The All-Soul
The Third Hypostasis of the Divine-Triad is, then, the ALL-SOUL, or UNIVERSAL SOUL or SOUL OF THE ALL: it is the eternal emanation and image of the Second Hypostasis, the Intellectual-Principle. As the Divine-Intellectual-Principle has, to our own view, two Acts – that of upward contemplation of The One and that of ‘generation’ towards the lower -so the All-Soul has two Acts: it at once contemplates the Intellectual-Principle and ‘generates’ in the bounty of its own perfection the lower possible. Thus we have often in the Enneads a verbal partition of the All-Soul; we hear of the Leading-Principle of the Soul, or the Celestial Soul, concentrated in contemplation of its superior, and the Lower Soul, called also the Nature-Looking and Generative Soul, whose operation it is to generate or fashion the lower, the material Universe upon the model of the Divine-Thoughts, the ‘Ideas’ laid up within the Divine-Mind: this lower principle in the Soul is sometimes called the Logos of the Universe, or the ‘Reason-Principle’ of the Universe. The All-Soul is the mobile cause of movement as well as of Form: more directly than the two superior or ‘earlier’ Hypostases of the Divine-Triad it is the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the COSMOS, or ‘WORLD’, or material or sense-grasped Universe, which is the Soul’s Act and emanation, image and ‘shadow’. It is the Creator, therefore, and the Vital-Principle of all that is lower, or ‘later’ than the Divine-Triad. In a sense that need not be here minutely elaborated the All-Soul includes, and is, All-the-Souls: for the first rough practical purposes of the average reader, it may be conveniently indicated in a stanza, by Richard Watson Dixon:
There is a soul above the soul of each,
A mightier soul, which yet to each belongs:
There is a sound made of all human speech,
And numerous as the concourse of all songs:
And in that soul lives each, in each that soul,
Tho’ all the ages are its life-time vast;
Each soul that dies, in its most sacred whole
Receiveth life that shall for ever last.