Tratado 53,8 (I, 1, 8) — Relação individual com o intelecto cósmico (Guthrie)

INDIVIDUAL RELATION WITH COSMIC INTELLECT.

8. What is our relation with the Intelligence? I mean not the habit imparted to the soul by the intellect, but the absolute Intelligence1; which, though above us, is also common to all men, or peculiar to each of them; in other words, is simultaneously common and individual. Common because it is indivisible, one and everywhere the same; particular because each soul possesses it entirely in the first or rational soul. Likewise, we possess the ideas in a double manner; in the soul they appear developed and separate; in the intelligence they exist all together2.

INDIVIDUAL RELATION WITH GOD AND COSMIC SOUL.

What is our relation with God? He hovers over the intelligible nature, and real being; while we, being on the third rank as counted from thence, are of the undivided universal Soul, which3 is indivisible because she forms part of the upper world, while she is divisible in regard to the bodies. She is indeed divisible in regard to the bodies, since she permeates each of them as far as they live; out at the same time she is indivisible because she is one in the universe.

SOUL GIVES LIFE TO PSYCHOLOGIC ELEMENTS.

She seems to be present in the bodies, and illuminates them, making living beings out of them. This occurs not as a mixture of herself and bodies, but by remaining individual, giving out images of herself4, just as a single face in several mirrors. Of these, the first is sensation, which resides in the common part, the organism; then come all the other forms of the soul—forms which successively derive each from the other, down to the faculties of generation and increase, and generally, the power of producing and fashioning that which is different from self—which indeed the soul does as soon as she turns towards the object she fashions5.

GUTHRIE, K. S. Plotinus: Complete Works: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods. [single Volume, Unabridged]. [s.l.] CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.

  1. One of the three hypostases

  2. See Bouillet, i. p. LXXIII. 344-352. 

  3. Plato. Timaeus, p. 35; Cary, 12. 

  4. These images of the universal Soul are the faculties of the soul, sense-power, vegetative power, generative power or nature; see IV. 4.13, 14

  5. “Turning” means here to incline.