body

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the BODY, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending. Enneads I,1,

Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for courage: courage implies the presence of danger. 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,1,

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,1,

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,1,

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,1,

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. 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,1,

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from BODY to Soul? Body may communicate qualities or conditions to another BODY: but – BODY to Soul? Something happens to A; does that make it happen to B? 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,1,

But apart from the philosophical separation how does Soul stand to BODY? Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are possible. 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,1,

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,1,

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. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such as Sense-Perception? No: the BODY has acquired life, it is the BODY that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the BODY, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the BODY. And fear, too, will belong to the BODY alone; for it is the BODY’s doom to fail of its joys and to perish. Enneads I,1,

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,1,

Let us then suppose Soul to be in BODY as Ideal-Form in Matter. 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,1,

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,1,

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,1,

The BODY, the live-BODY as we know it, we will consider later. Enneads I,1,

Let us take first the Couplement of BODY and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement? 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. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation unexplained. Enneads I,1,

Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the BODY and in the entire Animate. 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? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet not be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than before to any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement. Enneads I,1,

Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and, collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? 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. 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,1,

In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be desire in the Desiring-Faculty as well. How can this be? Are we to suppose that, when the man originates the desire, the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order? How could the Man have come to desire at all unless through a prior activity in the Desiring-Faculty? Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that takes the lead? Yet how, unless the BODY be first in the appropriate condition? Enneads I,1,

But if sensation is a movement traversing the BODY and culminating in Soul, how the soul lack sensation? The very presence of the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul. Enneads I,1,

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,1,

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,1,

And how do we possess the Divinity? 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. 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,1,

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.e, with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For Understanding, the true, is the Act of the Intellections: in many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the inner. Enneads I,1,

But it has been observed that the Couplement, too – especially before our emancipation – is a member of this total We, and in fact what the BODY experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends the brute. 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. (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,1,

And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the Animate? 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,1,

But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? 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,1,

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this BODY only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other (lower) phase of the Soul. 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,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. 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,2,

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness? 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. 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,2,

So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle? Identity with what God? The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion – anger, desire and the like, with grief and its kin – and in what degree the disengagement from the BODY is possible. Enneads I,2,

Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the BODY bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished. Enneads I,4,

“The Sage,” we shall be told, “may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely… until the BODY’s appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the BODY to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate’s distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the BODY or the BODY’s sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness.” Enneads I,4,

What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to anything below? If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter – kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork – how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or… Zeus… by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the BODY. Enneads I,4,

But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice? Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars? But if he go unburied? Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his BODY will always rot. Enneads I,4,

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the BODY, Reason and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination. Enneads I,4,

The pleasure demanded for the life cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications of the BODY – there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness – nor in any violent emotions – what could so move the Sage? – it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself: his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable. Enneads I,4,

For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and BODY: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the BODY and disdain its nominal goods. Enneads I,4,

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,4,

A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make felicity; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest: the BODY must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the appearances. Enneads I,4,

Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the BODY he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to know nothing of the BODY. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it. Enneads I,4,

What though the one be favoured in BODY and in all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to? The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself that he is more truly happy than the man without them: the utmost profusion of such boons would not help even to make a flute-player. Enneads I,4,

He will give to the BODY all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not prevented from abandoning the BODY, necessarily leaving it at nature’s hour, he himself always the master to decide in its regard. Enneads I,4,

Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness? Do not all troubles – long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type – yield a greater sum of misery in the longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment happiness when all is well? In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase: for example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the BODY is brought lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but that of the present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state – in the sense that, the evil in the sufferer’s condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time. Enneads I,5,

The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being BODY and being beautiful. Enneads I,6,

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the BODY but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers. Enneads I,6,

What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within, what do you feel? 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? These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of love. Enneads I,6,

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? An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of BODY, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its own essential Idea. Enneads I,6,

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. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. 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,6,

Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of BODY find their joy in foulness. Enneads I,6,

What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the pleasures of the BODY, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean? 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. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above. Enneads I,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,6,

But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane? He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace that show in BODY, let him not pursue: he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water – is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness? 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,6,

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,7,

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,7,

But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought under the causing principle indicated? Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a BODY made of Matter. Enneads I,8,

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? Well, sickness is excess or defect in the BODY, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but matter not mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to be one long want. Enneads I,8,

The escape, we read, is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self from the BODY; this is the escape from Matter. Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he remains bound; and the phrase “to live among the gods” means to live among the Intelligible-Existents, for these are the Immortals. Enneads I,8,

They will say that neither ignorance nor wicked desires arise in Matter. Even if they admit that the unhappy condition within us is due to the pravity inherent in BODY, they will urge that still the blame lies not in the Matter itself but with the Form present in it – such Form as heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all other conditions perceptible to sense, or again such states as being full or void – not in the concrete signification but in the presence or absence of just such forms. In a word, they will argue, all particularity in desires and even in perverted judgements upon things, can be referred to such causes, so that Evil lies in this Form much more than in the mere Matter. Enneads I,8,

No, if BODY is the cause of Evil, then there is no escape; the cause of Evil is Matter. Enneads I,8,

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute GoodGood and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. 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. 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,8,

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,8,

It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for all these are pure and, as we read, winged and perfect and unimpeded in their task: there remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither cleansed nor clean; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm or bile in the organs of the BODY. Enneads I,8,

For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. 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,8,

But how does the BODY come to be separated? 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,8,

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. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge. Enneads I,8,

The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of BODY stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity? Let us suppose this persistence to be the result of the all-inclusiveness of the celestial and universal – with its consequence, the absence of any outlying matter into which change could take place or which could break in and destroy. Enneads: II I

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

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

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

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

We have authority for this where we read: “At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light”: he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm: this light is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other “light” which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the veritable “incandescent BODY.” Plato’s word earthy is commonly taken in too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay. Enneads: II I

Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible? Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions no power to force it down. Again, BODY in contact with soul must always be very different from BODY left to itself; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference. Enneads: II I

In sum, then, no outside BODY is necessary to the heavens to ensure their permanence – or to produce their circular movement, for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line; on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here represent a slipping-away from the being (a phenomenon not incident to the celestial sphere) and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm. Enneads: II I

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,2,

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,2,

But supposing that the circular movement is to be attributed to the BODY, how is it to be explained, since all BODY, including fire (which constitutes the heavens) has straightforward motion? The answer is that forthright movement is maintained only pending arrival at the place for which the moving thing is destined: where a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to come for its rest; its motion is its tendence to its appointed place. Enneads II,2,

Further, the centre of a circle (and therefore of the Kosmos) is distinctively a point of rest: if the circumference outside were not in motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case of a living thing whose nature binds it within a BODY. Such motion alone can constitute its impulse towards its centre: it cannot coincide with the centre, for then there would be no circle; since this may not be, it whirls about it; so only can it indulge its tendence. Enneads II,2,

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,2,

But if, wherever the circling BODY be, it possesses the Soul, what need of the circling? Because everywhere it finds something else besides the Soul (which it desires to possess alone). Enneads II,2,

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

In BODY, centre is a point of place; in Soul it is a source, the source of some other nature. 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,2,

And why not our very bodies, also? Because the forward path is characteristic of BODY and because all the BODY’s impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it at all. Enneads II,2,

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. The lower then, ringed round by the higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this upward tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is involved: for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion. 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,2,

But all the stars are serviceable to the Universe, and therefore can stand to each other only as the service of the Universe demands, in a harmony like that observed in the members of any one animal form. They exist essentially for the purpose of the Universe, just as the gall exists for the purposes of the BODY as a whole not less than for its own immediate function: it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but without allowing the entire organism and its own especial region to run riot. Some such balance of function was indispensable in the All – bitter with sweet. There must be differentiation – eyes and so forth – but all the members will be in sympathy with the entire animal frame to which they belong. Only so can there be a unity and a total harmony. Enneads II,3,

We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one<one principle underlying any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or in some other part of the BODY. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies. Enneads II,3,

What, after all this, remains to stand for the “We”? The “We” is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the BODY, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall. Enneads II,3,

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. 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,3,

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,3,

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. 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,3,

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,3,

Wealth may be due to personal activity: in this case if the BODY has contributed, part of the effect is due to whatever has contributed towards the physical powers, first the parents and then, if place has had its influence, sky and earth; if the BODY has borne no part of the burden, then the success, and all the splendid accompaniments added by the Recompensers, must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If fortune has come by gift from the good, then the source of the wealth is, again, virtue: if by gift from the evil, but to a meritorious recipient, then the credit must be given to the action of the best in them: if the recipient is himself unprincipled, the wealth must be attributed primarily to the very wickedness and to whatsoever is responsible for the wickedness, while the givers bear an equal share in the wrong. Enneads II,3,

But what is the significance of the Lots? By the Lots we are to understand birth into the conditions actually existent in the All at the particular moment of each entry into BODY, birth into such and such a physical frame, from such and such parents, in this or that place, and generally all that in our phraseology is the External. Enneads II,3,

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,3,

The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter – and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a BODY void of quality, but a magnitude. Enneads II,4,

And again, where could it have come from? whence did it take its being? If it is derived, it has a source: if it is eternal, then the Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the union constitutes a BODY; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme. Enneads II,4,

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: BODY without shape has never existed, always BODY achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two – Matter and Idea – by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter. Enneads II,4,

We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of BODY. Enneads II,4,

If this “infinite” means “of endless extension” there is no infinite among beings; there is neither an infinity-in-itself (Infinity Abstract) nor an infinity as an attribute to some BODY; for in the first case every part of that infinity would be infinite and in the second an object in which the infinity was present as an attribute could not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex, could not therefore be Matter. Enneads II,4,

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. Any number of reasons might be brought, and have been brought, against this hypothesis and it need detain us no longer. Enneads II,4,

“But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of BODY?” Enneads II,4,

“Or, taking a larger view, observe that actions, productive operations, periods of time, movements, none of these have any such substratum and yet are real things; in the same way the most elementary BODY has no need of Matter; things may be, all, what they are, each after its own kind, in their great variety, deriving the coherence of their being from the blending of the various Ideal-Forms. This Matter with its sizelessness seems, then, to be a name without a content.” Enneads II,4,

It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude: the Ideal-Forms of BODY are Ideas installed in Mass. Enneads II,4,

But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. 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.e., instead of Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so producing BODY, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling remote in Soul.) Enneads II,4,

The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since it has been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from Magnitude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that is composite: once each of the constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no need of any other base. No doubt there must be a container, as it were a place, to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even BODY precede place and space; the primal necessity, in order to the existence of BODY, is Matter. Enneads II,4,

Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and, therefore, to BODY. Enneads II,4,

It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour: it is not heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour for nostrils or palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither is it corporeal; and touch deals with BODY, which is known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry – all properties utterly lacking in Matter. Enneads II,4,

It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of the intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject; and so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No bodiliness belongs to it; bodiliness is itself a phase of Reason-Principle and so is something different from Matter, as Matter, therefore, from it: bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be BODY manifest and not Matter unelaborated. Enneads II,4,

In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very substance of the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing more, (not constituting but simply) giving some particular character to the real thing; in this second case the qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which – whether in soul or BODY – merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing. Enneads: II VI.

What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality which precedes the qualified Reality? Its mere BODY, perhaps? If so, BODY being the Reality, fire is a warmed BODY; and the total thing is not the Reality; and the fire has warmth as a man might have a snub nose. Enneads: II VI.

Those, on the other hand, that accept “complete transfusion,” might object that it does not require the reduction of the mixed things to fragments, a certain cleavage being sufficient: thus, for instance, sweat does not split up the BODY or even pierce holes in it. And if it is answered that this may well be a special decree of Nature to allow of the sweat exuding, there is the case of those manufactured articles, slender but without puncture, in which we can see a liquid wetting them through and through so that it runs down from the upper to the under surface. How can this fact be explained, since both the liquid and the solid are bodily substances? Interpenetration without disintegration is difficult to conceive, and if there is such mutual disintegration the two must obviously destroy each other. Enneads: II VII.

But let it be understood how we came to say that BODY passing through and through another BODY must produce disintegration, while we make qualities pervade their substances without producing disintegration: the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is bodiless: it may, then, be supposed that as Matter pervades everything so the bodiless qualities associated with it – as long as they are few – have the power of penetration without disintegration. Anything solid would be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a solid has the precise quality which forbids it to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of too many qualities in Matter (constitutes density and so) produces the same inhibition. Enneads: II VII.

If, then, what we call a dense BODY is so by reason of the presence of many qualities, that plenitude of qualities will be the cause (of the inhibition). Enneads: II VII.

We have thus covered our main ground, but since corporeity has been mentioned, we must consider its nature: is it the conjunction of all the qualities or is it an Idea, or Reason-Principle, whose presence in Matter constitutes a BODY? Now if BODY is the compound, the thing made up of all the required qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is nothing more than their conjunction. Enneads: II VII.

And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the BODY, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the BODY: thus the BODY will be Matter associated with an indwelling Reason-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even though irremoveably attached to the BODY. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man – treated elsewhere – which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle. Enneads: II VII.

Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive BODY within range. Enneads: II VIII.

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 VIII.

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. 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. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past. Enneads: II VIII.

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 VIII.

That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the BODY is no gain to a Soul. Enneads: II VIII.

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. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the BODY admits nothing bodily to itself. 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. 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 VIII.

This earth of ours is full of varied life-forms and of immortal beings; to the very heavens it is crowded. And the stars, those of the upper and the under spheres, moving in their ordered path, fellow-travellers with the universe, how can they be less than gods? Surely they must be morally good: what could prevent them? All that occasions vice here below is unknown there evil of BODY, perturbed and perturbing. Enneads: II VIII.

If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to serve towards beauty and order. The action attributed to them must be understood as a foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is due, in part to diverse destinies – for there cannot be one lot for the entire BODY of men – in part to the birth moment, in part to wide divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls. Enneads: II VIII.

Their error is that they know nothing good here: all they care for is something else to which they will at some future time apply themselves: yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the starting-point of the pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction. The understanding of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of the BODY, and those that have no part in well-doing can make no step towards the Supernal. Enneads: II VIII.

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 VIII.

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 VIII.

These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such stirring, and that they see no difference between beautiful and ugly forms of BODY; but, at that, they can make no distinction between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct; sciences can have no beauty; there can be none in thought; and none, therefore, in God. This world descends from the Firsts: if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source; springing thence, this world, too, must have its beautiful things. And while they proclaim their contempt for earthly beauty, they would do well to ignore that of youths and women so as not to be overcome by incontinence. Enneads: II VIII.

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 VIII.

Or would this school reject the word Sister? 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? 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. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength. Enneads: II VIII.

No: it is possible to go free of love for the BODY; to be clean-living, to disregard death; to know the Highest and aim at that other world; not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it and faithful to it; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our sense they stand still – the error which in another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation. Enneads: II VIII.

What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury? 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

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<one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine. Enneads III,2,

Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring: a slight deviation at the beginning develops with every advance into a continuously wider and graver error – especially since there is the attached BODY with its inevitable concomitant of desire – and the first step, the hasty movement not previously considered and not immediately corrected, ends by establishing a set habit where there was at first only a fall. Enneads III,2,

Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good – only to the evil are they disastrous – and where there is BODY there must be ill health. Enneads III,2,

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. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers – poverty and sickness, for example – and as for vice, even this brings something to the general service: it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast of the evil under which wrong-doers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends; and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms. Enneads III,2,

A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this Universe contains BODY, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine Reason. Enneads III,2,

The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end; all that comes into being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of man and beast? This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others? Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but changing a BODY as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the BODY like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another? Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed: that way would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime. Enneads III,2,

Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of Reason-Principles which, by the fact that they are Principles of harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more comprehensive Principle, greater than they and including them as its parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we find contraries – white and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless, reasoning and unreasoning – but all these elements are members of one living BODY, their sum-total; the Universe is a self-accordant entity, its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation of a Reason-Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then, must be the unification of conflicting Reason-Principles whose very opposition is the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being. Enneads III,2,

All such right-doing, then, is linked to Providence; but it is not therefore performed by it: men or other agents, living or lifeless, are causes of certain things happening, and any good that may result is taken up again by Providence. In the total, then, the right rules and what has happened amiss is transformed and corrected. Thus, to take an example from a single BODY, the Providence of a living organism implies its health; let it be gashed or otherwise wounded, and that Reason-Principle which governs it sets to work to draw it together, knit it anew, heal it, and put the affected part to rights. Enneads III,3,

What does this imply? 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. No doubt even in things of the nearer order there was indetermination, but within a form; they were undetermined not utterly but only in contrast with their perfect state: at this extreme point we have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its highest degree and it becomes BODY by taking such shape as serves its scope; then it becomes the recipient of its author and sustainer: this presence in BODY is the only example of the boundaries of Higher Existents running into the boundary of the Lower. Enneads III,4,

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the BODY grows and propagates: all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the BODY it is what it is, what it most intensely lived. Enneads III,4,

But is this lower extremity of our intellective phase fettered to BODY for ever? No: if we turn, this turns by the same act. Enneads III,4,

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? 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? Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but becomes the one or the other by force of act? But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered BODY, or if a perfect BODY falls to a man naturally vicious? 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. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted conditions to their own particular quality. Enneads III,4,

Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the beauty found on earth, the beauty of image and of BODY; it is because they are strangers to the Archetype, the source of even the attraction they feel towards what is lovely here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that in the higher realm and these love the earthly as an image; those that have not attained to this memory do not understand what is happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy the beauty of earth; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is sin. Enneads III,5,

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! 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! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals. Enneads III,5,

But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what Matter? Certainly none in bodily Matter; that would make them simply living things of the order of sense. And if, even, they are to invest themselves in bodies of air or of fire, the nature must have already been altered before they could have any contact with the corporeal. The Pure does not mix, unmediated, with BODY – though many think that the Celestial-Kind, of its very essence, comports a BODY aerial or of fire. Enneads III,5,

But why should one order of Celestial descend to BODY and another not? The difference implies the existence of some cause or medium working upon such as thus descend. What would constitute such a medium? We are forced to assume that there is a Matter of the Intellectual Order, and that Beings partaking of it are thereby enabled to enter into the lower Matter, the corporeal. Enneads III,5,

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,6,

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,6,

But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear – are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the Soul? This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious facts. But, while we recognize this, we must make very sure what it is that changes. 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,6,

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. Fear begins in the mind; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the BODY; the purely mental phase has not reached the point of sensation: the same is true of pain. So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows. Enneads III,6,

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,6,

But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind? The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. 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. It is equally certain that in all that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the BODY, belongs to the sense-order; trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. 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,6,

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? 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. Is it not a true purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly things? Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer entering into the BODY to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a light, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all. Enneads III,6,

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,6,

If we have thus rightly described the Authentic Existent, we see that it cannot be any kind of BODY nor the under-stuff of BODY; in such entities the Being is simply the existing of things outside of Being. Enneads III,6,

But BODY, a non-existence? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a non-existence? Mountain and rock, the wide solid earth, all that resists, all that can be struck and driven, surely all proclaims the real existence of the corporeal? 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? Yet even the corporeal realm witnesses for us; the resting earth has certainly a scantier share in Being than belongs to what has more motion and less solidity – and less than belongs to its own most upward element, for fire begins, already, to flit up and away outside of the BODY-kind. Enneads III,6,

Again, Movement, which is a sort of life within bodies, an imitation of true Life, is the more decided where there is the least of BODY a sign that the waning of Being makes the object affected more distinctly corporeal. Enneads III,6,

The changes known as affections show even more clearly that where the bodily quality is most pronounced susceptibility is at its intensest – earth more susceptible than other elements, and these others again more or less so in the degree of their corporeality: sever the other elements and, failing some preventive force, they join again; but earthy matter divided remains apart indefinitely. Things whose nature represents a diminishment have no power of recuperation after even a slight disturbance and they perish; thus what has most definitely become BODY, having most closely approximated to non-being lacks the strength to reknit its unity: the heavy and violent crash of BODY against BODY works destruction, and weak is powerful against weak, non-being against its like. Enneads III,6,

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify BODY with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision. 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,6,

Matter must be bodiless – for BODY is a later production, a compound made by Matter in conjunction with some other entity. Thus it is included among incorporeal things in the sense that BODY is something that is neither Real-Being nor Matter. Enneads III,6,

But how can this follow on the conjunction when no unity has been produced by the two? Even if such a unity had been produced, it would be a unity of things not mutually sharing experiences but acting upon each other. And the question would then arise whether each was effective upon the other or whether the sole action was not that of one (the form) preventing the other (the Matter) from slipping away? But when any material thing is severed, must not the Matter be divided with it? Surely the bodily modification and other experience that have accompanied the sundering, must have occurred, identically, within the Matter? This reasoning would force the destructibility of Matter upon us: “the BODY is dissolved; then the Matter is dissolved.” We would have to allow Matter to be a thing of quantity, a magnitude. But since it is not a magnitude it could not have the experiences that belong to magnitude and, on the larger scale, since it is not BODY it cannot know the experiences of BODY. Enneads III,6,

In fact those that declare Matter subject to modification may as well declare it BODY right out. Enneads III,6,

In bodies, necessarily compounds, Magnitude though not a determined Magnitude must be present as one of the constituents; it is implied in the very notion of BODY; but Matter – not a Body – excludes even undetermined Magnitude. Enneads III,6,

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. (Body is modified: Mind knows) but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy. Enneads III,6,

Things and Beings in the Time order – even when to all appearance complete, as a BODY is when fit to harbour a soul – are still bound to sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which they need: let them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete; completeness is attributed to them only by an accident of language. Enneads III,7,

You must relate the BODY, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the man’s soul. Enneads III,7,

…. For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire BODY of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme. Enneads III,8,

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. 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,8,

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

But there is a difference: The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to partition. 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

Thus it is that, entering this realm, it possesses still the vision inherent to that superior phase in virtue of which it unchangingly maintains its integral nature. Even here it is not exclusively the partible soul: it is still the impartible as well: what in it knows partition is parted without partibility; undivided as giving itself to the entire BODY, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective in every part. Enneads: IV I

So far we have the primarily indivisible – supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent – and we have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also another Kind, of earlier rank than the sensible yet near to it and resident within it – an order, not, like BODY, primarily a thing of part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we may think of colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations. In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility. Enneads IV,2,

The Essence, very near to the impartible, which we assert to belong to the Kind we are now dealing with, is at once an Essence and an entrant into BODY; upon embodiment, it experiences a partition unknown before it thus bestowed itself. Enneads IV,2,

This unity of an Essence is not like that of BODY, which is a unit by the mode of continuous extension, the mode of distinct parts each occupying its own space. Nor is it such a unity as we have dealt with in the case of quality. Enneads IV,2,

Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass: it exists here and yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered identity: thus it is “parted and not parted,” or, better, it has never known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a self-gathered integral, and is “parted among bodies” merely in the sense that bodies, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot receive it unless in some partitive mode; the partition, in other words, is an occurrence in BODY not in soul. Enneads IV,2,

If it had the nature of BODY it would consist of isolated members each unaware of the conditions of every other; there would be a particular soul – say a soul of the finger – answering as a distinct and independent entity to every local experience; in general terms, there would be a multiplicity of souls administering each individual; and, moreover, the universe would be governed not by one soul but by an incalculable number, each standing apart to itself. But, without a dominant unity, continuity is meaningless. Enneads IV,2,

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,2,

Now even in the universal Intellect (Divine Mind) there was duality, so that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which soul comes to occupy BODY. For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be offshoots from the soul of the universe (parts and an identity modally parted). Enneads IV,3,

They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says “As our BODY is a portion of the BODY of the All, so our soul is a portion of the soul of the All.” 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. They will urge also that the dictum “The collective soul cares for all the unensouled,” carries the same implication and could be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be there to concern itself with the unensouled. Enneads IV,3,

Part, as understood of BODY – uniform or varied – need not detain us; it is enough to indicate that, when part is mentioned in respect of things whose members are alike, it refers to mass and not to ideal-form (specific idea): take for example, whiteness: the whiteness in a portion of milk is not a part of the whiteness of milk in general: we have the whiteness of a portion not a portion of whiteness; for whiteness is utterly without magnitude; has nothing whatever to do with quantity. Enneads IV,3,

In a line, no doubt, the part is inevitably a line; but even here there is a necessary difference in size; and if, in the case of the soul we similarly called upon magnitude as the distinction between constituents and collective soul, then soul, thus classed by magnitude becomes quantitative, and is simply BODY. Enneads IV,3,

Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being, the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire? This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside of BODY, or that – no soul being within BODY – the thing described as the soul of the universe is, none the less, outside the BODY of the universe. That is a point to be investigated, but for the present we must consider what kind of soul this parallel would give us. Enneads IV,3,

But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly, the difficulty of soul in BODY as against soul not embodied. Enneads IV,3,

We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit BODY; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its BODY as the human soul does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul, while it must leave the BODY, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human soul can go free of the BODY but the All-Soul not, though they are one and the same? There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing. Enneads IV,3,

A possible solution may be offered: The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into BODY; the differentiated souls – the All-Soul, with the others – issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. Enneads IV,3,

The one – the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul – would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth – for this is the ratio of the animated BODY to the universe – while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent upon his own care and cure, and so living for the BODY, BODY-bound. Enneads IV,3,

But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and mine and another’s? 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? At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates’ soul remained in BODY; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest. Enneads IV,3,

The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but dwelling within it and assuming BODY therein, while the others received their allotted spheres when the BODY was already in existence, when their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one (the creative All-Soul) looks towards the universal Intellectual-Principle (the exemplar of all that can be), while the others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator – the work accomplished before them – an impediment inevitable whichsoever of the souls were first to operate. Enneads IV,3,

So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul? The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the heavens are ensouled – a teaching which he maintains in the observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when we, who contain a part of the BODY of the All, have a soul; how, he asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total. Enneads IV,3,

As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic circuit, and taking character and condition thence; this is no indication that they are parts: soul-nature may very well take some tincture from even the qualities of place, from water and from air; residence in this city or in that, and the varying make-up of the BODY may have their influence (upon our human souls which, yet, are no parts of place or of BODY). Enneads IV,3,

This means that it is no external limit that defines the individual being or the extension of souls any more than of God; on the contrary each in right of its own power is all that it chooses to be: and we are not to think of it as going forth from itself (losing its unity by any partition): the fact is simply that the element within it, which is apt to entrance into BODY, has the power of immediate projection any whither: the soul is certainly not wrenched asunder by its presence at once in foot and in finger. Its presence in the All is similarly unbroken; over its entire range it exists in every several part of everything having even vegetal life, even in a part cut off from the main; in any possible segment it is as it is at its source. For the BODY of the All is a unit, and soul is everywhere present to it as to one thing. Enneads IV,3,

When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the Life-Principle now present is not the particular soul that was in the larger BODY; that BODY has ceased to be receptive of soul, or there would have been no death; what happens is that whatsoever in the product of the decay is apt material for animal existence of one kind or another becomes ensouled by the fact that soul is nowhere lacking, though a recipient of soul may be. This new ensouling does not mean, however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one or, rather, all remains one: it is as with ourselves; some elements are shed, others grow in their place; the soul abandons the discarded and flows into the newcoming as long as the one<one soul of the man holds its ground; in the All the one<one soul holds its ground for ever; its distinct contents now retain soul and now reject it, but the total of spiritual beings is unaffected. Enneads IV,3,

But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the BODY – the manner and the process – a question certainly of no minor interest. Enneads IV,3,

The entry of soul into BODY takes place under two forms. Enneads IV,3,

Firstly, there is the entry – metensomatosis – of a soul present in BODY by change from one (wholly material) frame to another or the entry – not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier habitacle is not certainly definable – of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery BODY for one of earth. Enneads IV,3,

Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of BODY; this is the earliest form of any dealing between BODY and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation. Enneads IV,3,

What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from BODY, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature? It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All. Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use such words as “entry” and “ensoulment,” though never was this All unensouled, never did BODY subsist with soul away, never was there Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which must in fact be co-existent. Enneads IV,3,

The true doctrine may be stated as follows: In the absence of BODY, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once BODY, also, exists. Enneads IV,3,

The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature – a thing unbounded – as to embrace the entire BODY of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea (the Divine forming power) which it conveys. Enneads IV,3,

In soulless entities, the outgo (natural to everything) remains dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it communicates reason to the BODY – an image of the reason within itself, just as the life given to the BODY is an image of Real-Being – and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it contains the Reason-Forms. Enneads IV,3,

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. 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,3,

The depth of the descent, also, will differ – sometimes lower, sometimes less low – and this even in its entry into any given Kind: all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the BODY of man or animal. Enneads IV,3,

In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image (the thing in the world of copy) to which its individual constitution inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender or leader acting at the right moment to bring it at the right moment whether into BODY or into a definitely appropriate BODY: of its own motion it descends at the precisely true time and enters where it must. 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,3,

The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a BODY; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude (physical extension) they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness. Enneads IV,3,

If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect, self-sufficing, in peril from no outside influence the soul now spoken of as indwelling would not occupy the BODY; it would infuse life while clinging, entire, within the Supreme. Enneads IV,3,

There remains still something to be said on the question whether the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it has left the BODY. Enneads IV,3,

“In bodies”: we must then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is required to produce life in the corporeal, and what there must be of soul present throughout such a BODY, such a completed organism. Enneads IV,3,

Now, every sensitive power – by the fact of being sensitive throughout – tends to become a thing of parts: present at every distinct point of sensitiveness, it may be thought of as divided. In the sense, however, that it is present as a whole at every such point, it cannot be said to be wholly divided; it “becomes divisible in BODY.” We may be told that no such partition is implied in any sensations but those of touch; but this is not so; where the participant is BODY (of itself insensitive and non-transmitting) that divisibility in the sensitive agent will be a condition of all other sensations, though in less degree than in the case of touch. Similarly the vegetative function in the soul, with that of growth, indicates divisibility; and, admitting such locations as that of desire at the liver and emotional activity at the heart, we have the same result. It is to be noted, however, as regards these (the less corporeal) sensations, that the BODY may possibly not experience them as a fact of the conjoint thing but in another mode, as rising within some one of the elements of which it has been participant (as inherent, purely, in some phase of the associated soul): reasoning and the act of the intellect, for instance, are not vested in the BODY; their task is not accomplished by means of the BODY which in fact is detrimental to any thinking on which it is allowed to intrude. Enneads IV,3,

Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the divisible; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole consisting of parts, each part a self-standing thing having its own peculiar virtue. None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible in BODY holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power, then this one same thing (the soul in BODY) may be at once indivisible and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its own divisible self with, in addition, the quality that it derives from above itself. Enneads IV,3,

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,3,

This simply shows that neither the soul entire nor any part of it may be considered to be within the BODY as in a space: space is a container, a container of BODY; it is the home of such things as consist of isolated parts, things, therefore, in which at no point is there an entirety; now, the soul is not a BODY and is no more contained than containing. Enneads IV,3,

Neither is it in BODY as in some vessel: whether as vessel or as place of location, the BODY would remain, in itself, unensouled. If we are to think of some passing-over from the soul – that self-gathered thing – to the containing vessel, then soul is diminished by just as much as the vessel takes. Enneads IV,3,

Space, again, in the strict sense is unembodied, and is not, itself, BODY; why, then, should it need soul? Besides (if the soul were contained as in space) contact would be only at the surface of the BODY, not throughout the entire mass. Enneads IV,3,

Many other considerations equally refute the notion that the soul is in BODY as (an object) in space; for example, this space would be shifted with every movement, and a thing itself would carry its own space about. Enneads IV,3,

Of course if by space we understand the interval separating objects, it is still less possible that the soul be in BODY as in space: such a separating interval must be a void; but BODY is not a void; the void must be that in which BODY is placed; BODY (not soul) will be in the void. Enneads IV,3,

Nor can it be in the BODY as in some substratum: anything in a substratum is a condition affecting that – a colour, a form – but the soul is a separate existence. Enneads IV,3,

Nor is it present as a part in the whole; soul is no part of BODY. If we are asked to think of soul as a part in the living total we are faced with the old difficulty: How it is in that whole. It is certainly not there as the wine is in the wine jar, or as the jar in the jar, or as some absolute is self-present. Enneads IV,3,

Nor can the presence be that of a whole in its part: It would be absurd to think of the soul as a total of which the BODY should represent the parts. Enneads IV,3,

It is not present as Form is in Matter; for the Form as in Matter is inseparable and, further, is something superimposed upon an already existent thing; soul, on the contrary, is that which engenders the Form residing within the Matter and therefore is not the Form. If the reference is not to the Form actually present, but to Form as a thing existing apart from all formed objects, it is hard to see how such an entity has found its way into BODY, and at any rate this makes the soul separable. Enneads IV,3,

How comes it then that everyone speaks of soul as being in BODY? Because the soul is not seen and the BODY is: we perceive the BODY, and by its movement and sensation we understand that it is ensouled, and we say that it possesses a soul; to speak of residence is a natural sequence. If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full force to the very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in BODY; we would say the minor was within the major, the contained within the container, the fleeting within the perdurable. Enneads IV,3,

What does all this come to? What answer do we give to him who, with no opinion of his own to assert, asks us to explain this presence? And what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase? Of the modes currently accepted for the presence of one thing in another, none really meets the case of the soul’s relation to the BODY. Thus we are given as a parallel the steersman in the ship; this serves adequately to indicate that the soul is potentially separable, but the mode of presence, which is what we are seeking, it does not exhibit. Enneads IV,3,

We can imagine it within the BODY in some incidental way – for example, as a voyager in a ship – but scarcely as the steersman: and, of course, too, the steersman is not omnipresent to the ship as the soul is to the BODY. Enneads IV,3,

Is it any help to adopt the illustration of the steersman taking the helm, and to station the soul within the BODY as the steersman may be thought to be within the material instrument through which he works? Soul, whenever and wherever it chooses to operate, does in much that way move the BODY. Enneads IV,3,

May we think that the mode of the soul’s presence to BODY is that of the presence of light to the air? This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit area it is dark; under the light it is lit: we have a true parallel to what we have been saying of BODY and soul, for the air is in the light quite as much as the light in the air. Enneads IV,3,

Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the BODY in its soul, and not its soul in the BODY, and says that, while there is a region of that soul which contains BODY, there is another region to which BODY does not enter – certain powers, that is, with which BODY has no concern. And what is true of the All-Soul is true of the others. Enneads IV,3,

There are, therefore, certain soul-powers whose presence to BODY must be denied. Enneads IV,3,

The phases present are those which the nature of BODY demands: they are present without being resident – either in any parts of the BODY or in the BODY as a whole. Enneads IV,3,

I explain: A living BODY is illuminated by soul: each organ and member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to itself; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle of the soul-faculty under which the function is performed; thus the seeing faculty acts through the eyes, the hearing faculty through the ears, the tasting faculty through the tongue, the faculty of smelling through the nostrils, and the faculty of sentient touch is present throughout, since in this particular form of perception the entire BODY is an instrument in the soul’s service. Enneads IV,3,

Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the Reason-Principle immediately above itself; downward, it is in contact with an inferior of its own: on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat; they lodged it in the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to BODY – at the point most receptive of the act of reason – while something, utterly isolated from BODY must be in contact with that superior thing which is a form of soul (and not merely of the vegetative or other quasi-corporeal forms but) of that soul apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle. Enneads IV,3,

Now comes the question of the soul leaving the BODY; where does it go? It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing within itself something of that which lures it. Enneads IV,3,

Souls, BODY-bound, are apt to BODY-punishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of BODY are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; BODY-free, containing nothing of BODY – there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be. Enneads IV,3,

If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are – and in your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one seeking for BODY. Enneads IV,3,

Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and BODY, sensation must be of that double nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the BODY to the tool employed: the BODY is passive and menial; the soul is active, reading such impressions as are made upon the BODY or discerned by means of the BODY, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the bodily experiences. Enneads IV,3,

It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily constitution determines our memories good or bad; but the answer would come that, whether the BODY happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the soul. And in the case of matters learned (and not merely felt, as corporeal experiences), how can we think of the Couplement of soul and BODY as the remembering principle? Here, surely, it must be soul alone? We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of something entirely distinct formed from the two elements (so that it might have memory though neither soul nor BODY had it). But, to begin with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither BODY nor soul; these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the animate whole. And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness will be due to the honey. Enneads IV,3,

It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired some degree of modification by its presence in BODY, it becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the BODY, it may reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in such a manner as to retain them (thus in some sense possessing memory). Enneads IV,3,

But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes (are not of corporeal nature at all); there is no resemblance to seal impressions, no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust (as of the seal) nor (the acceptance) as in the wax: the process is entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense; and what kind of resistance (or other physical action) can be affirmed in matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of BODY or bodily quality as a means? Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never came to the BODY: the BODY can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the BODY as a means to the remembrance of what the BODY by its nature cannot know. Enneads IV,3,

If the soul is to have any significance – to be a definite principle with a function of its own – we are forced to recognize two orders of fact, an order in which the BODY is a means but all culminates in soul, and an order which is of the soul alone. This being admitted, aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a consequence, will that memory of the aspiration and of its attainment or frustration, without which the soul’s nature would fall into the category of the unstable (that is to say of the undivine, unreal). Deny this character of the soul and at once we refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of comparison, almost any understanding. Yet these powers of which, embodied it becomes the source cannot be absent from its own nature. On the contrary; it possesses certain activities to be expressed in various functions whose accomplishment demands bodily organs; at its entry it brings with it (as vested in itself alone) the powers necessary for some of these functions, while in the case of others it brings the very activities themselves. Enneads IV,3,

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the BODY: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and dearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is a stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which BODY is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering – Lethe stream may be understood in this sense – and memory is a fact of the soul. Enneads IV,3,

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told: what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would recount? The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the BODY, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of one BODY after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion. Enneads IV,3,

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

There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul, and receives from it: soul, near to Nature but superior, operates towards Nature but without receiving in turn; and there is the still higher phase (the purely Intellectual) with no action whatever upon BODY or upon Matter. Enneads IV,4,

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,4,

When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the object – a sort of sensation, in announcement and in picture, of the experience – calling us to follow and to attain: the personality, whether it resists or follows and procures, is necessarily thrown out of equilibrium. The same disturbance is caused by passion urging revenge and by the needs of the BODY; every other sensation or experience effects its own change upon our mental attitude; then there is the ignorance of what is good and the indecision of a soul (a human soul) thus pulled in every direction; and, again, the interaction of all these perplexities gives rise to yet others. Enneads IV,4,

There remains the question whether the BODY possesses any force of its own – so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some individuality – or whether all it has is this Nature we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with it. Enneads IV,4,

Certainly the BODY, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the BODY holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is BODY thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without emotion. By “us, the true human being” I mean the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified BODY is not alien but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason: “attached,” for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is an accessory and dependent of the human being; “we” means the master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an “ours”; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment. Enneads IV,4,

Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul alone, but to the modified BODY and to something intermediary between soul and BODY and made up of both. A unity is independent: thus BODY alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt – in its dissolution there is no damage to the BODY, but merely to its unity – and soul in similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very nature is immune from evil. Enneads IV,4,

Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a BODY despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living BODY, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the BODY feels the pain, or at least the BODY is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain (non-material) conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity. Enneads IV,4,

And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at every point of its being, and is thereby enabled to assign every condition to the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs. Being present as a whole at every point of the BODY, if it were itself affected the pain would take it at every point, and it would suffer as one entire being, so that it could not know, or make known, the spot affected; it could say only that at the place of its presence there existed pain – and the place of its presence is the entire human being. As things are, when the finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is in pain; we class him as suffering, from his finger being painful, just as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue. Enneads IV,4,

Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter: all this must belong to what is specifically BODY but chooses to be something else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects, to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained untouched by life. Enneads IV,4,

In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction. Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the sensation (the sensitive phase of the soul) and in the next lower phase, that described as the “Nature” which carries the imprint of the soul to the BODY; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is the culmination of the less formed desire in BODY; sensation knows the image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that which subsequently entertained it. Enneads IV,4,

But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the BODY as a determined entity (the living total) be the sole desirer? Because there are (in man) two distinct things, this Nature and the BODY, which, through it, becomes a living being: the Nature precedes the determined BODY which is its creation, made and shaped by it; it cannot originate the desires; they must belong to the living BODY meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in its distress to alter its state, to substitute pleasure for pain, sufficiency for want: this Nature must be like a mother reading the wishes of a suffering child, and seeking to set it right and to bring it back to herself; in her search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to the sufferer’s desire and makes the child’s experience her own. Enneads IV,4,

In sum, the living BODY may be said to desire of its own motion in a fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and because of, that living BODY; granting or withholding belongs to another again, the higher soul. Enneads IV,4,

That this is the phase of the human being in which desire takes its origin is shown by observation of the different stages of life; in childhood, youth, maturity, the bodily desires differ; health or sickness also may change them, while the (psychic) faculty is of course the same through all: the evidence is clear that the variety of desire in the human being results from the fact that he is a corporeal entity, a living BODY subject to every sort of vicissitude. Enneads IV,4,

The total movement of desire is not always stirred simultaneously with what we call the impulses to the satisfaction even of the lasting bodily demands; it may refuse assent to the idea of eating or drinking until reason gives the word: this shows us desire – the degree of it existing in the living BODY – advancing towards some object, with Nature (the lower soul-phase) refusing its co-operation and approval, and as sole arbiter between what is naturally fit and unfit, rejecting what does not accord with the natural need. Enneads IV,4,

We may be told that the changing state of the BODY is sufficient explanation of the changing desires in the faculty; but that would require the demonstration that the changing condition of a given entity could effect a change of desire in another, in one which cannot itself gain by the gratification; for it is not the desiring faculty that profits by food, liquid, warmth, movement, or by any relief from overplenty or any filling of a void; all such services touch the BODY only. Enneads IV,4,

Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul, and the earthly globe not? The stars are equally corporeal, and they lack the flesh, blood, muscle, and pliant material of earth, which, besides, is of more varied content and includes every form of BODY. If the earth’s immobility is urged in objection, the answer is that this refers only to spatial movement. Enneads IV,4,

But how can perception and sensation (implied in ensoulment) be supposed to occur in the earth? How do they occur in the stars? Feeling does not belong to fleshy matter: soul to have perception does not require BODY; BODY, on the contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its efficiency, judgement (the foundation of perception) belongs to the soul which overlooks the BODY, and, from what is experienced there, forms its decisions. Enneads IV,4,

If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the soul entirely freed of BODY can apprehend nothing in the order of sense. Enneads IV,4,

The organ must be either the BODY entire or some member set apart for a particular function; thus touch for one, vision for another. The tools of craftsmanship will be seen to be intermediaries between the judging worker and the judged object, disclosing to the experimenter the particular character of the matter under investigation: thus a ruler, representing at once the straightness which is in the mind and the straightness of a plank, is used as an intermediary by which the operator proves his work. Enneads IV,4,

Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere: Is it necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception is to take place should be in contact with the organ of perception, or can the process occur across space upon an object at a distance? Thus, is the heat of a fire really at a distance from the flesh it warms, the intermediate space remaining unmodified; is it possible to see colour over a sheer blank intervening between the colour and the eye, the organ of vision reaching to its object by its own power? For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the BODY. Enneads IV,4,

The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with the BODY; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the BODY to which the sensations are due; it must be something brought about by association with the BODY. Enneads IV,4,

Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the normal is the sense of something intruding from without: but besides this, we have the apprehension of one member by another; why then should not the All, by means of what is stationary in it, perceive that region of itself which is in movement, that is to say the earth and the earth’s content? Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other regions of the All; what, then, need prevent the All from having, in some appropriate way, the perception of those changes? In addition to that self-contemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not have a seeing power like that of an eye able to announce to the All-Soul what has passed before it? Even granted that it is entirely unaffected by its lower, why, still, should it not see like an eye, ensouled as it is, all lightsome? Still: “eyes were not necessary to it,” we read. If this meant simply that nothing is left to be seen outside of the All, still there is the inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent it seeing what constitutes itself: if the meaning is that such self-vision could serve to no use, we may think that it has vision not as a main intention for vision’s sake but as a necessary concomitant of its characteristic nature; it is difficult to conceive why such a BODY should be incapable of seeing. Enneads IV,4,

There is, thus, no longer any absurdity or impossibility in the notion that the soul in the earth has vision: we must, further, consider that it is the soul of no mean BODY; that in fact it is a god since certainly soul must be everywhere good. Enneads IV,4,

If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things – or retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal principle in them – at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing: this phase of the soul is immanent in the BODY of the growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere lump of material. Enneads IV,4,

But does the entire BODY of the earth similarly receive anything from the soul? Yes: for we must recognize that earthly material broken off from the main BODY differs from the same remaining continuously attached; thus stones increase as long as they are embedded, and, from the moment they are separated, stop at the size attained. Enneads IV,4,

Pleasures and pains – the conditions, that is, not the perception of them – and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the BODY as a determined thing, the BODY brought, in some sense, to life: are we entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion? Are we to consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined BODY or in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile necessarily taking condition within a BODY not dead? Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in this case – the passionate element being one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient faculty? Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal, pervades the entire BODY, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it – there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed – but in general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver and BODY – the seat, because the spring. Enneads IV,4,

On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states; people in whom the blood and the bile are intensely active are as quick to anger as those of cool blood and no bile are slow; animals grow angry though they pay attention to no outside combinations except where they recognize physical danger; all this forces us again to place the seat of anger in the strictly corporeal element, the principle by which the animal organism is held together. Similarly, that anger or its first stirring depends upon the condition of the BODY follows from the consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than well, fasting than after food: it would seem that the bile and the blood, acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions. Enneads IV,4,

Our conclusion (reconciling with these corporeal facts the psychic or mental element indicated) will identify, first, some suffering in the BODY answered by a movement in the blood or in the bile: sensation ensues and the soul, brought by means of the representative faculty to partake in the condition of the affected BODY, is directed towards the cause of the pain: the reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above the phase not inbound with BODY-acts in its own mode when the breach of order has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of that ready passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil disclosed. Enneads IV,4,

Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by which the BODY becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this principle it was that made the BODY a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states – churlish and angry under stress of environment – so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition. Enneads IV,4,

That this soul-vestige, which determines the movements of passion is of one essence (con-substantial) with the other is evident from the consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal pleasures, especially those that wholly repudiate the BODY, are the least prone to anger and to all experiences not rising from reason. Enneads IV,4,

But – keeping to our illustration, by which the BODY is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it – how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle? For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly hair and nails still grow on the dead; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time after; these are signs of a life force still indwelling. Enneads IV,4,

But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration? The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk into BODY. Enneads IV,4,

But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon the composition of the BODY; it would no longer be the Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for instance, the colours of a bird’s variegated plumage; these principles would merely blend and place them, or if they produced them would draw also on the full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, mainly, of showing in the formed bodies something very different from what appears in the heavens. Enneads IV,4,

But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the bodies remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered, then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the BODY, the light – both that in immediate contact and any other attached to that – should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going as in the coming. Enneads IV,4,

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living BODY: if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the BODY, as the life of the BODY, we have the same question that rose in the case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting upon the remote object. Enneads IV,4,

We take the question back to the initial act of causation. It cannot be admitted that either heat or cold and the like what are known as the primal qualities of the elements – or any admixture of these qualities, should be the first causes we are seeking; equally inacceptable, that while the sun’s action is all by heat, there is another member of the Circuit operating wholly by cold – incongruous in the heavens and in a fiery BODY – nor can we think of some other star operating by liquid fire. Enneads IV,4,

Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences – determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a reigning heat or cold – does that give us a reasonable explanation of envy, jealously, acts of violence? Or, if it does, what, at any rate, are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle blood, treasure-trove? An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from any corporeal quality that could enter the BODY and soul of a living thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars, temple-strippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained. Enneads IV,4,

In our dance-plays there are outside elements contributing to the total effect – fluting, singing, and other linked accessories – and each of these changes in each new movement: there is no need to dwell on these; their significance is obvious. But besides this there is the fact that the limbs of the dancer cannot possibly keep the same positions in every figure; they adapt themselves to the plan, bending as it dictates, one lowered, another raised, one active, another resting as the set pattern changes. The dancer’s mind is on his own purpose; his limbs are submissive to the dance-movement which they accomplish to the end, so that the connoisseur can explain that this or that figure is the motive for the lifting, bending, concealment, effacing, of the various members of the BODY; and in all this the executant does not choose the particular motions for their own sake; the whole play of the entire person dictates the necessary position to each limb and member as it serves to the plan. Enneads IV,4,

For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the BODY of the All should be yielded to its action, we ought to make sure that we submit only within limits, realizing that the entire man is not thus bound to it: intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters but in part retain their personality, and are thus less absolutely at beck and call, as not being slaves, not utterly chattels. Enneads IV,4,

But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter requires a more definite handling. How can there be a difference of power between one triangular configuration and another? How can there be the exercise of power from man to man; under what law, and within what limits? The difficulty is that we are unable to attribute causation either to the bodies of the heavenly beings or to their wills: their bodies are excluded because the product transcends the causative power of BODY, their will because it would be unseemly to suppose divine beings to produce unseemliness. Enneads IV,4,

In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we can but believe that though the heavenly BODY is intent upon the Supreme yet – to keep to the sun – its warming of terrestrial things, and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of Nature. Each of the heavenly bodies, similarly, gives forth a power, involuntary, by its mere radiation: all things become one entity, grouped by this diffusion of power, and so bring about wide changes of condition; thus the very groupings have power since their diversity produces diverse conditions; that the grouped beings themselves have also their efficiency is clear since they produce differently according to the different membership of the groups. Enneads IV,4,

We have learned, further, something of our human standing; we know that we too accomplish within the All a work not confined to the activity and receptivity of BODY in relation to BODY; we know that we bring to it that higher nature of ours, linked as we are by affinities within us towards the answering affinities outside us; becoming by our soul and the conditions of our kind thus linked – or, better, being linked by Nature – with our next highest in the celestial or demonic realm, and thence onwards with those above the Celestials, we cannot fail to manifest our quality. Still, we are not all able to offer the same gifts or to accept identically: if we do not possess good, we cannot bestow it; nor can we ever purvey any good thing to one that has no power of receiving good. Anyone that adds his evil to the total of things is known for what he is and, in accordance with his kind, is pressed down into the evil which he has made his own, and hence, upon death, goes to whatever region fits his quality – and all this happens under the pull of natural forces. Enneads IV,4,

The punishments of wrong-doing are like the treatment of diseased parts of the BODY – here, medicines to knit sundered flesh; there, amputations; elsewhere, change of environment and condition – and the penalties are planned to bring health to the All by settling every member in the fitting place: and this health of the All requires that one man be made over anew and another, sick here, be taken hence to where he shall be weakly no longer. Enneads IV,4,

We undertook to discuss the question whether sight is possible in the absence of any intervening medium, such as air or some other form of what is known as transparent BODY: this is the time and place. Enneads IV,5,

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence of BODY the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap. Enneads IV,5,

If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the light leading progressively to the illumined object, then, by the very hypothesis, one intervening substance, the light, is indispensable: but if the illuminated BODY, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent operating certain changes, some such change might very well impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium; this all the more, since as things are the intervening substance, which actually does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of contact with the eye (and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision). Enneads IV,5,

So, too, those that explain vision by sympathy must recognize that an intervening substance will be a hindrance as tending to check or block or enfeeble that sympathy; this theory, especially, requires the admission that any intervenient, and particularly one of kindred nature, must blunt the perception by itself absorbing part of the activity. Apply fire to a BODY continuous through and through, and no doubt the core will be less affected than the surface: but where we are dealing with the sympathetic parts of one living being, there will scarcely be less sensation because of the intervening substance, or, if there should be, the degree of sensation will still be proportionate to the nature of the separate part, with the intervenient acting merely as a certain limitation; this, though, will not be the case where the element introduced is of a kind to overleap the bridge. Enneads IV,5,

Why it should be especially requisite in the act of seeing would have to be explained: in general, an object passing through the air does not affect it beyond dividing it; when a stone falls, the air simply yields; nor is it reasonable to explain the natural direction of movement by resistance; to do so would bring us to the absurdity that resistance accounts for the upward movement of fire, which on the contrary, overcomes the resistance of the air by its own essentially quick energy. If we are told that the resistance is brought more swiftly into play by the very swiftness of the ascending BODY, that would be a mere accidental circumstance, not a cause of the upward motion: in trees the upthrust from the root depends on no such external propulsion; we, too, in our movements cleave the air and are in no wise forwarded by its resistance; it simply flows in from behind to fill the void we make. Enneads IV,5,

Now, firstly: since the intervening air is not necessary – unless in the purely accidental sense that air may be necessary to light – the light that acts as intermediate in vision will be unmodified: vision depends upon no modification whatever. This one intermediate, light, would seem to be necessary, but, unless light is corporeal, no intervening BODY is requisite: and we must remember that intervenient and borrowed light is essential not to seeing in general but to distant vision; the question whether light absolutely requires the presence of air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us: If, in the act of vision, that linked light becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding – which is what vision really is – then the intervening light is not a necessity: the process of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light; all that intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which the vision ranges. Enneads IV,5,

This brings up the question whether the sight is made active over its field by the sheer presence of a distance spread before it, or by the presence of a BODY of some kind within that distance. Enneads IV,5,

If by the presence of such a BODY, then there will be vision though there be no intervenient; if the intervenient is the sole attractive agent, then we are forced to think of the visible object as being a Kind utterly without energy, performing no act. But so inactive a BODY cannot be: touch tells us that, for it does not merely announce that something is by and is touched: it is acted upon by the object so that it reports distinguishing qualities in it, qualities so effective that even at a distance touch itself would register them but for the accidental that it demands proximity. Enneads IV,5,

We catch the heat of a fire just as soon as the intervening air does; no need to wait for it to be warmed: the denser BODY, in fact, takes in more warmth than the air has to give; in other words, the air transmits the heat but is not the source of our warmth. Enneads IV,5,

If we decide that sound is caused by a percussion upon the air, then obviously nothing turning upon the distinctive nature of air is in question: it sounds at a moment in which it is simply a solid BODY, until (by its distinctive character) it is sent pulsing outwards: thus air in itself is not essential to the production of sound; all is done by clashing solids as they meet and that percussion, reaching the sense, is the sound. This is shown also by the sounds formed within living beings not in air but by the friction of parts; for example, the grinding of teeth and the crunching of bones against each other in the bending of the BODY, cases in which the air does not intervene. Enneads IV,5,

The fact is that primarily light is no appanage of air, and does not depend upon the existence of air: it belongs to every fiery and shining BODY, it constitutes even the gleaming surface of certain stones. Enneads IV,5,

Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming, could it exist in the absence of its container? There is a distinction to be made: if it is a quality, some quality of some substance, then light, equally with other qualities, will need a BODY in which to lodge: if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising from something else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there be no neighbouring BODY but, if that is possible, a blank void which it will overleap and so appear on the further side: it is powerful, and may very well pass over unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall, nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes its light; there is no reason why they should draw the light from its source and speed it onwards. Enneads IV,5,

Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when anything – the human BODY, for instance – comes in its path to be affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it to modify: surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of whatever luminary source there be (i.e., light, affecting things, may be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other). Certainly light is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that it is no longer the brilliant reality: as reasonable to talk of some substance being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter. Enneads IV,5,

We distinguish two forms of activity; one is gathered within the luminary and is comparable to the life of the shining BODY; this is the vaster and is, as it were, the foundation or wellspring of all the act; the other lies next to the surface, the outer image of the inner content, a secondary activity though inseparable from the former. For every existent has an Act which is in its likeness: as long as the one exists, so does the other; yet while the original is stationary the activity reaches forth, in some things over a wide range, in others less far. There are weak and faint activities, and there are some, even, that do not appear; but there are also things whose activities are great and far-going; in the case of these the activity must be thought of as being lodged, both in the active and powerful source and in the point at which it settles. This may be observed in the case of an animal’s eyes where the pupils gleam: they have a light which shows outside the orbs. Again there are living things which have an inner fire that in darkness shines out when they expand themselves and ceases to ray outward when they contract: the fire has not perished; it is a mere matter of it being rayed out or not. Enneads IV,5,

But surely the light has gone inward too? No: only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only of the non-luminous BODY; the fire can no longer act towards the outer. Enneads IV,5,

The light, then, raying from bodies is an outgoing activity of a luminous BODY; the light within luminous bodies – understand; such as are primarily luminous – is the essential being embraced under the idea of that BODY. When such a BODY is brought into association with Matter, its activity produces colour: when there is no such association, it does not give colour – it gives merely an incipient on which colour might be formed – for it belongs to another being (primal light) with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or from its (inner) activity. Enneads IV,5,

And light is incorporeal even when it is the light of a BODY; there is therefore no question, strictly speaking, of its withdrawal or of its being present – these terms do not apply to its modes – and its essential existence is to be an activity. As an example: the image upon a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the reflected object upon the potential recipient: there is no outgoing from the object (or ingoing into the reflecting BODY); it is simply that, as long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form of colour shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not there, the reflecting surface no longer holds what it held when the conditions were favourable. Enneads IV,5,

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity – as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the BODY to be – is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held in material things? No; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of the active element (the light being alloyed with Matter); whereas the life-principle of the BODY is something that holds from another soul closely present to it. Enneads IV,5,

But when the BODY perishes – by the fact that nothing without part in soul can continue in being – when the BODY is perishing, no longer supported by that primal life-giving soul, or by the presence of any secondary phase of it, it is clear that the life-principle can no longer remain; but does this mean that the life perishes? No; not even it; for it, too, is an image of that first out-shining; it is merely no longer where it was. Enneads IV,5,

Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that percipients and things perceived are all members of one living being, no acts of perception could take place: that far BODY could be known only if it were a member of this living universe of ours – which condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if, without being thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting light and colour and the qualities by which we perceive things, and belonging to the same ideal category as the organ of vision? If our supposition (of perception by sympathy) is true, there would still be no perception – though we may be told that the hypothesis is clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can fail in grasping an illuminated object lying before it, and that the other senses in the presence of their particular objects remain unresponsive. Enneads IV,5,

We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a BODY: this is the first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and essential being of these two constituents. Enneads IV,7,

Reason tells us that the BODY as, itself too, a composite, cannot for ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its constituents going its own way, one part working against another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling soul. Enneads IV,7,

If this BODY, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly immortal; if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a thing put at our service for a certain time, it must be in its nature passing. Enneads IV,7,

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. But what sort of an entity have we there; what is this BODY which of its own nature possesses soul? Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless – whenever soul is in any of them, that life is borrowed – and there are no other forms of BODY than these four: even the school that believes there are has always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life. Enneads IV,7,

Body – not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex – could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for BODY owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and only from soul can a Reason-Principle come. Enneads IV,7,

Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again, constituents void of part could never produce BODY or bulk. Enneads IV,7,

Perhaps we will be asked to consider BODY as a simple entity (disregarding the question of any constituent elements): they will tell us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a self-springing life – since matter is without quality – but that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of BODY and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being (by hypothesis) outside of the Matter, cannot be BODY: to make it BODY would simply force us to repeat our former analysis. Enneads IV,7,

It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor BODY in any mode has this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal. Enneads IV,7,

In fact, BODY itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not: BODY passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in a twinkling if all were BODY. It is no help to erect some one mode of BODY into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul BODY would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist: the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape. Enneads IV,7,

Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a BODY which, though elevated to the nominal rank of “soul,” remains air, fleeting breath (the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, “spirit” in the lower sense), whose very unity is not drawn from itself. Enneads IV,7,

Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the necessity of a prior to BODY, a higher thing, some phase or form of soul; their “pneuma” (finer-BODY or spirit) is intelligent, and they speak of an “intellectual fire”; this “fire” and “spirit” they imagine to be necessary to the existence of the higher order which they conceive as demanding some base, though the real difficulty, under their theory, is to find a base for material things whose only possible base is, precisely, the powers of soul. Enneads IV,7,

Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this “pneuma,” what is the import of that repeated qualification of theirs “in a certain state,” their refuge when they are compelled to recognize some acting principle apart from BODY? If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this “certain state” is soul, what follows? Either this “certain state,” this shaping or configuration of things, is a real being or it is nothing. Enneads IV,7,

There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any form of BODY. Enneads IV,7,

Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or white, and so on through all the qualities by which one is different from another; and, again, if a BODY is warm it diffuses only warmth, if cold it can only chill, if light its presence tells against the total weight which if heavy it increases; black, it darkens; white, it lightens; fire has not the property of chilling or a cold BODY that of warming. Enneads IV,7,

Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? Predilections, reasons, they will say; that is all very well, but these already contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to BODY which is one and simplex, and, besides, is not participant in reason – that is, not in the sense here meant, but only as it is influenced by some principle which confers upon it the qualities of, for instance, being warm or cold. Enneads IV,7,

Then there is growth under a time-law, and within a definite limit: how can this belong strictly to BODY? Body can indeed be brought to growth, but does not itself grow except in the sense that in the material mass a capacity for growing is included as an accessory to some principle whose action upon the BODY causes growth. Enneads IV,7,

Supposing the soul to be at once a BODY and the cause of growth, then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the added material must be either soul or soulless BODY: if soul, whence and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined (to the soul which by hypothesis is BODY); if soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up before? Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of our material mass? And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul? Assume soul to be a BODY: now in the nature of BODY, characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being; soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a quality quite independent of quantity. Enneads IV,7,

What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal? Is every part of the soul, in any one BODY, soul entire, soul perfectly true to its essential being? and may the same be said of every part of the part? If so, the magnitude makes no contribution to the soul’s essential nature, as it must if soul (as corporeal) were a definite magnitude: it is, as BODY cannot be, an “all-everywhere,” a complete identity present at each and every point, the part all that the whole is. Enneads IV,7,

Thus: Transmission would not give sensation of the actual condition at the affected spot: it is not in the nature of BODY that where one part suffers there should be knowledge in another part; for BODY is a magnitude, and the parts of every magnitude are distinct parts; therefore we need, as the sentient, something of a nature to be identical to itself at any and every spot; this property can belong only to some other form of being than BODY. Enneads IV,7,

It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the soul were any form of BODY. Enneads IV,7,

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of the BODY, intellection cannot be a similar use of the BODY or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from BODY, much more must there be a distinction between the BODY and the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We will be told “By some partless part.” But, at this, the intellective will not be BODY: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded – and it cannot be denied – that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from BODY. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the bodies (in which these forms appear) and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them. Enneads IV,7,

Again: if the Soul is a BODY, how can we account for its virtues – moral excellence (Sophrosyne), justice, courage and so forth? All these could be only some kind of rarefied BODY (pneuma), or blood in some form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough with the idea of rarefied BODY; but what can this rarefied BODY want with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft around it: what could it care about a just distribution? Then consider the objects of the soul’s contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul’s contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore be BODY, since all BODY-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux. Enneads IV,7,

A. (sometimes appearing as 9) There are those who insist on the activities observed in bodies – warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing – and class soul with BODY, as it were to assure its efficacy. This ignores the double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers operating in them, and that these are not the powers we attribute to soul: intellection, perception, reasoning, desire, wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very different form of being. Enneads IV,7,

In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this school leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their efficiency is clear from certain reflections: It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different things, that BODY is always a thing of quantity but not always a thing of quality: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied that quality, being a different thing from quantity, is a different thing from BODY. Obviously quality could not be BODY when it has not quantity as all BODY must; and, again, as we have said, BODY, any thing of mass, on being reduced to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but the quality it possessed remains intact in every particle – for instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck – this shows that sweetness and all other qualities are not BODY. Enneads IV,7,

Further: if the powers in question were bodies, then necessarily the stronger powers would be large masses and those less efficient small masses: but if there are large masses with small while not a few of the smaller masses manifest great powers, then the efficiency must be vested in something other than magnitude; efficacy, thus, belongs to non-magnitude. Again; Matter, they tell us, remains unchanged as long as it is BODY, but produces variety upon accepting qualities; is not this proof enough that the entrants (with whose arrival the changes happen) are Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order? They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are many other things of which none could possibly be soul: and neither pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being; but soul is. Enneads IV,7,

B. (10) If the soul is BODY and permeates the entire BODY-mass, still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing. Enneads IV,7,

Two bodies (i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human BODY) are blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture: the one BODY thus inblended can have left in the other nothing undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point – an impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater; still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout. Now if, thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided material anywhere, the division of the BODY concerned must have been a division into (geometrical) points: an impossibility. The division is an infinite series – any material particle may be cut in two – and the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual. Enneads IV,7,

Therefore BODY cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal. Enneads IV,7,

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,7,

These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a BODY. Enneads IV,7,

D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it something which, while distinct from BODY, still belongs to it, for example a harmony or accord? The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre. When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our BODY is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing upon the bodily total. Enneads IV,7,

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The soul is a prior (to BODY), the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the BODY; as an accord of BODY it could not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due blending (or accord) of the corporeal materials which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the BODY, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul (its own accord or note), so that there would be many souls to each person. Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune. Enneads IV,7,

It is thought that in the Conjoint of BODY and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled BODY – not, then, Form to every example of BODY or to BODY as merely such, but to a natural organic BODY having the potentiality of life. Enneads IV,7,

Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the BODY as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will follow that, upon any dividing of the BODY, the soul is divided with it, and if any part of the BODY is cut away a fragment of soul must go with it. Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul is an Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to the desires; the total (of BODY and Entelechy-Soul) must have one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal contradiction. Sense-perception might occur; but intellection would be impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy – if the word is to be used at all – in some other mode. Enneads IV,7,

Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, must hold these without aid from the BODY; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the BODY. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from BODY; this also is no inseparable Entelechy. Enneads IV,7,

There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant’s development the life-principle is situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why should it not pass outside altogether? An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present partwise in the partible BODY? An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another: how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet that this transference does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis. Enneads IV,7,

The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come into being by finding a seat in BODY; it exists before it becomes also the soul of some particular, for example, of a living being, whose BODY would by this doctrine be the author of its soul. Enneads IV,7,

What, then, is the soul’s Being? If it is neither BODY nor a state or experience of BODY, but is act and creation: if it holds much and gives much, and is an existence outside of BODY; of what order and character must it be? Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process; it appears and it perishes; in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as it has the capacity, by participating in what authentically is. Enneads IV,7,

(14) Over against that BODY, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul. Enneads IV,7,

Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated with BODY. Enneads IV,7,

But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been divided (in the BODY) and so becoming fragmentary. Enneads IV,7,

(18) But how does the soul enter into BODY from the aloofness of the Intellectual? There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this, knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm. But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step outward; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-Principle: pregnant by those Beings, and in pain to the birth, it is eager to make, to create. 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. As a whole it is partly in BODY, partly outside: it has plunged from among the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the universe with beauty and penetrant order – immortal mind, eternal in its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul. Enneads IV,7,

(20) Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to those asking for demonstration: those whose need is conviction by evidence of the more material order are best met from the abundant records relevant to the subject: there are also the oracles of the Gods ordering the appeasing of wronged souls and the honouring of the dead as still sentient, a practice common to all mankind: and again, not a few souls, once among men, have continued to serve them after quitting the BODY and by revelations, practically helpful, make clear, as well, that the other souls, too, have not ceased to be. Enneads IV,7,

Eighth tractate – The soul’s descent into BODY. Enneads IV,8,

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the BODY into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my BODY, the soul which, even within the BODY, is the high thing it has shown itself to be. Enneads IV,8,

We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into BODY so that we may well hope to get some light from him. Enneads IV,8,

Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of the soul with BODY as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual Realm. Enneads IV,8,

In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at BODY, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a reason, then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God: in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the realm of sense. Enneads IV,8,

Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general – to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with BODY, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity. Enneads IV,8,

We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has planned well or ill…… like our souls, which it may be, are such that governing their inferior, the BODY, they must sink deeper and deeper into it if they are to control it. Enneads IV,8,

No doubt the individual BODY – though in all cases appropriately placed within the universe – is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but the BODY inhabited by the World-Soul – complete, competent, self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature – this needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress. Enneads IV,8,

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to BODY nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing BODY with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest. Enneads IV,8,

And so we might expect: commerce with the BODY is repudiated for two only reasons, as hindering the soul’s intellective act and as filling with pleasure, desire, pain; but neither of these misfortunes can befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into the BODY, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a BODY of such an order as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor fear. Enneads IV,8,

There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to such a BODY nor is there any such preoccupied concern, bringing about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed vision; it remains always intent upon the Supreme, and its governance of this universe is effected by a power not calling upon act. Enneads IV,8,

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,8,

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in BODY: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back. Enneads IV,8,

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,8,

Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier realms, has entered BODY; it is a god, a later phase of the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known that suppressed and inhibited total. Enneads IV,8,

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

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,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. In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and so in the forms of vegetal life the vegetal soul is entire at each several point throughout the organism. Enneads IV,8,

Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one, and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate items, but an omnipresent identity? If the soul in me is a unity, why need that in the universe be otherwise seeing that there is no longer any question of bulk or BODY? And if that, too, is one soul and yours, and mine, belongs to it, then yours and mine must also be one: and if, again, the soul of the universe and mine depend from one soul, once more all must be one. Enneads IV,8,

Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another’s, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and BODY identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one BODY a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralizing unity. Enneads IV,8,

We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same BODY escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism. Enneads IV,8,

We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity – only of the Supreme can that be affirmed – we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in BODY, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that Order which suffers no division. Enneads IV,8,

In myself some experience occurring in a part of the BODY may take no effect upon the entire man but anything occurring in the higher reaches would tell upon the partial: in the same way any influx from the All upon the individual will have manifest effect since the points of sympathetic contact are numerous – but as to any operation from ourselves upon the All there can be no certainty. Enneads IV,8,

But why are not all the powers of this unity present everywhere? The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described, similarly, as permeating its BODY, sensation is not equally present in all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of growth is at work where there is no sensation – and yet all these powers join in the one<one soul when the BODY is laid aside. Enneads IV,8,

But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity – much as a multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or modification of BODY, we could not wonder that this quality – this one thing from one source – should be present in many objects. The same reasoning would apply if soul were an effect (or manifestation) of the Conjoint. Enneads IV,8,

The detail cannot be considered as something separate from the entire BODY of speculation: so treated it would have no technical or scientific value; it would be childish divagation. The one detail, when it is a matter of science, potentially includes all. Grasping one such constituent of his science, the expert deduces the rest by force of sequence. Enneads IV,8,

It is our feebleness that leads to doubt in these matters; the BODY obscures the truth, but There all stands out clear and separate. Enneads IV,8,

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping BODY be at peace, BODY’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark BODY – clay and water – or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods.” Enneads: V I

The material BODY is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously interdependent; the soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. By the power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for “dead is viler than dung.” Enneads: V I

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is BODY but earth, and, taking fire itself, what (but soul) is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with water and air added to them? If, then, it is the presence of soul that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things? You honour the Soul elsewhere; honour then yourself. Enneads: V I

Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of soul, but (above the life-principle) there is the soul perfected as containing Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated – this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into BODY, within the first Intellectual. We may not seek any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of all space: its distinct quality, its separateness, its immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all of the bodily order. This is why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the soul around it from without – understand that phase of soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual – and of ourselves that the charioteer’s head reaches upwards towards the heights. Enneads: V I

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

The sense-principle in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance only of the external; even in any awareness of events within the BODY it occupies, this is still the perception of something external to a principle dealing with those bodily conditions not as within but as beneath itself. Enneads V,3,

One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the BODY – yourself, that is, from your BODY – next to put aside that soul which moulded the BODY, and, very earnestly, the system of sense with desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left is the phase of the soul which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that sun, while it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes (that is, of Matter) the light playing about itself which is generated from its own nature. Enneads V,3,

Our One-First is not a BODY: a BODY is not simplex and, as a thing of process cannot be a First, the Source cannot be a thing of generation: only a principle outside of BODY, and utterly untouched by multiplicity, could be The First. Enneads V,4,

Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it is not, itself, in a universe or in any place – what place was there before the universe came to be? – its linked members form and occupy the whole. 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. The Intellectual-Principle in turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First? This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things nor directly within them; there is nothing containing it; it contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way, that towards it all things have their being, all dependent upon it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness according to its fuller possession of authentic being. Enneads V,5,

And how (by the theory of a divine archetype of each individual) are the differences caused by place to be explained? Is the differentiating element to be found in the varying resistance of the material of the BODY? No: if this were so, all men with the exception of one only would be untrue to nature. Enneads V,7,

For assuredly all the Gods are august and beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech. And what makes them so? Intellect; and especially Intellect operating within them (the divine sun and stars) to visibility. It is not through the loveliness of their corporeal forms: even those that have BODY are not gods by that beauty; it is in virtue of Intellect that they, too, are gods, and as gods beautiful. They do not veer between wisdom and folly: in the immunity of Intellect unmoving and pure, they are wise always, all-knowing, taking cognisance not of the human but of their own being and of all that lies within the contemplation of Intellect. Those of them whose dwelling is in the heavens, are ever in this meditation – what task prevents them? – and from afar they look, too, into that further heaven by a lifting of the head. The Gods belonging to that higher Heaven itself, they whose station is upon it and in it, see and know in virtue of their omnipresence to it. For all There is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal and plant and man; all is the heavenly content of that heaven: and the Gods in it, despising neither men nor anything else that is there where all is of the heavenly order, traverse all that country and all space in peace. Enneads V,8,

More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for, in the coming to be of all those, this, the one, has suffered no diminishing. He and all have one existence while each again is distinct. It is distinction by state without interval: there is no outward form to set one here and another there and to prevent any from being an entire identity; yet there is no sharing of parts from one to another. Nor is each of those divine wholes a power in fragment, a power totalling to the sum of the measurable segments: the divine is one all-power, reaching out to infinity, powerful to infinity; and so great is God that his very members are infinites. What place can be named to which He does not reach? Great, too, is this firmament of ours and all the powers constellated within it, but it would be greater still, unspeakably, but that there is inbound in it something of the petty power of BODY; no doubt the powers of fire and other bodily substances might themselves be thought very great, but in fact, it is through their failure in the true power that we see them burning, destroying, wearing things away, and slaving towards the production of life; they destroy because they are themselves in process of destruction, and they produce because they belong to the realm of the produced. Enneads V,8,

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and BODY; and the human BODY into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle – since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless – you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else – the Intellectual-Principle in it – representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. Enneads V,8,

The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the soul, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape – the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given – imparting to soul nearly the authentic reality while what BODY receives is but image and imitation. Enneads V,8,

Every soul, authentically a soul, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the Supreme, as in the sense-world, but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. For those Beings are not set apart in some defined place; wherever there is a soul that has risen from BODY, there too these are: the world of sense is one – where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. Whatever the freed soul attains to here, that it is There. Enneads V,8,

But are we really obliged to posit the existence of such genera? Take Substance, for Substance must certainly be our starting-point: what are the grounds for regarding Substance as one single genus? It has been remarked that Substance cannot be a single entity common to both the Intellectual and the Sensible worlds. We may add that such community would entail the existence of something prior to Intellectual and Sensible Substances alike, something distinct from both as predicated of both; and this prior would be neither BODY nor unembodied; for it were one or the other, BODY would be unembodied, or the unembodied would be the BODY. Enneads: VI I

Supposing we grant that all things known as substances are homogeneous as possessing something denied to the other genera, what precisely is this something, this individuality, this subject which is never a predicate, this thing not present in any thing as in a subject, this thing which does not owe its essential character to any other thing, as a quality takes character from a BODY and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to motion and motion to the moved? The Second Substance is, it is true, a predicate. But predication in this case signifies a different relation from that just considered; it reveals the genus inherent in the subject and the subject’s essential character, whereas whiteness is predicated of a thing in the sense of being present in the thing. Enneads: VI I

On the other hand, line and surface and BODY are not called quantities; they are called magnitudes: they become known as quantities only when they are rated by number-two yards, three yards. Even the natural BODY becomes a quantity when measured, as does the space which it occupies; but this is quantity accidental, not quantity essential; what we seek to grasp is not accidental quantity but Quantity independent and essential, Quantity-Absolute. Three oxen is not a quantity; it is their number, the three, that is Quantity; for in three oxen we are dealing with two categories. So too with a line of a stated length, a surface of a given area; the area will be a quantity but not the surface, which only comes under that category when it constitutes a definite geometric figure. Enneads: VI I

It need hardly be said that we are not to affirm Relation where one thing is simply an attribute of another, as a habit is an attribute of a soul or of a BODY; it is not Relation when a soul belongs to this individual or dwells in that BODY. Relation enters only when the actuality of the relationships is derived from no other source than Relation itself; the actuality must be, not that which is characteristic of the substances in question, but that which is specifically called relative. Thus double with its correlative, half gives actuality neither to two yards’ length or the number two, nor to one yard’s length or the number one; what happens is that, when these quantities are viewed in their relation, they are found to be not merely two and one respectively, but to produce the assertion and to exhibit the fact of standing one to the other in the condition of double and half. Out of the objects in a certain conjunction this condition of being double and half has issued as something distinct from either; double and half have emerged as correlatives, and their being is precisely this of mutual dependence; the double exists by its superiority over the half, and the half by its inferiority; there is no priority to distinguish double from half; they arise simultaneously. Enneads: VI I

Now the common principle in question cannot be a BODY. The only alternative is that, if it does exist, it be something bodiless, either in the objects thus brought together or outside of them. Enneads: VI I

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

But how can they all be powers? Beauty or health of soul or BODY, very well: but surely not ugliness, disease, weakness, incapacity. In a word, is powerlessness a power? It may be urged that these are qualities in so far as qualia are also named after them: but may not the qualia be so called by analogy, and not in the strict sense of the single principle? Not only may the term be understood in the four ways (of Aristotle), but each of the four may have at least a twofold significance. Enneads: VI I

If then we do not propose to divide Quality in this (fourfold) manner, what basis of division have we? We must examine whether qualities may not prove to be divisible on the principle that some belong to the BODY and others to the soul. Those of the BODY would be subdivided according to the senses, some being attributed to sight, others to hearing and taste, others to smell and touch. Those of the soul would presumably be allotted to appetite, emotion, reason; though, again, they may be distinguished by the differences of the activities they condition, in so far as activities are engendered by these qualities; or according as they are beneficial or injurious, the benefits and injuries being duly classified. This last is applicable also to the classification of bodily qualities, which also produce differences of benefit and injury: these differences must be regarded as distinctively qualitative; for either the benefit and injury are held to be derived from Quality and the quale, or else some other explanation must be found for them. Enneads: VI I

Again, in the case of walking there is the earth trodden upon, but no one thinks of it as having experienced Passion (or suffering). Treading on a living BODY, we think of suffering, because we reflect not upon the walking but upon the ensuing pain: otherwise we should think of suffering in the case of the tablet as well. Enneads: VI I

If, on the contrary, the category of Possession comprises only the things of the BODY, such as weapons and shoes, we first ask why this should be so, and why their possession produces a single category, while burning, cutting, burying or casting them out do not give another or others. If it is because these things are carried on the person, then one’s mantle lying on a couch will come under a different category from that of the mantle covering the person. If the ownership of possession suffices, then clearly one must refer to the one category of Possession all objects identified by being possessed, every case in which possession can be established; the character of the possessed object will make no difference. Enneads: VI I

Furthermore, God becomes a secondary to Matter, inasmuch as even he is regarded as a BODY composed of Matter and Form – though how he acquires the Form is not revealed. If however he be admitted to exist apart from Matter in virtue of his character as a principle and a rational law (logos), God will be bodiless, the Creative Power bodiless. If we are told that he is without Matter but is composite in essence by the fact of being a BODY, this amounts to introducing another Matter, the Matter of God. Enneads: VI I

Again, how can Matter be a first-principle, seeing that it is BODY? Body must necessarily be a plurality, since all bodies are composite of Matter and Quality. If however BODY in this case is to be understood in some different way, then Matter is identified with BODY only by an equivocation. Enneads: VI I

If the possession of three dimensions is given as the characteristic of BODY, then we are dealing simply with mathematical BODY. If resistance is added, we are no longer considering a unity: besides, resistance is a quality or at least derived from Quality. Enneads: VI I

But is it not a paradox that, while Matter, the Substrate, is to them an existence, bodies should not have more claim to existence, the universe yet more, and not merely a claim grounded on the reality of one of its parts? It is no less paradoxical that the living form should owe existence not to its soul but to its Matter only, the soul being but an affection of Matter and posterior to it. From what source then did Matter receive ensoulment? Whence, in short, is soul’s entity derived? How does it occur that Matter sometimes turns into bodies, while another part of it turns into Soul? 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. 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

This philosophy began by identifying the Real with BODY; then, viewing with apprehension the transmutations of bodies, decided that Reality was that which is permanent beneath the superficial changes – which is much as if one regarded space as having more title to Reality than the bodies within it, on the principle that space does not perish with them. They found a permanent in space, but it was a fault to take mere permanence as in itself a sufficient definition of the Real; the right method would have been to consider what properties must characterize Reality, by the presence of which properties it has also that of unfailing permanence. Thus if a shadow had permanence, accompanying an object through every change, that would not make it more real than the object itself. The sensible universe, as including the Substrate and a multitude of attributes, will thus have more claim to be Reality entire than has any one of its component entities (such as Matter): and if the sensible were in very truth the whole of Reality, Matter, the mere base and not the total, could not be that whole. Enneads: VI I

If all the genera could be species of Being, all individuals without exception being immediately subordinate to these species, then such a unification becomes feasible. But that supposition bespeaks annihilation for the genera: the species will no longer be species; plurality will no longer be subordinated to unity; everything must be the unity, unless there exist some thing or things outside the unity. The One never becomes many – as the existence of species demands – unless there is something distinct from it: it cannot of itself assume plurality, unless we are to think of it as being broken into pieces like some extended BODY: but even so, the force which breaks it up must be distinct from it: if it is itself to effect the breaking up – or whatever form the division may take – then it is itself previously divided. Enneads VI,2,

If we had to ascertain the nature of BODY and the place it holds in the universe, surely we should take some sample of BODY, say stone, and examine into what constituents it may be divided. There would be what we think of as the substrate of stone, its quantity – in this case, a magnitude; its quality – for example, the colour of stone. As with stone, so with every other BODY: we should see that in this thing, BODY, there are three distinguishable characteristics – the pseudo-substance, the quantity, the quality – though they all make one and are only logically trisected, the three being found to constitute the unit thing, BODY. If motion were equally inherent in its constitution, we should include this as well, and the four would form a unity, the single BODY depending upon them all for its unity and characteristic nature. Enneads VI,2,

But we must begin by subtracting what is peculiar to BODY, its coming-to-be, its sensible nature, its magnitude – that is to say, the characteristics which produce isolation and mutual separation. It is an Intellectual Being we have to consider, an Authentic Existent, possessed of a unity surpassing that of any sensible thing. Enneads VI,2,

Now the wonder comes how a unity of this type can be many as well as one. In the case of BODY it was easy to concede unity-with-plurality; the one BODY is divisible to infinity; its colour is a different thing from its shape, since in fact they are separated. 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? We believed that the division of the living being into BODY and soul was final: BODY indeed was manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt, supposing that we had come to the limit of our course. Enneads VI,2,

Let us examine this soul, presented to us from the Intellectual realm as BODY from the Sensible. How is its unity a plurality? How is its plurality a unity? Clearly its unity is not that of a composite formed from diverse elements, but that of a single nature comprising a plurality. Enneads VI,2,

A first point demanding consideration: Bodies – those, for example, of animals and plants – are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the BODY itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from Reality. Since, thus, bodies take their rise from unity, but not “unity” in the sense of the complete unity or Unity-Absolute – for this could never yield discrete plurality – it remains that they be derived from a unity Pluralized. But the creative principle (in bodies) is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity. Enneads VI,2,

We are in the presence of Intellect undefiled. Fix it firmly, but not with the eyes of the BODY. You are looking upon the hearth of Reality, within it a sleepless light: you see how it holds to itself, and how it puts apart things that were together, how it lives a life that endures and keeps a thought acting not upon any future but upon that which already is, upon an eternal present – a thought self-centred, bearing on nothing outside of itself. Enneads VI,2,

But what are we to posit as its species? how divide this genus? The genus as a whole must be identified with BODY. Bodies may be divided into the characteristically material and the organic: the material bodies comprise fire, earth, water, air; the organic the bodies of plants and animals, these in turn admitting of formal differentiation. Enneads VI,3,

When each of the entities bound up with the pseudo-substance is taken apart from the rest, the name of Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing – for example, the beauty or ugliness of a BODY. This beauty – need we say? – is identical in name only with Intellectual Beauty: it follows that the term “Quality” as applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual is necessarily equivocal; even blackness and whiteness are different in the two spheres. Enneads VI,3,

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. On the other hand, their being found in company with Matter commits them in some degree to the lower sphere. Take the case of lyrical music: it is performed upon strings; melody, which may be termed a part of the art, is sensuous sound – though, perhaps, we should speak here not of parts but of manifestations (Acts): yet, called manifestations, they are nonetheless sensuous. The beauty inherent in BODY is similarly bodiless; but we have assigned it to the order of things bound up with BODY and subordinate to it. Enneads VI,3,

Are we, then, to rank the individual soul, as containing these Reason-Principles, with Sensible Substance? But we do not even identify the Principles with BODY; we merely include them in Sensible Quality on the ground that they are connected with BODY and are activities of BODY. The constituents of Sensible Substance have already been specified; we have no intention whatever of adding to them Substance bodiless. Enneads VI,3,

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,3,

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. 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,3,

This procedure, if approved, will entail a distinction between psychic and bodily qualities, the latter belonging specifically to BODY. Enneads VI,3,

How are we to explain the omnipresence of the soul? Does it depend upon the definite magnitude of the material universe coupled with some native tendency in soul to distribute itself over material mass, or is it a characteristic of soul apart from BODY? In the latter case, soul will not appear just where BODY may bring it; BODY will meet soul awaiting it everywhere; wheresoever BODY finds place, there soul lay before ever BODY was; the entire material mass of the universe has been set into an existent soul. Enneads VI,4,

But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before there was any All? And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence of extension, extending over a universe? We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an accidental attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the move of accident? We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say sweetness or colour, for while these are actual states of the masses affected so that they show that quality at every point, none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of BODY and known only as in BODY; such quality is necessarily of a definite extension. Further, the colour at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence. Enneads VI,4,

Wherever the BODY of the universe may touch, there it finds this All; it strives for no further advance, willing to revolve in that one circle, since to it that is the All and in that movement its every part embraces the All. Enneads VI,4,

Now, in beings whose unity does not reproduce the entire nature of that principle, any presence is presence of an emanant power: even this, however, does not mean that the principle is less than integrally present; it is not sundered from the power which it has uttered; all is offered, but the recipient is able to take only so much. But in Beings in which the plenitude of these powers is manifested, there clearly the Authentic itself is present, though still as remaining distinct; it is distinct in that, becoming the informing principle of some definite thing, it would abdicate from its standing as the total and from its uttermost self-abiding and would belong, in some mode of accident, to another thing as well. Still it is not the property of what may seek to join with it; it chooses where it will and enters as the participant’s power may allow, but it does not become a chattel; it remains the quested and so in another sense never passes over. There is nothing disquieting in omnipresence after this mode where there is no appropriation: in the same accidental way, we may reasonably put it, soul concurs with BODY, but it is soul self-holding, not inbound with Matter, free even of the BODY which it has illuminated through and through. Enneads VI,4,

But set it outside of place, and reason tells us that it will be present entire where it is present at all and that, present to the total, it must be present in the same completeness to every several unity; otherwise something of it is here and something there, and at once it is fragmentary, it is BODY. Enneads VI,4,

How can we so dispart Being? We cannot break Life into parts; if the total was Life, the fragment is not. But we do not thus sunder Intelligence, one intelligence in this man, another in that? No; such a fragment would not be Intelligence. But the Being of the individual? Once more, if the total thing is Being, then a fragment could not be. Are we told that in a BODY, a total of parts, every member is also a BODY? But here we are dividing not BODY but a particular quantity of BODY, each of those divisions being described as BODY in virtue of possessing the Form or Idea that constitutes BODY; and this Idea has no magnitude, is incapable of magnitude. Enneads VI,4,

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

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

Soul too? Souls too. That principle distributed over material masses we hold to be in its own nature incapable of distribution; the magnitude belongs to the masses; when this soul-principle enters into them – or rather they into it – it is thought of as distributable only because, within the discrimination of the corporeal, the animating force is to be recognised at any and every point. For soul is not articulated, section of soul to section of BODY; there is integral omnipresence manifesting the unity of that principle, its veritable partlessness. Enneads VI,4,

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

Herein lies its greatness, not in mass; mass is limited and may be whittled down to nothingness; in that order no such paring off is possible – nor, if it were, could there be any falling short. Where limitation is unthinkable, what fear can there be of absence at any point? Nowhere can that principle fail which is the unfailing, the everlasting, the undwindling; suppose it in flux and it must at some time flow to its end; since it is not in flux – and, besides (as the All), it has nowhere to flow to – it lies spread over the universe; in fact it is the universe, too great to be held by BODY, giving, therefore, to the material universe but little of itself, the little which that participant can take. Enneads VI,4,

We may not make this principle the lesser, or if in the sense of mass we do, we must not begin to mistrust the power of that less to stretch to the greater. Of course, we have in fact no right to affirm it less or to measure the thing of magnitude against that which has none; as well talk of a doctor’s skill being smaller than his BODY. This greatness is not to be thought of in terms of quantity; the greater and less of BODY have nothing to do with soul. Enneads VI,4,

The nature of the greatness of soul is indicated by the fact that as the BODY grows, the larger mass is held by the same soul that sufficed to the smaller; it would be in many ways absurd to suppose a corresponding enlargement in the soul. Enneads VI,4,

But why does not one same soul enter more than one BODY? Because any second BODY must approach, if it might; but the first has approached and received and keeps. Enneads VI,4,

Are we to think that this second BODY, in keeping its soul with a like care, is keeping the same soul as the first? Why not: what difference is there? Merely some additions (from the experiences of life, none in the soul itself). Enneads VI,4,

Sensations no doubt differ from soul to soul but only as do the conditions and experiences; this is difference not in the judging principle but in the matters coming to judgement; the judge is one and the same soul pronouncing upon various events, and these not its own but belonging to a particular BODY; it is only as a man pronounces simultaneously upon a pleasant sensation in his finger and a pain in his head. Enneads VI,4,

A hand may very well control an entire mass, a long plank, or anything of that sort; the control is effective throughout and yet is not distributed, unit for unit, over the object of control: the power is felt to reach over the whole area, though the hand is only hand-long, not taking the extension of the mass it wields; lengthen the object and, provided that the total is within the strength, the power handles the new load with no need of distributing itself over the increased area. Now let us eliminate the corporeal mass of the hand, retaining the power it exerted: is not that power, the impartible, present integrally over the entire area of control? Or imagine a small luminous mass serving as centre to a transparent sphere, so that the light from within shows upon the entire outer surface, otherwise unlit: we surely agree that the inner core of light, intact and immobile, reaches over the entire outer extension; the single light of that small centre illuminates the whole field. The diffused light is not due to any bodily magnitude of that central point which illuminates not as BODY but as BODY lit, that is by another kind of power than corporeal quality: let us then abstract the corporeal mass, retaining the light as power: we can no longer speak of the light in any particular spot; it is equally diffused within and throughout the entire sphere. We can no longer even name the spot it occupied so as to say whence it came or how it is present; we can but seek and wonder as the search shows us the light simultaneously present at each and every point in the sphere. So with the sunlight: looking to the corporeal mass you are able to name the source of the light shining through all the air, but what you see is one identical light in integral omnipresence. Consider too the refraction of light by which it is thrown away from the line of incidence; yet, direct or refracted, it is one and the same light. And supposing, as before, that the sun were simply an unembodied illuminant, the light would no longer be fixed to any one definite spot: having no starting point, no centre of origin, it would be an integral unity omnipresent. Enneads VI,4,

The light of our world can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass of known position, but conceive an immaterial entity, independent of BODY as being of earlier nature than all BODY, a nature firmly self-based or, better, without need of base: such a principle, incorporeal, autonomous, having no source for its rising, coming from no place, attached to no material mass, this cannot be allotted part here and part there: that would be to give it both a previous position and a present attachment. Finally, anything participating in such a principle can participate only as entirety with entirety; there can be no allotment and no partition. Enneads VI,4,

A principle attached to BODY might be exposed, at least by way of accident, to such partition and so be definable as passive and partible in view of its close relationship with the BODY of which it is so to speak a state or a Form; but that which is not inbound with BODY, which on the contrary BODY must seek, will of necessity go utterly free of every bodily modification and especially of the very possibility of partition which is entirely a phenomenon of BODY, belonging to its very essence. As partibility goes with BODY, so impartibility with the bodiless: what partition is possible where there is no magnitude? If a thing of magnitude participates to any degree in what has no magnitude, it must be by a participation without division; divisibility implies magnitude. Enneads VI,4,

Extension is of BODY; what is not of BODY, but of the opposed order, must be kept free of extension; but where there is no extension there is no spatial distinction, nothing of the here and there which would end its freedom of presence. Since, then, partition goes with place – each part occupying a place of its own – how can the placeless be parted? The unity must remain self-concentrated, immune from part, however much the multiple aspire or attain to contact with it. This means that any movement towards it is movement towards its entirety, and any participation attained is participation in its entirety. Its participants, then, link with it as with something unparticipated, something never appropriated: thus only can it remain intact within itself and within the multiples in which it is manifested. And if it did not remain thus intact, it would cease to be itself; any participation, then, would not be in the object of quest but in something never quested. Enneads VI,4,

Or, again, suppose the powers coming Thence are other than their source – lesser, fainter, as a bright light dwindles to a dim – but each attached to its essence as a power must always be: such secondary powers would be perfectly uniform and at once we are forced to admit the omnipresence of the one same power or at the least the presence – as in one and the same BODY – of some undivided identity integral at every point. Enneads VI,4,

And if this is the case with a particular BODY, why not with the entire universe? If we think of the single power as being endlessly divided, it is no longer a power entire; partition means lessening of power; and, with part of power for part of BODY, the conditions of consciousness cease. Enneads VI,4,

To begin with the image and archetype: If we are reminded of an artist’s picture we observe that here the image was produced by the artist, not by his subject; even in the case of a self-portrait, the picture is no “image of archetype,” since it is not produced by the painter’s BODY, the original represented: the reproduction is due to the effective laying on of the colours. Enneads VI,4,

But would not this indicate that the Authentic is diverse, multiple? That diversity is simplex still; that multiple is one; for it is a Reason-Principle, which is to say a unity in variety: all Being is one; the differing being is still included in Being; the differentiation is within Being, obviously not within non-Being. Being is bound up with the unity which is never apart from it; wheresoever Being appears, there appears its unity; and the unity of Being is self-standing, for presence in the sensible does not abrogate independence: things of sense are present to the Intellectual – where this occurs – otherwise than as the Intellectual is present within itself; so, too, BODY’s presence to soul differs from that of knowledge to soul; one item of knowledge is present in a different way than another; a BODY’s presence to BODY is, again, another form of relation. Enneads VI,4,

Clearly no participant can participate in itself; self-participation would be merely identity. Body, then, as participant does not participate in BODY; BODY it has; its participation must be in what is not BODY. So too magnitude does not participate in magnitude; it has it: not even in addition of quantity does the initial magnitude participate in magnitude: the two cubits do not themselves become three cubits; what occurs is that an object totalling to a certain quantity now totals to another: for magnitude to participate in magnitude the actual two cubits must themselves become the new three (which cannot occur). Enneads VI,4,

A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound with Reality entire; it possesses also a BODY; but this BODY is not a husk having no part in soul, not a thing that earlier lay away in the soulless; the BODY had its aptitude and by this draws near: now it is not BODY merely, but living BODY. By this neighboring it is enhanced with some impress of soul – not in the sense of a portion of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul entire: at once there is the ground of desire, pleasure, pain; the BODY of the living form that has come to be was certainly no unrelated thing. Enneads VI,4,

But one that has reduced his rabble and gone back to the Man he was, lives to that and is that Man again, so that what he allows to the BODY is allowed as to something separate. Enneads VI,4,

But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul’s entry or presence to BODY, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting. Enneads VI,4,

We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the BODY to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of BODY but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul’s departure is the complete cessation of that communion. Enneads VI,4,

The various rankings of the universe will determine various degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the Intellectual, will give forth freely to BODY as being more nearly of the one power and standing closer, as distance holds in that order. Enneads VI,4,

As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its release; if into some lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the BODY is, in place with the BODY. Enneads VI,4,

But on the dissolution of the BODY? So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary, the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the image-soul may very well go alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that image but nonetheless the soul entire. Enneads VI,4,

This does not mean that Man Absolute, or any Absolute, or the Universe in the sense of a Whole, is absorbed by multiplicity; on the contrary, the multiplicity is absorbed by the Absolute, or rather is bound up with it. There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a substance entire and that in which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the BODY: it is in this latter mode that Being is omnipresent. Enneads VI,5,

The Intellectual giving is not an act of transmission; even in the case of corporeal objects, with their local separation, the mutual giving (and taking) is of things of one order and their communication, every effect they produce, is upon their like; what is corporeal in the All acts and is acted upon within itself, nothing external impinging upon it. Now if in BODY, whose very nature is partition, there is no incursion of the alien, how can there be any in the order in which no partition exists? It is therefore by identification that we see the good and touch it, brought to it by becoming identical with what is of the Intellectual within ourselves. In that realm exists what is far more truly a kosmos of unity; otherwise there will be two sensible universes, divided into correspondent parts; the Intellectual sphere, if a unity only as this sphere is, will be undistinguishable from it – except, indeed, that it will be less worthy of respect since in the nature of things extension is appropriate in the lower while the Intellectual will have wrought out its own extension with no motive, in a departure from its very character. Enneads VI,5,

But what of that “Number within us having its own manner of being”? It is the Number of our essence. “Our essence” we read “partakes of Number and harmony and, also, is Number and harmony.” “Neither BODY nor magnitude,” someone says: soul, then, is Number since it is essence. The number belonging to BODY is an essence of the order of BODY; the number belonging to soul constitutes the essences of souls. Enneads VI,6,

We may be told that it lay within the divine knowledge that animal life would be exposed to heat and cold and other such experiences incident to BODY and that in this knowledge he provided the senses and the organs apt to their activity in order that the living total might not fall an easy prey. Enneads VI,7,

We ask first whether man as here is a Reason-Principle different to that soul which produces him as here and gives him life and thought; or is he that very soul or, again, the (yet lower) soul using the human BODY? Now if man is a reasonable living being and by “living being” is meant a conjoint of soul and BODY, the Reason-Principle of man is not identical with soul. But if the conjoint of soul and BODY is the reason-principle of man, how can man be an eternal reality, seeing that it is only when soul and BODY have come together that the Reason-Principle so constituted appears? The Reason-Principle will be the foreteller of the man to be, not the Man Absolute with which we are dealing but more like his definition, and not at that indicating his nature since what is indicated is not the Idea that is to enter Matter but only that of the known thing, the conjoint. We have not yet found the Man we are seeking, the equivalent of the Reason-Principle. Enneads VI,7,

The soul of that order, the soul that has entered into Matter of that order, is man by having, apart from BODY, a certain disposition; within BODY it shapes all to its own fashion, producing another form of Man, man reduced to what BODY admits, just as an artist may make a reduced image of that again. Enneads VI,7,

The higher Man, above this sphere, rises from the more godlike soul, a soul possessed of a nobler humanity and brighter perceptions. 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,7,

But how can that higher soul have sense-perception? It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul’s perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the sense-realm to the lowest extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the Reason-Principles in copy; and Man in the Intellectual-Principle contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all – not in the sense of actually living by them all but as standing in under-parallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the BODY, then if the second also departs – of course not losing hold on the Above – the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the BODY of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that. Enneads VI,7,

We know that Intellectual-Principle has a source and advances to some term as its ultimate; now, is the intermediate between source and term to thought of as a line or as some distinct kind of BODY uniform and unvaried? Where at that would be its worth? it had no change, if no differentiation woke it into life, it would not be a Force; that condition would in no way differ from mere absence of power and, even calling it movement, it would still be the movement of a life not all-varied but indiscriminate; now it is of necessity that life be all-embracing, covering all the realms, and that nothing fail of life. Intellectual-Principle, therefore, must move in every direction upon all, or more precisely must ever have so moved. Enneads VI,7,

Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; BODY would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. Each of these progressive priors must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place, others life, others wisdom and the good life: Intellectual-Principle will draw upon the Authentic Good which we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking light from it. This good we will define later. Enneads VI,7,

But if Matter by very essence is evil how could it choose the good? This question implies that if Evil were self-conscious it would admire itself: but how can the unadmirable be admired; and did we not discover that the good must be apt to the nature? There that question may rest. But if universally the good is Form and the higher the ascent the more there is of Form-Soul more truly Form than BODY is and phases of soul progressively of higher Form and Intellectual-Principle standing as Form to soul collectively – then the Good advances by the opposite of Matter and, therefore, by a cleansing and casting away to the utmost possible at each stage: and the greatest good must be there where all that is of Matter has disappeared. The Principle of Good rejecting Matter entirely – or rather never having come near it at any point or in any way – must hold itself aloft with that Formless in which Primal Form takes its origin. But we will return to this. Enneads VI,7,

But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. Intellectual-Principle was raised thus to that Supreme and remains with it, happy in that presence. 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. Lovers here mould themselves to the beloved; they seek to increase their attraction of person and their likeness of mind; they are unwilling to fall short in moral quality or in other graces lest they be distasteful to those possessing such merit – and only among such can true love be. In the same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. The soul which has never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love – perhaps unawares – it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter, befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could never venture into the mud of BODY to be soiled, annulled. Enneads VI,7,

Suppose the soul to have attained: the highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision – she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in BODY and will give herself no foreign name, not “man,” not “living being,” not “being,” not “all”; any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. Once There she will barter for This nothing the universe holds; not though one would make over the heavens entire to her; than This there is nothing higher, nothing of more good; above This there is no passing; all the rest, however lofty, lies on the downgoing path: she is of perfect judgement and knows that This was her quest, that nothing higher is. Here can be no deceit; where could she come upon truer than the truth? and the truth she affirms, that she is, herself; but all the affirmation is later and is silent. In this happiness she knows beyond delusion that she is happy; for this is no affirmation of an excited BODY but of a soul become again what she was in the time of her early joy. All that she had welcomed of old-office, power, wealth, beauty, knowledge of all she tells her scorn as she never could had she not found their better; linked to This she can fear no disaster nor even know it; let all about her fall to pieces, so she would have it that she may be wholly with This, so huge the happiness she has won to. Enneads VI,7,

Where the appetites are dictated by the very nature they are the desires of the conjoint of soul and BODY and then soul lies under physical compulsions: if they spring in the soul as an independent, then much that we take to be voluntary is in reality outside of our free act. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meagre reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us masters in the ensuing act? Need, inexorably craving satisfaction, is not free in face of that to which it is forced: and how at all can a thing have efficiency of its own when it rises from an extern, has an extern for very principle, thence taking its Being as it stands? It lives by that extern, lives as it has been moulded: if this be freedom, there is freedom in even the soulless; fire acts in accordance with its characteristic being. Enneads VI,8,

Taking it that the presentment of fancy is not a matter of our will and choice, how can we think those acting at its dictation to be free agents? Fancy strictly, in our use, takes it rise from conditions of the BODY; lack of food and drink sets up presentments, and so does the meeting of these needs; similarly with seminal abundance and other humours of the BODY. We refuse to range under the principle of freedom those whose conduct is directed by such fancy: the baser sort, therefore, mainly so guided, cannot be credited with self-disposal or voluntary act. Self-disposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the Intellectual-Principle, live above the states of the BODY. The spring of freedom is the activity of Intellectual-Principle, the highest in our being; the proposals emanating thence are freedom; such desires as are formed in the exercise of the Intellectual act cannot be classed as involuntary; the gods, therefore, that live in this state, living by Intellectual-Principle and by desire conformed to it, possess freedom. Enneads VI,8,

So understood, virtue is a mode of Intellectual-Principle, a mode not involving any of the emotions or passions controlled by its reasonings, since such experiences, amenable to morality and discipline, touch closely – we read – on BODY. Enneads VI,8,

Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being? The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered: In us the individual, viewed as BODY, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we participate in reality, are in some degree real. This is a compound state, a mingling of Reality and Difference, not, therefore reality in the strictest sense, not reality pure. Thus far we are not masters of our being; in some sense the reality in us is one thing and we another. We are not masters of our being; the real in us is the master, since that is the principle establishing our characteristic difference; yet we are again in some sense that which is sovereign in us and so even on this level might in spite of all be described as self-disposing. Enneads VI,8,

Health, similarly, is the condition of a BODY acting as a co-ordinate unity. Beauty appears when limbs and features are controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of a soul acting as a concordant total, brought to unity. Enneads VI,8,

Anything that can be described as a unity is so in the precise degree in which it holds a characteristic being; the less or more the degree of the being, the less or more the unity. 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. Absolute unity it is not: it is soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul’s unity as there is BODY with BODY’s unity. The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are furthest from unity, the more compact are the nearer; soul is nearer yet but still a participant. Enneads VI,8,

Is soul to be identified with unity on the ground that unless it were one thing it could not be soul? No; unity is equally necessary to every other thing, yet unity stands distinct from them; BODY and unity are not identical; BODY, too; is still a participant. Enneads VI,8,

Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here addressing them but only such as accept another nature than BODY and have some conception of soul. Enneads VI,8,

In our present state – part of our being weighed down by the BODY, as one might have the feet under water with all the rest untouched – we bear – ourselves aloft by that – intact part and, in that, hold through our own centre to the centre of all the centres, just as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that of the sphere to which all belong. Thus we are secure. Enneads VI,8,

But how comes the soul not to keep that ground? Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the time of vision unbroken, the self hindered no longer by any hindrance of BODY. Not that those hindrances beset that in us which has veritably seen; it is the other phase of the soul that suffers and that only when we withdraw from vision and take to knowing by proof, by evidence, by the reasoning processes of the mental habit. Such logic is not to be confounded with that act of ours in the vision; it is not our reason that has seen; it is something greater than reason, reason’s Prior, as far above reason as the very object of that thought must be. Enneads VI,8,