14. There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this Principle must be the source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly?
The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes to be, why the Intellectual-Principle is all and whence it springs, these matters demand another approach.
But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea – whether there is an Idea of filth and mud – it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the Soul which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these.
But all this will be more clearly brought out, when we turn to the problem of the production of multiplicity from unity. Compounds, we shall see – as owing existence to hazard and not to the Intellectual-Principle, having been fused into objects of sense by their own impulse – are not to be included under Ideas.
The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul’s inability to bring some other thing to being – something in the order of nature, which, else, it would – but producing where it may. In the matter of the arts and crafts, all that are to be traced to the needs of human nature are laid up in the Absolute Man.
And before the particular Soul there is another Soul, a universal, and, before that, an Absolute-Soul, which is the Life existing in the Intellectual-Principle before Soul came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life in the Divine] the Absolute-Soul.