isolate Soul by inclining it towards the higher; their manifestation makes for beauty in this world, a beauty regarded not as necessary but as desirable. 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

But we refrain from assigning Soul to Sensible Substance, on the ground that we have already referred to Quality [which is Sensible] those affections of Soul which are related to body. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

On the contrary, Soul, conceived apart from affection and Reason-Principle, we have restored to its origin, leaving in the lower realm no substance which is in any sense Intellectual. ENNEADS: VI III. 16

To proceed to identify this bodily motion with life would however be unwarrantable; it must be considered as identical only in name with the motions of Intellect and Soul. ENNEADS: VI III. 22

Soul too? ENNEADS: VI IV. 4

That One Soul — member of the Intellectual kosmos and there merging what it has of partial into the total — has broken away, so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself becoming partial with it: thus fire that might consume everything may be set to ply its all-power upon some trifle. ENNEADS: VI IV. 16

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 thing There [Soul in the Intellectual] was in some sense horse and dog from the beginning; given the condition, it produces the higher kind; let the condition fail, then, since produce it must, it produces what it may: it is like a skillful craftsman competent to create all kinds of works of art but reduced to making what is ordered and what the aptitude of his material indicates. ENNEADS: VI VII. 7

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

Soul and life are traces of Intellectual-Principle; that principle is the Term of Soul which on judgement sets itself towards Intellectual-Principle, pronouncing right preferable to wrong and virtue in every form to vice, and thus ranking by its choosing. ENNEADS: VI VII. 20

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

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

Soul becomes free when it moves, through Intellectual-Principle, towards The Good; what it does in that spirit is its free act; Intellectual-Principle is free in its own right. ENNEADS: VI VIII. 7

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

Soul, while distinct from unity's very self, is a thing of the greater unity in proportion as it is of the greater, the authentic, being. ENNEADS: VI IX. 1

Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is prevented by that very unification from recognising that it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this intuition. ENNEADS: VI IX. 3

Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation from Intellectual-Principle and as holding its value by a Reason-Principle thence infused. ENNEADS: VI IX. 5

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