The system of Plotinus is a system of necessary emanation, procession, or irradiation accompanied by necessary aspiration or reversion-to-source: all the forms and phases of Existence flow from the Divinity and all strive to return Thither and to remain There.

This Divinity is a graded Triad.

Its three Hypostases - or in modern religious terminology, 'Persons' - are, in the briefest description:

1 The One, or First Existent.
2 The Divine Mind, or First Thinker and Thought.
3 The All-Soul, or First and Only Principle of Life.

'Of all things the governance and the existence are in these Three.'

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The Triad, it must never under any stress be forgotten, is The Divinity, and each Hypostasis is Divine: the All-Soul, as Jules Simon well remarks, is the expression of the outgoing energy of the Divinity as the Intellectual-Principle is the expression of the Godhead's self-pent Thought or Vision.

The Divinity is communicated and approached by the channel of any one of the three Hypostases. The Intellectual-Principle has its Act about The First, towards Which it 'looks' in eternal 'contemplation', while, of its lavishness, it engenders the Vital-Principle or Soul; similarly the All-Soul ceaselessly 'looks' towards the Intellectual-Principle, while, of its lavish energy, it engenders or creates all the lower, down to the lowest form of being in the visible universe. Thus the Divinity is communicated to all things. Now this action within the Divine-Circle is reflected by a parallel action in the lower Cosmos. All 'Nature', even in the lowest, is in ceaseless Contemplation and Aspiration: while every being, until the ultimate possible is reached, tends to engender an image of itself, it tends also to rejoin the next highest, of which it is itself a shadow or lower manifestation: even Matter, all but outcast from the sphere of Being and unable to engender, has the power of receiving form and is, thereby, tending feebly towards Authentic-Existence, towards Soul and Mind, and so is linked, distantly, with the Divine.