4th Ennead | Plotinus | Book 3-1
Book 3
Problems of the Soul (1)
The Soul:
what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt — with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us — this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who bade us know ourselves.
Our general instinct to seek and learn, our longing to possess ourselves of whatsoever is lovely in the vision will, in all reason, set us enquiring into the nature of the instrument with which we search.
Now even in the universal Intellect [Divine Mind] there was duality, so that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which soul comes to occupy body. For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be offshoots from the soul of the universe [parts and an identity modally parted].
Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the All-Soul — the considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that equality of intellection.
They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says “As our body is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the soul of the All.” It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that — taking character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it — we must derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within ourselves every part absorbs from our soul so, analogically, we, standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the Soul of the All as parts of it. They will urge also that the dictum “The collective soul cares for all the unensouled,” carries the same implication and could be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be there to concern itself with the unensouled.
To this our first answer is that to place certain things under one identical class — by admitting an identical range of operation — is to make them of one common species, and puts an end to all mention of part; the reasonable conclusion would be, on the contrary, that there is one identical soul, every separate manifestation being that soul complete.
Our opponents after first admitting the unity go on to make our soul dependent on something else, something in which we have no longer the soul of this or that, even of the universe, but a soul of nowhere, a soul belonging neither to the Cosmos, nor to anything else, and yet vested with all the function inherent to the cosmic soul and to that of every ensouled thing.
The soul considered as an entirety cannot be a soul of any one given thing — since it is an Essence [a divine Real-Being] — or, at least, there must be a soul which is not exclusively the soul of any particular thing, and those attached to particulars must so belong merely in some mode of accident.
In such questions as this it is important to clarify the significance of “part.”
Part, as understood of body — uniform or varied — need not detain us; it is enough to indicate that, when part is mentioned in respect of things whose members are alike, it refers to mass and not to ideal-form [specific idea]: take for example, whiteness: the whiteness in a portion of milk is not a part of the whiteness of milk in general: we have the whiteness of a portion not a portion of whiteness; for whiteness is utterly without magnitude; has nothing whatever to do with quantity.
That is all we need say with regard to part in material things; but part in the unembodied may be taken in various ways. We may think of it in the sense familiar in numbers, “two” a part of the standard “ten” — in abstract numbers of course — or as we think of a segment of a circle, or line [abstractly considered], or, again, of a section or branch of knowledge.
In the case of the units of reckoning and of geometrical figure, exactly as in that of corporeal masses, partition must diminish the total; the part must be less than the whole; for these are things of quantity, and have their being as things of quantity; and — since they are not the ideal-form Quantity — they are subject to increase and decrease.
Now in such a sense as this, part cannot be affirmed of the soul.
The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the All-Soul as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent units.
Such a conception would entail many absurdities:
The Ten could not be [essentially] a unity [the Soul would be an aggregation, not a self- standing Real-Being] and, further — unless every one of the single constituents were itself an All-Soul — the All-Soul would be formed of non-souls.
Again, it is admitted that the particular soul — this “part of the All-Soul — is of one ideal-form with it, but this does not entail the relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts there is nothing inevitably making any portion uniform with the total: take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we may divide it in different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided into triangles; all sorts of different figures are possible: yet an absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul.
In a line, no doubt, the part is inevitably a line; but even here there is a necessary difference in size; and if, in the case of the soul we similarly called upon magnitude as the distinction between constituents and collective soul, then soul, thus classed by magnitude becomes quantitative, and is simply body.
But it is admitted that all souls are alike and are entireties; clearly, soul is not subject to part in the sense in which magnitudes are: our opponents themselves would not consent to the notion of the All-Soul being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they would be doing, annulling the All-Soul — if any collective soul existed at all — making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being described as a portion of the total thing, wine.
Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the sense in which we speak of some single proposition as a part of the science entire.
The theorem is separate, but the science stands as one undivided thing, the expression and summed efficiency [energy] of each constituent notion: this is partition without severance; each item potentially includes the whole science, which itself remains an unbroken total.
Is this the appropriate parallel?
No; in such a relationship the All-Soul, of which the particular souls are to be a part, would not be the soul of any definite thing, but an entity standing aloof; that means that it would not even be the soul of the Cosmos; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls; thus all alike would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there would be no reason for making any such distinction.
Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being, the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire?
This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside of body, or that — no soul being within body — the thing described as the soul of the universe is, none the less, outside the body of the universe. That is a point to be investigated, but for the present we must consider what kind of soul this parallel would give us.
If the particular soul is a part of the All-Soul only in the sense that this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing, multi- present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul that is a part against a soul that is an all — especially where an identical power is present. Even difference of function, as in eyes and ears, cannot warrant the assertion of distinct parts concerned in each separate act — with other parts again making allotment of faculty — all is met by the notion of one identical thing, but a thing in which a distinct power operates in each separate function. All the powers are present either in seeing or in hearing; the difference in impression received is due to the difference in the organs concerned; all the varying impressions are our various responses to Ideal-forms that can be taken in a variety of modes.
A further proof [of the unity of Soul] is that perception demands a common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these impressions must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all that is said and done.
But again: “Everywhere, Unity”: in the variety of functions if each “part of the soul” were as distinct as are the entrant sensations, none of those parts could have knowledge; awareness would belong only to that judging faculty — or, if local, every such act of awareness would stand quite unrelated to any other. But since the soul is a rational soul, by the very same title by which it is an All-Soul, and is called the rational soul, in the sense of being a whole [and so not merely “reasoning locally”] , then what is thought of as a part must in reality be no part but the identity of an unparted thing.
But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly, the difficulty of soul in body as against soul not embodied.
We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul, while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human soul can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they are one and the same?
There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing.
A possible solution may be offered:
The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls — the All-Soul, with the others — issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance.
The All-Soul would always remain above, since essentially it has nothing to do with descent or with the lower, or with any tendency towards this sphere: the other souls would become ours [become “partial,” individual in us] because their lot is cast for this sphere, and because they are solicited by a thing [the body] which invites their care.
The one — the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul — would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth — for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe — while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound.
But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and mine and another’s?
May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to some individual, but to belong on the higher to that other sphere?
At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates’ soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the highest.
Now nothing of Real Being is ever annulled.
In the Supreme, the Intellectual-Principles are not annulled, for in their differentiation there is no bodily partition, no passing of each separate phase into a distinct unity; every such phase remains in full possession of that identical being. It is exactly so with the souls.
By their succession they are linked to the several Intellectual-Principles, for they are the expression, the Logos, of the Intellectual-Principles, of which they are the unfolding; brevity has opened out to multiplicity; by that point of their being which least belongs to the partial order, they are attached each to its own Intellectual original: they have already chosen the way of division; but to the extreme they cannot go; thus they keep, at once, identification and difference; each soul is permanently a unity [a self] and yet all are, in their total, one being.
Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all; those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which abides in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles, partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the Supreme.
But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a Cosmos, the soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and contains, it too, all things in itself?
We have indicated that a thing may enter and dwell at the same time in various places; this ought to be explained, and the enquiry would show how an identity resident simultaneously here and there may, in its separate appearances, act or react — or both — after distinct modes; but the matter deserves to be examined in a special discussion.
To return, then: how and why has the All-Soul produced a Cosmos, while the particular souls simply administer some one part of it?
In the first place, we are not surprised when men of identical knowledge differ greatly in effective power.
But the reason, we will be asked.
The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one [the creative All-Soul] looks towards the universal Intellectual-Principle [the exemplar of all that can be], while the others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator — the work accomplished before them — an impediment inevitable whichsoever of the souls were first to operate.
But it is safer to account for the creative act by nearer connection with the over-world; the souls whose tendency is exercised within the Supreme have the greater power; immune in that pure seat they create securely; for the greater power takes the least hurt from the material within which it operates; and this power remains enduringly attached to the over- world: it creates, therefore, self gathered and the created things gather round it; the other souls, on the contrary, themselves go forth; that can mean only that they have deserted to- wards the abyss; a main phase in them is drawn downward and pulls them with it in the desire towards the lower.
The “secondary and tertiary souls,” of which we hear, must be understood in the sense of closer or remoter position: it is much as in ourselves the relation to the Supreme is not identical from soul to soul; some of us are capable of becoming Uniate, others of striving and almost attaining, while a third rank is much less apt; it is a matter of the degree or powers of the soul by which our expression is determined — the first degree dominant in the one person, the second, the third [the merely animal life] in others while, still, all of us contain all the powers.
So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul?
The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the heavens are ensouled — a teaching which he maintains in the observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul; how, he asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total.
He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the other souls brought into existence after the All-Soul, but compounded from the same mixing bowl”; secondary and tertiary are duly marked off from the primal but every form of soul is presented as being of identical ideal-nature with the All-Soul.
As for saying of the Phaedrus. “All that is soul cares for all that is soulless,” this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be controlled — fashioned, set in place or brought into being — by anything but the Soul. And we cannot think that there is one soul whose nature includes this power and another without it. “The perfect soul, that of the All,” we read, “going its lofty journey, operates upon the Cosmos not by sinking into it, but, as it were, by brooding over it”; and “every perfect soul exercises this governance”; he distinguishes the other, the soul in this sphere as “the soul when its wing is broken.”
As for our souls being entrained in the cosmic circuit, and taking character and condition thence; this is no indication that they are parts: soul-nature may very well take some tincture from even the qualities of place, from water and from air; residence in this city or in that, and the varying make-up of the body may have their influence [upon our human souls which, yet, are no parts of place or of body].
We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over something from the All-Soul; we do not deny the influence of the Cosmic Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul in us [the Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalizing] proven to be distinct by that power of opposition.
As for our being begotten children of the Cosmos, we answer that in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother’s.
These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question, are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between soul and soul is due to the mere fact that all spring from that self-same soul [the next to Divine Mind] from which springs the Soul of the All.
We have already stated that the one soul is also multiple; and we have dealt with the different forms of relationship between part and whole: we have investigated the different degrees existing within soul; we may now add, briefly, that differences might be induced, also, by the bodies with which the soul has to do, and, even more, by the character and mental operations carried over from the conduct of the previous lives. “The life-choice made by a soul has a correspondence” — we read — “with its former lives.”
As regards the nature of soul in general, the differences have been defined in the passage in which we mentioned the secondary and tertiary orders and laid down that, while all souls are all-comprehensive, each ranks according to its operative phase — one becoming Uniate in the achieved fact, another in knowledge, another in desire, according to the distinct orientation by which each is, or tends to become, what it looks upon. The very fulfilment and perfectionment attainable by souls cannot but be different.
But, if in the total the organization in which they have their being is compact of variety — as it must be since every Reason-Principle is a unity of multiplicity and variety, and may be thought of as a psychic animated organism having many shapes at its command — if this is so and all constitutes a system in which being is not cut adrift from being, if there is nothing chance — borne among beings as there is none even in bodily organisms, then it follows that Number must enter into the scheme; for, once again, Being must be stable; the members of the Intellectual must possess identity, each numerically one; this is the condition of individuality. Where, as in bodily masses, the Idea is not essentially native, and the individuality is therefore in flux, existence under ideal form can rise only out of imitation of the Authentic Existences; these last, on the contrary, not rising out of any such conjunction [as the duality of Idea and dead Matter] have their being in that which is numerically one, that which was from the beginning, and neither becomes what it has not been nor can cease to be what it is.
Even supposing Real-Beings [such as soul] to be produced by some other principle, they are certainly not made from Matter; or, if they were, the creating principle must infuse into them, from within itself, something of the nature of Real-Being; but, at this, it would itself suffer change, as it created more or less. And, after all, why should it thus produce at any given moment rather than remain for ever stationary?
Moreover the produced total, variable from more to less, could not be an eternal: yet the soul, it stands agreed, is eternal.
But what becomes of the soul’s infinity if it is thus fixed?
The infinity is a matter of power: there is question, not of the soul’s being divisible into an infinite number of parts, but of an infinite possible effectiveness: it is infinity in the sense in which the Supreme God, also, is free of all bound.
This means that it is no external limit that defines the individual being or the extension of souls any more than of God; on the contrary each in right of its own power is all that it chooses to be: and we are not to think of it as going forth from itself [losing its unity by any partition]: the fact is simply that the element within it, which is apt to entrance into body, has the power of immediate projection any whither: the soul is certainly not wrenched asunder by its presence at once in foot and in finger. Its presence in the All is similarly un- broken; over its entire range it exists in every several part of everything having even vegetal life, even in a part cut off from the main; in any possible segment it is as it is at its source. For the body of the All is a unit, and soul is everywhere present to it as to one thing.
When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the Life-Principle now present is not the particular soul that was in the larger body; that body has ceased to be receptive of soul, or there would have been no death; what happens is that whatsoever in the product of the decay is apt material for animal existence of one kind or another becomes ensouled by the fact that soul is nowhere lacking, though a recipient of soul may be. This new ensouling does not mean, however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one or, rather, all remains one: it is as with ourselves; some elements are shed, others grow in their place; the soul abandons the discarded and flows into the new-coming as long as the one soul of the man holds its ground; in the All the one soul holds its ground for ever; its distinct contents now retain soul and now reject it, but the total of spiritual beings is unaffected.
But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body — the manner and the process — a question certainly of no minor interest.
The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms.
Firstly, there is the entry — metensomatosis — of a soul present in body by change from one [wholly material] frame to another or the entry — not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier habitacle is not certainly definable — of a soul leaving an aerial or fiery body for one of earth.
Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation.
What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature?
It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All. Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use such words as “entry” and “ensoulment,” though never was this All unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which must in fact be co-existent.
The true doctrine may be stated as follows:
In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists.
While the Soul [as an eternal, a Divine Being] is at rest — in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute — yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest.
Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to its Being — as far as it can share in Being — or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the Cosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing.
The Cosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature — a thing unbounded — as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a cosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea [the Divine forming power] which it conveys.
In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.
We ascend from air, light, sun — or, moon and light and sun — in detail, to these things as constituting a total — though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the [cosmic] Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it. That suite [the lower and material world] we take to be the very last effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach.
Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate [the material world] itself receives its share of the general light, something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul’s own Real-Being.
We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies — toys, things of no great worth — and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world [under the soul but above the material] the entire shape [as well as the idea] comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose.
Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within outwards towards the new production.
In soulless entities, the outgo [natural to everything] remains dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it communicates reason to the body — an image of the reason within itself, just as the life given to the body is an image of Real-Being — and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it contains the Reason-Forms.
The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the Cosmos contains all.
I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.
It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the created.
The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere — let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos — and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the over- world; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises — as far as, through soul, anything can — from the lower to the highest.
Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.
These Beings [the Reason-Principles of this sphere] are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being.
The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.
Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt.
For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration, to its established character; it is leading the things of this realm to be of one voice and plan with the Supreme. And thus the cosmic content is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place, under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and return of souls and to every purpose of the system.
We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the Cosmos; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with cosmic circuit — to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars — and out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth.
Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way:
The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens, sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the Divine In- tellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase [the World-Soul] maintaining the unvarying march [of the cosmic circuit] the other [the soul of the Individual] adopting itself to times and season.
The depth of the descent, also, will differ — sometimes lower, sometimes less low — and this even in its entry into any given Kind: all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or animal.
The Ineluctable, the Cosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural principle under which each several entity is overruled to go, duly and in order, towards that place and Kind to which it characteristically tends, that is towards the image of its primal choice and constitution.
In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image [the thing in the world of copy] to which its individual constitution inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender or leader acting at the right moment to bring it at the right moment whether into body or into a definitely appropriate body: of its own motion it descends at the precisely true time and enters where it must. To every Soul its own hour; when that strikes it descends and enters the body suitable to it as at the cry of a herald; thus all is set stirring and advancing as by a magician’s power or by some mighty traction; it is much as, in any living thing, the soul itself effects the fulfilment of the natural career, stirring and bringing forth, in due season, every element — beard, horn, and all the successive stages of tendency and of output — or, as it leads a tree through its normal course within set periods.
The Souls go forth neither under compulsion nor of freewill; or, at least, freedom, here, is not to be regarded as action upon preference; it is more like such a leap of the nature as moves men to the instinctive desire of sexual union, or, in the case of some, to fine conduct; the motive lies elsewhere than in the reason: like is destined unfailingly to like, and each moves hither or thither at its fixed moment.
Even the Intellectual-Principle, which is before all the Cosmos, has, it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact above, and of giving downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose existence is implied in the law of the universal; for the universal broods closely over the particular; it is not from without that the law derives the power by which it is executed; on the contrary the law is given in the entities upon whom it falls; these bear it about with them. Let but the moment arrive, and what it decrees will be brought to act by those beings in whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it prevails because it is within them; it becomes like a heavy burden, and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are bidden from within.
Thus it comes about that this Cosmos, lit with many lights, gleaming in its souls, receives still further graces, gifts from here and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other Intellectual-Principles whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably the secret of the myth in which, after Prometheus had moulded woman, the other gods heaped gifts upon her, Hephaistos “blending the clay with moisture and bestowing the human voice and the form of a goddess”; Aphrodite bringing her gifts, and the Graces theirs, and other gods other gifts, and finally calling her by the name [Pandora] which tells of gift and of all giving — for all have added something to this formation brought to being by a Pro- methean, a fore-thinking power. As for the rejection of Prometheus’ gift by after-thought, Epimetheus, what can this signify but that the wiser choice is to remain in the Intellectual realm? Pandora’s creator is fettered, to signify that he is in some sense held by his own creation; such a fettering is external and the release by Hercules tells that there is power in Prometheus, so that he need not remain in bonds.
Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the bestowal of gifts upon the Cosmos as harmonizes with our explanation of the universal system.
The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude [physical extension] they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness.
As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in the bodies entered, or to the accidents of life, or to upbringing, or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these influences together, or to specific combinations of them.
Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne, have the strength of self-mastery in all that is left to their own act; they have given themselves to another dispensation: they live by the code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the Cosmos, out of soul-movements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code, therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon them, linking their sequents back to them, keeping unshakeably true all that is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature, and leading round by all appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt.
In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is determined by the descendent beings themselves.