5. Man, thus, must be some Reason-Principle other than soul. But why should he not be some conjoint – a soul in a certain Reason-Principle – the Reason-Principle being, as it were, a definite activity which however could not exist without that which acts?
This is the case with the Reason-Principles in seed which are neither soulless nor entirely soul. For these productive principles cannot be devoid of soul and there is nothing surprising in such essences being Reason-Principles.
But these principles producing other forms than man, of what phase of soul are they activities? Of the vegetal soul? Rather of that which produces animal life, a brighter soul and therefore one more intensely living.
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.
It is soul, then, that holds the pattern and Reason-Principles of Man, the natural tendencies, the dispositions and powers – all feeble since this is not the Primal Man – and it contains also the Ideal-Forms of other senses, Forms which themselves are senses, bright to all seeming but images, and dim in comparison with those of the earlier order.
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.
The Man of the realm of birth has sense-perception: the higher soul enters to bestow a brighter life, or rather does not so much enter as simply impart itself; for soul does not leave the Intellectual but, maintaining that contact, holds the lower life as pendant from it, blending with it by the natural link of Reason-Principle to Reason-Principle: and man, the dimmer, brightens under that illumination.