Categoria: Tratado 28 (IV,4)

29. 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…

10. The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the appellation “Zeus” sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe. When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must leave…

18. 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. Certainly the body, container…

1. What, then, will be the Soul’s discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence? Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is; failing such…

2. Enough on that point: we come now to the question of memory of the personality? There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that the contemplator is the self – Socrates, for example – or that it is Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in mind that,…

3. But it leaves that conjunction; it cannot suffer that unity; it falls in love with its own powers and possessions, and desires to stand apart; it leans outward so to speak: then, it appears to acquire a memory of itself. In this self-memory a distinction is to be made; the memory dealing with the…

4. 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…

5. But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective in us? At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the…

11. The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a living unit: there is the action determined by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals and on…

12. It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are the work of Nature, but that, since there is wisdom within the All, there must be also, by the side of such natural operation, acts of reasoning and of memory. But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what…

13. But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the universe and the principle known as Nature? This Wisdom is a first (within the All-Soul) while Nature is a last: for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul, possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle: we…

14. Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and vegetable forms stand to it? Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them? Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light…