The Six Enneads: Enneads III-IV

Ennead III, Treatise 1

i. In the two orders of things — those whose existence is that of process and those in whom it is Authentic Being — there is a variety of possible relation to Cause.

Cause might conceivably underly all the entities hi both orders or none in either. It might underly some, only, in each order, the others being causeless. It might, again, underly the Realm of Process univer sally while in the Realm of Authentic Existence some things were caused, others not, or all were causeless. Conceivably, on the other hand, the Authentic Existents are all caused while in the Realm of Process some things are caused and others not, or all are causeless.

Now, to begin with the Eternal Existents :—

The Firsts among these, by the fact that they are Firsts, cannot be referred to outside Causes ; but all such (Eternals) as depend upon those Firsts may be admitted to derive their Being from them.

And in all cases the Act may be referred to the Essence (as its cause), for their Essence consists, precisely, in giving forth an appropriate Act.

As for Things of Process — or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable — we must hold that these are due to Cause ; Causelessness is quite inadmissible ; we can make no place here for unwar ranted " slantings," for sudden movement of bodies apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a soul with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind the Soul under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause. Something willed

—within itself or without — something desired, must lead it to action ; without motive it can have no motion.

On the assumption that all happens by Cause, it is easy to discover the nearest determinants of any particular act or state and to trace it plainly to them.

The cause of a visit to the centre of affairs will be that one thinks it necessary to see some person or to receive a debt, or, in a word, that one has some definite motive or impulse confirmed by a judgment of expediency. Sometimes a condition may be referred to the arts, the recovery of health for instance to medical science and the doctor. Wealth has for its cause the discovery of a treasure or the receipt of a gift, or the earning of money by manual or intellectual labour. The child is traced to the father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of favourable outside circumstances such as a particular diet or, more immediately, a special organic aptitude or a wife apt to childbirth.

And the general cause of all is Nature.

2. But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing to penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a dullness to all that calls us towards the primal and transcendent causes.

How comes it that the same surface causes produce different results ? There is moonshine, and one man steals and the other does not : under the influence of exactly similar surroundings one man falls sick and the other keeps well ; an identical set of operations makes one rich and leaves another poor. The differences amongst us in manners, in characters, in success, force us to go still further back.

Men therefore have never been able to rest at the surface causes.

One school postulates material principles, such as atoms ; from the movement, from the collisions and combinations of these, it derives the existence and the mode of being of all particular phenomena, supposing that all depends upon how these atoms are agglomerated, how they act, how they are affected ; our own impulses and states, even, are supposed to be determined by these principles.

Such teaching, then, obtrudes this compulsion, an atomic Anagke,

even upon Real Being. Substitute, for the atoms, any other material entities as principles and the cause of all things, and at once Real Being becomes servile to the determination set up by them.

Others rise to the first-principle of all that exists and from it derive all they tell of a cause penetrating all things, not merely moving all but making each and everything ; but they pose this as a fate and a supremely dominating cause ; not merely all else that comes into being, but even our own thinking and thoughts would spring from its movement, just as the several members of an animal move not at their own choice but at the dictation of the leading principle which animal life presupposes.

Yet another school fastens on the universal Circuit as embracing all things and producing all by its motion and by the positions and mutual aspect of the planets and fixed stars in whose power of foretelling they find warrant for the belief that this Circuit is the universal determinant.

Finally, there are those that dwell on the interconnection of the causa tive forces and on their linked descent — every later phenomenon following upon an earlier, one always leading back to others by which it arose and without which it could not be, and the latest always subservient to what went before them — but this is obviously to bring in fate by another path. This school may be fairly distinguished into two branches ; a section which makes all depend upon some one principle and a section which ignores such a unity.

Of this last opinion we will have something to say, but for the moment we will deal with the former, taking the others in their turn.

3- " Atoms " or " elements " — it is in either case an absurdity, an

impossibility, to hand over the universe and its contents to material entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order, reasoning, and the governing soul into being ; but the atomic origin is, if we may use the phrase, the most impossible.

A good deal of truth has resulted from the discussion of this subject ; but, even to admit such principles does not compel us to admit universal compulsion or any kind of " fate."

Suppose the atoms to exist : —

These atoms are to move, one downwards — admitting a down and an up (in the Universe or before the Universe is in being)— another slant wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly ; order has not come into being, though the outcome, this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order ; and thus prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws of the science— what science can operate where there is no order ?— or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated.

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under compulsion to yield to whatsoever the atoms may bring : but would anyone pretend that the acts and states of a soul or mind could be explained by any atomic movements ? How can we imagine that the onslaught of an atom, striking downwards or dashing in from any direction, could force the soul to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise ? And what of the soul's resistance to bodily states ? What movement of atoms could compel one man to be a geometrician, set another studying arithmetic or astronomy, lead a third to the philo sophic life ? In a word, if we must go, like soulless bodies, wherever bodies push and drive us, there is an end to our personal act and to our very existence as living beings.

The School that erects other material forces (such as " the elements ") into universal causes is met by the same reasoning : we say that while these can warm us and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of nothing that is done in the sphere of mind or soul : all this must be traceable to quite another kind of Principle.

4- Another theory :—

The Universe is permeated by one Soul, Cause of all things and events ; every separate phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in its place with the general movement ; all the various causes spring into action from one source : therefore, it is argued, the entire descending

claim of causes and all their interaction must follow inevitably and so constitute a universal determination. A plant rises from a root, and we are asked on that account to reason that not only the interconnection linking the root to all the members and every member to every other but the entire activity and experience of the plant, as well, must be one organised overruling, a " destiny " of the plant.

But such an extremity of determination, a destiny so all-pervasive, does away with the very destiny that is affirmed : it shatters the sequence and co-operation of causes.

It would be unreasonable to attribute to destiny the movement of our limbs dictated by the mind and will : this is no case of something outside (some destiny) bestowing motion while another thing (mind) accepts it and is thus set into action ; the mind itself (and not destiny) is the prime mover.

Similarly in the case of the universal system ; if all that performs act and is subject to experience constitutes one substance, if one thing does not really produce another thing under causes leading back con tinuously one to another, then it is not a truth that all happens by causes, there is nothing but a rigid unity. We are no " We " : nothing is our act ; our thought is not ours ; our decisions are the reasoning of something outside ourselves ; we are no more agents than our feet are kickers when we use them to kick with.

No ; each several thing must be a separate thing ; there must be acts and thoughts that are our own ; the good and evil done by each human being must be his own ; and it is quite certain that we must not lay any vileness to the charge of the All.

5- But perhaps the explanation of every particular act or event is rather that they are determined by the spheric movement — the Phora— and by the changing position of the heavenly bodies as these stand at setting or rising or in mid course and in various aspects with each other.

Augury, it is urged, is able from these indications to foretell what is to happen not merely to the universe as a whole, but even to individuals, and this not merely as regards external conditions of fortune but even as to the events of the mind. We observe, too, how growth or check in other orders of beings — animals and plants — is determined by their sympathetic relations with the heavenly bodies and how widely they are influenced by them, how, for example, the various countries show a different produce according to their situation on the earth and especially their lie towards the sun. And the effect of place is not limited to plants and animals ; it rules human beings too, determining their appearance, their height and colour, their mentality and their desires, their pursuits and their moral habit. Thus the universal circuit would seem to be the monarch of the All.

Now a first answer to this theory is that its advocates have merely devised another shift to immolate to the heavenly bodies all that is ours, our acts of will and our states, all the evil in us, our entire personality ; nothing is allowed to us ; we are left to be stones set rolling, not men, not beings whose nature implies a task.

But we must be allowed our own — with the understanding that to what is primarily ours, our personal holding, there is added some influx from the All — the distinction must be made between our individual act and what is thrust upon us : we are not to be immolated to the stars.

Place and climate, no doubt, produce constitutions warmer or colder ; and the parents tell on the offspring, as is seen in the resemblance between them, very general in personal appearance and noted also in some of the unreflecting states of the mind.

None the less, in spite of physical resemblance and similar environ ment, we observe the greatest difference in temperament and in ideas : this side of the human being, then, derives from some quite other Principle (than any external causation or destiny). A further confirma tion is found in the efforts we make to correct both bodily constitution and mental aspirations.

If the stars are held to be causing principles on the ground of the possibility of foretelling individual fate or fortune from observation of their positions, then the birds and all the other things which the soothsayer observes for divination must equally be taken as causing what they indicate.

Some further considerations will help to clarify this matter : —

The heavens are observed at the moment of a birth and the individual fate is thence predicted in the idea that the stars are no mere indications, but active causes, of the future events. Sometimes the Astrologers tell of noble birth ; " the child is born of highly placed parents " ; yet how is it possible to make out the stars (of the natal chart) to be causes of a condition which existed in the father and mother previously to that star pattern on which the prediction is based ?

And consider still further : —

They are really announcing the fortunes of parents from the birth of children ; the character and career of children are included in the predictions as to the parents — they predict for the yet unborn ! — in the lot of one brother they are foretelling the death of another ; a girl's fate includes that of a future husband, a boy's that of a wife.

Now, can we think that the star-grouping over any particular birth can be the cause of what stands already announced in the facts about the parents ? Either the previous star-groupings were the determinants of the child's future career or, if they were not, then neither is the immediate grouping. And notice further that physical likeness to the parents — the Astrologers hold — is of purely domestic origin : this implies that ugliness and beauty are so caused and not by astral movements.

Again, there must at one and the same time be a widespread coming to birth — men, and the most varied forms of animal life at the same moment — and these should all be under the one destiny since the one pattern rules at the moment ; how explain that identical star-groupings give here the human form, there the animal ?

6. But in fact everything follows its own Kind ; the birth is a horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from the Human Kind ; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being :

allow the stars a wide material action upon the bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical constitution ; still does such action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems quite independent of material elements, a man taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of these pursuits ? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings, bestowing wickedness ? And what of a doctrine that makes them wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are being carried to a position beneath the earth — as if a decline from our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure around the earth.

Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in goodness as they see this one or another of the company in various aspects, and that in their happier position they are benignant to us and, less pleasantly situated, turn maleficent. We can but believe that their circuit is for the protection of the entirety of things while they furnish the incidental service of being letters on which the augur, acquainted with that alphabet, may look and read the future from their pattern — arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a soaring bird tells of some lofty event.

7- It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing- Principle alleged

to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon— a Principle which, acting through seminal (operatively productive) Reason-Forms — Logoi Spermatikoi — elaborates all that exists and happens.

The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or — supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act — within ourselves.

But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity : all the causative forces enter into the system, and so every several phenome non rises necessarily ; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power

to check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one general cause leave us no resource but to go where they drive. All our ideas will be determined by a chain of previous causes ; our doings will be determined by those ideas ; personal action becomes a mere word. That we are the agents does not save our freedom when our action is prescribed by those causes ; we have precisely what belongs to everything that lives, to infants guided by blind impulses, to lunatics ; all these act ; why, even fire acts ; there is act in everything that follows the plan of its being, servilely.

No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate : unable to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations of our action.

8. What can this other cause be ; one standing above those treated of ; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury ?

Soul : we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual : this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause : for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign ; it would hold rank in a series.

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes (or, by chance-causes) : there will therefore be a compromise ; the action of the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler Soul will have the greater power ; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. The

soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings ; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence.

We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is brought about by this compromise between evil and accidental circumstance : what room was there for anything else than the thing that is ? Given all the causes, all must happen beyond aye or nay — that is, all the external and whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit — therefore when the Soul has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary : so, too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of action.

But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Principle, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as our doing, for they have no other source ; they are the issue of the unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus.

To sum the results of our argument : — All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by causes ; but the causation is of two Kinds ; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to other causes, those of the environment.

In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the light of sound reason is the Soul's work, while what is done where they are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered. Unwisdom, then, is not due to the Soul, and, in general — if we mean by

Fate a compulsion outside ourselves — an act is fated when it is contrary to wisdom.

But all our best is of our own doing : such is our nature as long as we remain detached. The wise and good do perform acts ; their right action is the expression of their own power : in the others it comes in the breathing spaces when the passions are in abeyance ; but it is not that they draw this occasional wisdom from outside themselves ; simply, they are for the time being unhindered.

Ennead III, Treatise 2

i. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.

Such a notion could be entertained only where there is neither intelligence nor even ordinary perception ; and reason enough has been urged against it, though none is really necessary.

But there is still the question as to the process by which the indi vidual things of this sphere have come into being, how they were made.

Some of them seem so undesirable as to cast doubts upon a Universal Providence ; and we find, on the one hand, the denial of any controlling power, on the other the belief that the Kosmos is the work of an evil creator.

This matter must be examined through and through from the very first principles. We may, however, omit for the present any consideration of the particular providence, that beforehand decision which accom plishes or holds things in abeyance to some good purpose and gives or withholds in our own regard : when we have established the Universal Providence which we affirm, we can link the secondary with it.

Of course the belief that after a certain lapse of time a Kosmos previously non-existent came into being would imply a foreseeing and a reasoned plan on the part of God providing for the production of the Universe and securing all possible perfection in it — a guidance and

partial providence, therefore, such as is indicated. But since we hold the eternal existence of the Universe, the utter absence of a beginning to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in the Universe as a universal consonance with the divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos is subsequent not in time but in the fact of derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelligence, preceding it in Kind, is its cause as being the Archtype and Model which it merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, it has its existence and subsistence.

The relationship may be presented thus :—

The authentic and primal Kosmos is the Being of the Intellectual Principle and of the Veritable Existent. This contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and even its parts bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual is not severed from the entire. In this Nature inheres all life and all intellect, a life living and having intellection as one act within a unity : every part that it gives forth is a whole ; all its content is its very own, for there is here no separation of thing from thing, no part standing in isolated existence estranged from the rest, and therefore nowhere is there any wronging of any other, any opposition. Everywhere one and com plete, it is at rest throughout and shows difference at no point ; it does not make over any of its content into any new form ; there can be no reason for changing what is everywhere perfect.

Why should Reason elaborate yet another Reason, or Intelligence another Intelligence ? An indwelling power of making things is in the character of a being not at all points as it should be but making, moving, by reason of some failure in quality. Those whose nature is all blessed ness have no more to do than to repose in themselves and be their being.

A widespread activity is dangerous to those who must go out from themselves to act. But such is the blessedness of this Being that in its very non-action it magnificently operates and in its self-dwelling it pro duces mightily.

2. By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, one within itself, there subsists this lower kosmos, no longer a true unity.

It is multiple, divided into various elements, thing standing apart from thing in a new estrangement. No longer is there concord unbroken ; hostility, too, has entered as the result of difference and distance ; im perfection has inevitably introduced discord ; for a part is not selfsufficient, it must pursue something outside itself for its fulfilment, and so it becomes the enemy to what it needs.

This Kosmos of parts has come into being not as the result of a judgment establishing its desirability, but by the sheer necessity of a secondary Kind.

The Intellectual Realm was not of a nature to be the ultimate of exist ents. It was the First and it held great power, all there is of power ; this means that it is productive without seeking to produce ; for if effort and search were incumbent upon it, the Act would not be its own, would not spring from its essential nature ; it would be, like a craftsman, producing by a power not inherent but acquired, mastered by dint of study.

The Intellectual Principle, then, in its unperturbed serenity has brought the universe into being, by communicating from its own store to Matter : and this gift is the Reason-Form flowing from it. For the Emanation of the Intellectual Principle is Reason, an emanation unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle continues to have place among beings.

The Reason-Principle within a seed contains all the parts and qualities concentrated in identity ; there is no distinction, no jarring, no internal hindering ; then there comes a pushing out into bulk, part rises in distinction with part, and at once the members of the organism stand in each other's way and begin to wear each other down.

So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the Reason-Form emanating from it, our Universe rises and develops part, and inevitably are formed groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups discordant and combative ; sometimes of choice and sometimes incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering proceeds by destruction.

Yet : Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act ; each utters its own voice, but all is brought into accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the ruling Reason-Principle. This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason, like the Supernal, but participant in Intelligence and Reason : it stands in need of the harmonising because it is the meeting ground of Necessity and divine Reason — Necessity pulling towards the lower, towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the Intellectual Principle remains sovran over it.

The Intellectual Sphere (the Divine) alone is Reason, and there can never be another Sphere that is Reason and nothing else ; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first ; it cannot be Reason : yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason ; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of

presence.

3- Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than beautiful, as less than the noblest possible in the corporeal ; and neither can any charge be laid against its source.

The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of deliberate purpose : it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own likeness by a natural process. And none the less, a second consideration, if a con sidered plan brought it into being it would still be no disgrace to its maker — for it stands a stately whole, complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose and that of all its parts which, leading and lesser alike, are of such a nature as to further the interests of the total. It is, there fore, impossible to condemn the whole on the merits of the parts which, besides, must be judged only as they enter harmoniously or not into the

whole, the main consideration, quite overpassing the members which thus cease to have importance. To linger about the parts is to condemn not the Kosmos but some isolated appendage of it ; in the entire living Being we fasten our eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvellous spectacle of the complete Man ; we ignore all the tribes and kinds of animals except for the meanest ; we pass over an entire race, humanity, and bring forward — Thersites.

No : this thing that has come into Being is (not a mass of fragments, but) the Kosmos complete : do but survey it, and surely this is the pleading you will hear : —

I am made by a God : from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing : for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness.

And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and with living things of every race, and while the very sea has answered to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air and the ether and the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its conscious move ment ever about the one Centre, seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. And all that is within me strives towards the Good ; and each, to the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend, with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge inanimate.

But there are degrees of participation : here no more than Existence, elsewhere Life ; and, in Life, sometimes mainly that of Sensation, higher again that of Reason, finally Life in all its fullness. We have no right to demand equal powers in the unequal : the finger is not to be asked to see ; there is the eye for that ; a finger has its own business — to be finger and have finger power.

4- That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being from outside itself : this is no case of a self-originating substance being annihilated by an external ; it rose on the ruin of something else, and thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing strange ; and for every fire quenched, another is kindled.

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever ; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms — and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea : individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals ; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change ; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness change had to emerge and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine.

The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are in evitable, since things here are derived, brought into existence because the Divine Reason which contains all of them in the upper Heavenshow could they come here unless they were There ? — must outflow over the whole extent of Matter.

Similarly, the very wronging of man by man may be derived from an effort towards the Good ; foiled, in their weakness, of their true desire, they turn against each other : still, when they do wrong, they pay the penalty — that of having hurt their Souls by their evil conduct and of degradation to a lower place — for nothing can ever escape what stands decreed in the law of the Universe.

This is not to accept the idea, sometimes urged, that order is an outcome of disorder and law of lawlessness, as if evil were a necessary preliminary to their existence or their manifestation : on the contrary order is the original and enters this sphere as imposed from without : it is because order, law and reason exist that there can be disorder ; breach

of law and unreason exist because Reason exists — not that these better

things are directly the causes of the bad but simply that what ought to absorb the Best is prevented by its own nature, or by some accident, or by foreign interference. An entity which must look outside itself for a law, may be foiled of its purpose by either an internal or an external cause ; there will be some flaw in its own nature, or it will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm follows, unintended, upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have freedom of motion under their own will sometimes take the right turn, sometimes the wrong.

Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring : a slight deviation at the beginning develops with every advance into a continuously wider and graver error — especially since there is the attached body with its inevitable concomitant of desire — and the first step, the hasty movement not previously considered and not immediately corrected, ends by establishing a set habit where there was at first only a fall.

Punishment naturally follows : there is no injustice in a man suffer ing what belongs to the condition in which he is ; nor can we ask to be happy when our actions have not earned us happiness ; the good, only, are happy ; divine beings are happy only because they are good.

5- Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine ; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good — only to the evil are they disastrous — and where there is body there must be ill-health.

Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the co ordination and completion of the Universal system.

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason — whose control nothing anywhere eludes — employs that ending to the beginning of something new ; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction^

loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers — poverty and sickness, for example— and as for vice, even this brings something to the general service : it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces good ; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work ; by the contrast of the evil under which wrong doers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose ; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends ; and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.

The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in good, and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it is lodged in the alien : the good here is in something else, in something distinct from the Good, and this something else constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this is why evil is ineradicable : there is, first, the fact that in relation to this principle of Good, thing will always stand less than thing, and, besides, all things come into being through it, and are what they are by standing away from it.

6. As for the disregard of desert — the good afflicted, the unworthy thriving — it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good : still the question remains why should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands ? How can such an allotment be approved ?

No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions matter little : as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome.

Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a propriety,

a reasonableness, a regard to merit which, as things are, do not appear, though this would certainly be in keeping with the noblest Providence : even though external conditions do not affect a man's hold upon good or evil, none the less it would seem utterly unfitting that the bad should be the masters, be sovereign in the state, while honourable men are slaves : a wicked ruler may commit the most lawless acts ; and in war the worst men have a free hand and perpetrate every kind of crime against their prisoners.

We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence. Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings : the Provi dence must reach to all the details ; its functioning must consist in neglecting no point.

Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies under an Intellectual Principle whose power has touched every existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of this sphere is just.

7- A preliminary observation : in looking for excellence in this thing

of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled ; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this Universe contaiifs body, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine Reason.

Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the finest type of the human being as known here, we would certainly not demand that he prove identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect ; we would think it enough in the Creator to have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve and bone under Reason as to give grace to these corporeal elements and to have made it possible for Reason to have contact with Matter.

Our progress towards the object of our investigation must begin

Providence and of the power by which our universe holds its being.

We begin with evil acts entirely dependent upon the Souls which perpetrate them — the harm, for example, which perverted Souls do to the good and to each other. Unless the fore-planning power alone is to be charged with the vice in such Souls, we have no ground of accusation, no claim to redress : the blame lies on the Soul exercising its choice. Even a Soul, we have seen, must have its individual movement ; it is not abstract Spirit ; the first step towards animal life has been taken and the conduct will naturally be in keeping with that character.

It is not because the world existed that Souls are here : before the world was, they had it in them to be of the world, to concern themselves with it, to presuppose it, to administer it : it was in their nature to produce it — by whatever method, whether by giving forth some emana tion while they themselves remained above, or by an actual descent, or in both ways together, some presiding from above, others descending ; for we are not at the moment concerned about the mode of creation but are simply urging that, however the world was produced, no blame falls on Providence for what exists within it.

There remains the other phase of the question — the distribution of evil to the opposite classes of men : the good go bare while the wicked are rich : all that human need demands, the least deserving have in abundance ; it is they that rule ; peoples and states are at their disposal. Would not all this imply that the divine power does not reach to earth ?

That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules in the lower things : animals and plants have their share in Reason, Soul and Life.

Perhaps, then, it reaches to earth but is not master over all ?

We answer that the universe is one living organism : as well maintain that while human head and face are the work of nature and of the ruling reason-principle, the rest of the frame is due to other agencies — accident or sheer necessity — and owes its inferiority to this origin, or to the incompetence of unaided Nature. And even granting that

those less noble members are not in themselves admirable it would still be neither pious nor even reverent to censure the entire structure.

8. Thus we come to our enquiry as to the degree of excellence found in things of this Sphere, and how far they belong to an ordered system or in what degree they are, at least, not evil.

Now in every living being the upper parts — head, face — are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior. In the Universe the middle and lower members are human beings ; above them, the Heavens and the Gods that dwell there ; these Gods with the entire circling expanse of the heavens constitute the greater part of the Kosmos : the earth is but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the stars. Yet human wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder ; we are evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the Universe, nothing wiser existent !

But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and inclines now to the one order, now to the other ; some men grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral. But those that are corrupted to the point of approximating to irrational animals and wild beasts pull the mid-folk about and inflict wrong upon them ; the victims are no doubt better than the wrong doers, but are at the mercy of their inferiors in the field in which they themselves are inferior, where, that is, they cannot be classed among the good since they have not trained themselves in self-defence.

A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and throw another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food and their dainty clothes. What more is called for than a laugh ?

And surely even the lawgiver would be right in allowing the second group to suffer this treatment, the penalty of their sloth and self-indul gence : the gymnasium lies there before them, and they, in laziness and luxury and listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall like fat-loaded sheep, a prey to the wolves.

But the evil-doers also have their punishment : first they pay in that very wolfishness, in the disaster to their human quality : and next there is laid up for them the due of their Kind ; living ill here, they will not get off by death ; on every precedent through all the line there waits its sequent, reasonable and natural — worse to the bad, better to the good.

This at once brings us outside the gymnasium with its fun for boys ; they must grow up, both kinds, amid their childishness and both one day stand girt and armed. Then there is a finer spectacle than is ever seen by those that train in the ring. But at this stage some have not armed themselves — and the duly armed win the day.

Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike: the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling ; healthy days are not for those that neglect their health : we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.

Again : it is childish, while we carry on all the affairs of our life to our own taste and not as the Gods would have us, to expect them to keep all well for us in spite of a life that is lived without regard to the conditions which the Gods have prescribed for our well-being. Yet death would be better for us than to go on living lives condemned by the laws of the Universe. If things took the contrary course, if all the modes of folly and wickedness brought no trouble in life — then indeed we might complain of the indifference of a Providence leaving the victory to evil.

Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled : and this is just ; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.

9- It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something

reducing us to nothingness : to think of Providence as everything, with no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the Universe ; such a providence could have no field of action ; nothing would exist except the Divine. As things are, the Divine, of course, exists, but has reached

forth to something other — not to reduce that to nothingness but to preside over it ; thus in the case of Man, for instance, the Divine presides as the Providence, preserving the character of human nature, that is the character of a being under the providential law, which, again, implies subjection to what that law may enjoin.

And that law enjoins that those who have made themselves good shall know the best of life, here and later, the bad the reverse. But the law does not warrant the wicked in expecting that their prayers should bring others to sacrifice themselves for their sakes ; or that the gods should lay aside the divine life in order to direct their daily concerns ; or that good men, who have chosen a path nobler than all earthly rule, should become their rulers. The perverse have never made a single effort to bring the good into authority, nor do they take any steps to improve themselves ; they are all spite against anyone that becomes good of his own motion, though if good men were placed in authority the total of goodness would be increased.

In sum : Man has come into existence, a living being but not a member of the noblest order ; he occupies by choice an intermediate rank ; still, in that place in which he exists, Providence does not allow him to be reduced to nothing ; on the contrary he is ever being led upwards by all those varied devices which the Divine employs in its labour to increase the dominance of moral value. The human race, therefore, is not deprived by Providence of its rational being ; it retains its share, though neces sarily limited, in wisdom, intelligence, executive power and right doing, the right doing, at least, of individuals to each other — and even in wronging others people think they are doing right and only paying what is due.

Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect as the scheme allows ; a part, no doubt, in the fabric of the All, he yet holds a lot higher than that of all the other living things of earth.

Now, no one of any intelligence complains of these others, man's inferiors, which serve to the adornment of the world ; it would be feeble indeed to complain of animals biting man, as if we were to pass our days asleep. No : the animal, too, exists of necessity, and is serviceable

in many ways, some obvious and many progressively discovered — so that not one lives without profit to itself and even to humanity. It is ridiculous, also, to complain that many of them are dangerous — there are dangerous men abroad as well — and if they distrust us, and in their distrust attack, is that anything to wonder at ?

10. But : if the evil in men is involuntary, if their own will has not made them what they are, how can we either blame wrong-doers or even reproach their victims with suffering through their own fault ?

If there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by force of the celestial movement or by a rigorous sequence set up by the First Cause, is not the evil a thing rooted in Nature ? And if thus the Reason-Principle of the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is injustice ?

No : Men are no doubt involuntary sinners in the sense that they do not actually desire to sin ; but this does not alter the fact that wrong doers, of their own choice, are, themselves, the agents ; it is because they themselves act that the sin is in their own ; if they were not agents they could not sin.

The Necessity (held to underlie human wickedness) is not an outer force (actually compelling the individual), but exists only in the sense of a universal relationship.

Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us power less : if the universe were something outside and apart from us it would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their part, no man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to their intention. But, as things are, efficient act does come from men : given the starting Principle, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevitably com pleted ; but each and every principle contributes towards the sequence. Now Men are Principles, or, at least, they are moved by their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature is a Principle, a freely acting cause.

ii. Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that everything is as good as anything can be ?

No : the Reason-Principle is the sovereign, making all : it wills things as they are and, in its reasonable act, it produces even what we know as evil : it cannot desire all to be good : an artist would not make an animal all eyes ; and in the same way, the Reason-Principle would not make all divine ; it makes Gods but also celestial spirits, the intermediate order, then men, then the animals ; all is graded succession, and this in no spirit of grudging but in the expression of a Reason teeming with intellectual variety.

We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful everywhere in the picture : but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some scurrilous clown ; yet take away the low characters and the power of the drama is gone ; these are part and parcel of it.

12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the Reason-Prin ciple applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle — then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the Reason-Principle (if it is to be the author of a universe) could not be a thing of entire identity or even of closely compact diversity ; and the mode in which it is here manifested is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each single thing in some distinctive way.

But (it will be asked) has it not, besides itself entering Matter, brought other beings down ? Has it not for example brought Souls into Matter and, in adapting them to its creation, twisted them against their own nature and been the ruin of many of them ? And can this be right ?

The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this Reason-Principle and that it has not adapted them to the creation by perverting them, but has set them in the place here to which their quality entitles them.

And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future ; and these have everything to do with fixing worth of place.

Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money will be made poor — and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment.

It is not an accident that makes a man a slave ; no one is a prisoner by chance ; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son ; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged.

Hence arises that awesome word Adrasteia (the Inevadable Retri bution) ; for in very truth this ordinance is an Adrasteia, Justice itself and a wonderful wisdom.

We cannot but recognise from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence — the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total ; the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness as one would think Providence must disdain : the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form ; the world of vegetation, too ; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom : and all this not issuing once, and then to die out,

but made ever and ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth.

In all the changing, there is no change by chance : there is no taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its quality ; its quality is the ex pression of its essential Being : and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one thing the desirable and the just — for if the good and the just are not produced, there, where, then, have they their being ?

14- The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in keeping with the Intel lectual Principle. True, no reasoning went to its creation, but it so stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder — since no reasoning could be able to make it otherwise — at the spectacle before it, a product which, even in the Kinds of the partial and particular Sphere, displays the Divine Intelligence to a degree in which no arranging by reason could express it. Every one of the ceaselessly recurrent types of being manifests a creating Reason-Principle above all censure. No fault is to be found unless on the assumption that everything ought to come into being with all the perfection of those that have never known such a coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of the Intellectual realm and things of the realm of sense must remain one unbroken identity for ever.

In this demand for more good than exists, there is implied a failure to recognise that the form allotted to each entity is sufficient in itself ; it is like complaining because one kind of animal lacks horns. We ought to understand both that the Reason-Principle must extend to every possible existent and, at the same time, that every greater must include lesser things, that to every whole belong its parts, and that all cannot be equality unless all part is to be absent.

This is why in the Over- World each entity is all, while here, below, the single thing is not all (is not the Universe but a " Self "). Thus too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a part, is not Humanity complete : but wheresoever there is associated with the parts something that is no

part (but a Divine, an Intellectual Being), this makes a whole of that in which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing, cannot be required to have attained to the very summit of goodness : if he had, he would have ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there is any grudging in the whole towards the part that grows in goodness and dignity ; such an increase in value is a gain to the beauty of the whole ; the lesser grows by being made over in the likeness of the greater, by being admitted, as it were, to something of that greatness, by sharing in that rank, and thus even from this place of man, from man's own self, something gleams forth, as the stars shine in the divine firmament, so that all appears one great and lovely figure — living or wrought in the furnaces of craftsman ship — with stars radiant not only in the ears and on the brow but on the breasts too, and wherever else they may be displayed in beauty.

These considerations apply very well to things considered as standing alone : but there is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in mutual relationship.

The animals devour each other : men attack each other : all is war without rest, without truce : this gives new force to the question how Reason can be author of the plan and how all can be declared well done.

This new difficulty is not met by the former answer ; that all stands as well as the nature of things allows ; that the blame for their condition falls on Matter dragging them down ; that, given the plan as we know it, evil cannot be eliminated and should not be ; that the Matter making its presence felt is still not supreme but remains an element taken in from outside to contribute to a definite total, or rather to be itself brought to order by Reason.

The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end ; all that comes into being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of man and beast ?

This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the

transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them : what grievance is it that when they must go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others ?

Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form ? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play ; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed ; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another ?

Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed : that way would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside itself ; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of come liness and shapeliness, a living pastime.

Men directing their weapons against each other — under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their sport — this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to go away earlier and come back the sooner. So for misfortunes that may accompany life, the loss of property, for instance ; the loser will see that there was a tune when it was not his, that its possession is but a mock boon to the robbers, who will in their turn lose it to others, and even, that to retain property is a greater loss than to forfeit it.

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play ; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of

man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play ; to handle austere matters austerely is reserved for the thoughtful : the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature. Anyone that joins in their trifling and so comes to look on life with their eyes must understand that by lending himself to such idleness he has laid aside his own character. If Socrates himself takes part in the trifling, he trifles in the outer Socrates.

We must remember, too, that we cannot take tears and laments as proof that anything is wrong ; children cry and whimper where there is nothing amiss.

16. But if all this is true, what room is left for evil ? Where are we to place wrong-doing and sin ?

How explain that in a world organised in good, the efficient agents (human beings) behave unjustly, commit sin ? And how comes misery if neither sin nor injustice exists ?

Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can the distinction be maintained between behaviour in accordance with nature and behaviour in conflict with it ?

And what becomes of blasphemy against the divine ? The blas phemer is made what he is : a dramatist has written a part insulting and maligning himself and given it to an actor to play.

These considerations oblige us to state the Logos (the Reason-Principle of the Universe) once again, and more clearly, and to justify its nature.

This Reason-Principle, then — let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth — this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect ; nor does it descend from the pure Soul alone ; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases : the Intellectual Principle and the Soul — the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual

Principle — engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a certain measure of Reason.

Now all life, even the least valuable, is an activity, and not a blind activity like that of flame ; even where there is not sensation the activity of life is no mere haphazard play of Movement : any object in which life is present, any object which participates in Life, is at once enreasoned in the sense that the activity peculiar to life is formative, shaping as it moves.

Life, then, aims at pattern as does the pantomimic dancer with his set movements ; the mime, in himself, represents life, and, besides, his movements proceed in obedience to a pattern designed to symbolise life.

Thus far to give us some idea of the nature of Life in general.

But this Reason-Principle which emanates from the complete unity, divine Mind, and the complete unity Life (=Soul) — is neither a uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete divine Mind, nor does it give itself whole and all-including to its subj ect . (By an imperfect communication) it sets up a conflict of part against part : it produces imperfect things and so engenders and maintains war and attack, and thus its unity can be that only of a sum-total not of a thing undivided. At war with itself in the parts which it now exhibits, it has the unity, or harmony, of a drama torn with struggle. The drama, of course, brings the conflicting elements to one final harmony, weaving the entire story of the clashing characters into one thing ; while in the Logos the conflict of the divergent elements rises within the one element, the Reason-Principle : the com parison therefore is rather with a harmony emerging directly from the conflicting elements themselves, and the question becomes what intro duces clashing elements among these Reason-Principles.

Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of Reason-Principles which, by the fact that they are Principles of harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more compre hensive Principle, greater than they and including them as its parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we find contraries — white and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless, reasoning and unreasoning — but all these elements are members of one living body,

their sum-total ; the Universe is a self-accordant entity, its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation of a Reason-Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then, must be the unification of conflicting Reason-Principles whose very opposition is the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being.

And indeed, if it were not multiple, it could not be a Universal Principle, it could not even be at all a Reason-Principle ; in the fact of its being a Reason-Principle is contained the fact of interior difference. Now the maximum of difference is contrariety ; admitting that this differentiation exists and creates, it will create difference in the greatest and not in the least degree ; in other words, the Reason-Principle, bringing about differentiation to the uttermost degree, will of necessity create contrarieties : it will be complete only by producing itself not in merely diverse things but in contrary things.

The nature of the Reason-Principle is adequately expressed in its

Act and, therefore, the wider its extension the nearer will its productions approach to full contrariety : hence the world of sense is less a unity than is its Reason-Principle ; it contains a wider multiplicity and contrariety : its partial members will, therefore, be urged by a closer intention towards fullness of life, a warmer desire for unification.

But desire often destroys the desired ; it seeks its own good, and if the desired object is perishable, the ruin follows : and the partial thing (a human being, for example) straining towards its completing principle draws towards itself all it possibly can.

Thus, with the good we have the bad : we have the opposed move ments of a dancer guided by one artistic plan ; we recognise in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the design.

But, thus, the wicked disappear ?

No : their wickedness remains ; simply, their role is not of their own planning.

But, surely, this excuses them ?

No ; excuse lies with the Reason-Principle — and the Reason-Principle does not excuse them.

No doubt all are members of this Principle but one is a good man, another is bad — the larger class, this — and it goes as in a play ; the poet while he gives each actor a part is also using them as they are in their own persons : he does not himself rank the men as leading actor, second, third ; he simply gives suitable words to each, and by that assignment fixes each man's standing.

Thus, every man has his place, a place that fits the good man, a place that fits the bad : each within the two orders of men makes his way, naturally, reasonably, to the place, good or bad, that suits him, and takes the position he has made his own. There he talks and acts, in blasphemy and crime or in all goodness : for the actors bring to this play what they were before it was ever staged.

In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors add their own quality, good or bad — for they have more to do than merely repeat the author's words — in the truer drama which dramatic genius imitates in its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part assigned by the creator of the piece.

As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a Soul is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphazard but always under a Reason : it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to it, attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole Principle of the piece : then it speaks out its business, exhibiting at the same time all that a Soul can express of its own quality, as a singer in a song. A voice, a bearing, naturally fine or vulgar, may increase the charm of a piece ; on the other hand, an actor with his ugly voice may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the drama stands as good a work as ever : the dramatist taking the action which a sound criticism suggests, dis graces one, taking his part from him, with perfect justice : another man he promotes to more serious roles or to any more important play he may have, while the first is cast for whatever minor work there may be.

Just so the Soul, entering this drama of the Universe, making itself a part of the Play, bringing to its acting its personal excellence or defect,

set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the author its entire role — superimposed upon its own character and conduct — just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward.

But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dignity : they act in a vaster place than any stage : the Author has made them masters of all this world ; they have a wide choice of place ; they themselves determine the honour or discredit in which they are agents since their place and part are in keeping with their quality : they therefore fit into the Reason-Principle of the Universe, each adjusted, most legitimately, to the appropriate environment, as every string of the lyre is set in the pre cisely right position, determined by the Principle directing musical utterance, for the due production of the tones within its capacity. All is just and good hi the Universe in which every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in the Darkness and in Tartarus the dreadful sounds whose utterance there is well.

This Universe is good not when the individual is a stone, but when everyone throws in his own voice towards a total harmony, singing out a life — thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be. The Syrinx does not utter merely one pure note ; there is a thin obscure sound which blends in to make the harmony of Syrinx music : the harmony is made up from tones of various grades, all the tones differing, but the resultant of all forming one sound.

Similarly the Reason-Principle entire is One, but it is broken into unequal parts : hence the difference of place found in the Universe, better spots and worse ; and hence the inequality of Souls, finding their appropriate surroundings amid this local inequality. The diverse places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal grade and unlike conduct, are well exemplified by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or any other instru ment : there is local difference, but from every position every string gives forth its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once, to its particular place and to the entire plan.

What is evil in the single Soul will stand a good thing in the universal system ; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event— and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its

sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not mar the wellgoverned state : such an officer is a civic necessity ; and the correspond ing moral type is often serviceable ; thus, even as things are, all is well.

18. Souls vary in worth ; and the difference is due, among other causes, to an almost initial inequality ; it is in reason that, standing to the Reason-Principle, as parts, they should be unequal by the fact of becoming separate.

We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade and its third, and that, therefore, its expression may take any one of three main forms. But this point must be dealt with here again : the matter requires all possible elucidation.

We may perhaps think of actors having the right to add something to the poet's words : the drama as it stands is not perfectly filled in, and they are to supply where the Author has left blank spaces here and there ; the actors are to be something else as well ; they become parts of the poet, who on his side has a fore-knowledge of the word they will add, and so is able to bind into one story what the actors bring in and what is to follow.

For, in the All, the sequences, including what follows upon wicked ness, become Reason-Principles, and therefore in right reason. Thus : from adultery and the violation of prisoners the process of nature will produce fine children, to grow, perhaps, into fine men ; and where wicked violence has destroyed cities, other and nobler cities may rise in their place.

But does not this make it absurd to introduce Souls as responsible causes, some acting for good and some for evil ? If we thus exonerate the Reason-Principle from any part in wickedness do we not also cancel its credit for the good ? Why not simply take the doings of these actors (in the universal drama) for representative parts of the Reason-Principle as the doings of stage-actors are representative parts of the stage-drama ? Why not admit that the Reason-Principle itself includes evil action as

much as good action, and inspires the precise conduct of all its repre sentatives ? Would not this be all the more plausible in that the universal drama is the completer creation and that the Reason-Principle is the source of all that exists ?

But this raises the question, What motive could lead the Logos to produce evil ?

The explanation, also, would take away all power in the Universe from Souls, even those nearest to the divine ; they would all be mere parts of a Reason-Principle.

And, further — unless all Reason-Principles are Souls — why should some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is itself a Soul ?

Ennead III, Treatise 3

i. What is our answer ?

All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts — strictly " included " for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them.

The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul ; its parts (i.e. events good and evil) are expressions of these Soul-parts.

This unity, Soul, has different parts ; the Reason-Principles, corre spondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being.

The Souls are in harmony with each other and so, too, are their acts and effects ; but it is harmony in the sense of a resultant unity built out of contraries. All things, as they rise from a unity, come back to unity by a sheer need of nature ; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organised system by the unity at the source.

The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal

life : there is one genus, horse, though horses among themselves fight and bite and show malice and angry envy : so all the others within the unity of their Kind ; and so humanity.

All these types, again, can be ranged under the one Kind, that of living things ; objects without life can be thought of under their specific types and then be resumed under the one Kind of the " non-living " ; if we choose to go further yet, living and non-living may be included under the one Kind, " Beings," and, further still, under the Source of Being.

Having attached all to this source, we turn to move down again in continuous division : we see the Unity fissuring, as it reaches out into Universality, and yet embracing all in one system so that with all its differentiation it is one multiple living thing — an organism in which each member executes the function of its own nature while it still has its being in that One Whole ; fire burns ; horse does horse work ; men give, each the appropriate act of the peculiar personal quality — and upon the several particular Kinds to which each belongs follow the acts, and the good or evil of the life.

2. Circumstances are not sovereign over the good of life, for they are themselves moulded by their priors and come in as members of a sequence. The Leading-Principle holds all the threads while the minor agents, the individuals, serve according to their own capacities, as in a war the generalissimo lays down the plan and his subordinates do their best to its furtherance. The Universe has been ordered by a Providence that may be compared to a general ; he has considered operations, conditions and such practical needs as food and drink, arms and engines of war ; ah1 the problem of reconciling these complex elements has been worked out beforehand so as to make it probable that the final event may be success. The entire scheme emerges from the general's mind with a certain plau sible promise, though it cannot cover the enemy's operations, and there is no power over the disposition of the enemy's forces : but where the mighty general is in question whose power extends over all that is, what can pass unordered, what can fail to fit into the plan ?

3- For, even though the I is sovereign in choosing, yet by the fact of the choice the thing done takes its place in the ordered total. Your personality does not come from outside into the universal scheme ; you are a part of it, you and your personal disposition.

But what is the cause of this initial personality ?

This question resolves itself into two : are we to make the Creator, if Creator there is, the cause of the moral quality of the individual or does the responsibility lie with the creature ?

Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility ? After all, none is charged in the case of plants brought into being without the perceptive faculties ; no one is blamed because animals are not all that men are — which would be like complaining that men are not all that gods are. Reason acquits plant and animal and, their maker ; how can it complain because men do not stand above humanity ?

If the reproach simply means that Man might improve by bringing from his own stock something towards his betterment we must allow that the man failing in this is answerable for his own inferiority : but if the betterment must come not from within the man but from without, from his Author, it is folly to ask more than has been given, as foolish in the case of man as in plant and animal.

The question is not whether a thing is inferior to something else but whether in its own Kind it suffices to its own part ; universal equality there cannot be.

Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality ?

Certainly not : the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things : the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul ; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things ; in all things, there is implied variety of things ; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process

There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul (a lesser phase), not that (the Supreme Soul) from which the Reason-Principle itself derives ; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it en genders is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel !

In sum nothing can secure to a thing of process the quality of the prior order, loftier than all that is product and amenable to no charge in regard to it : the wonder is, only, that it reaches and gives to the lower at all, and that the traces of its presence should be so noble. And if its outgiving is greater than the lower can appropriate, the debt is the heavier ; all the blame must fall upon the unreceptive creature, and Providence be the more exalted.

4- If man were all of one piece — I mean, if he were nothing more than a made thing, acting and acted upon according to a fixed nature — he could be no more subject to reproach and punishment than the mere animals. But as the scheme holds, man is singled out for condemnation when he does evil ; and this with justice. For he is no mere thing made to rigid plan ; his nature contains a Principle apart and free.

This does not, however, stand outside of Providence or of the Reason of the All ; the Over- World cannot be dependent upon the World of Sense. The higher shines down upon the lower, and this illumination is Providence in its highest aspect : The Reason-Principle has two phases, one which creates the things of process and another which links them with the higher beings : these higher beings constitute the over-provi dence on which depends that lower providence which is the secondary Reason-Principle inseparably united with its primal : the two — the Major and Minor Providence — acting together produce the universal woof, the one all-comprehensive Providence.

Men possess, then, a distinctive Principle : but not all men turn to account all that is in their Nature ; there are men that live by one Principle and men that live by another or, rather, by several others, the

least noble. For all these Principles are present even when not acting upon the man — though we cannot think of them as lying idle ; everything performs its function.

" But," it will be said, " what reason can there be for their not acting upon the man once they are present ; inaction must mean absence ? "

We maintain their presence always, nothing void of them.

But surely not where they exercise no action ? If they necessarily reside in all men, surely they must be operative in all — this Principle of free action, especially.

First of all, this free Principle is not an absolute possession of the animal Kinds and is not even an absolute possession to all men.

So this Principle is not the only effective force in all men ?

There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it alone acts, giving its character to the life while all else is but Necessity (and therefore outside of blame) .

For (in the case of an evil life) whether it is that the constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled paths or whether (the fault is mental or spiritual in that) the desires have gained control, we are compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum (something inferior to the highest principle in Man) . We would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum (the responsible source of evil) must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-Principle ; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle but Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realised man : but we must remember that to this free Principle in man (which is a phase of the All Soul) the Substratum (the direct inferior to be moulded) is (not Matter but) the Reason-Principle itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organised in our human total is sovereign within us.

The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the con duct of a former life ; we may suppose that previous actions have made the Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior in radiance to

that which ruled before ; the Soul which later will shine out again is for the present at a feebler power.

And any Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the Reason-Principle of Matter which therefore it is able to elaborate to its own purposes, either finding it consonant with itself or bestowing upon it the quality which makes it so. The Reason-Principle of an ox does not occur except in connection with the Matter appropriate to the ox-Kind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which we read (in Plato) takes place ; the Soul must lose its nature, the Reason-Prin ciple be transformed ; thus there comes the ox-soul which once was Man.

The degradation, then, is just.

Still, how did the inferior Principle ever come into being, and how does the higher fall to it ?

Once more — not all things are Firsts ; there are Secondaries and Tertiaries, of a nature inferior to that of their Priors ; and a slight tilt is enough to determine the departure from the straight course. Further, the linking of any one being with any other amounts to a blending such as to produce a distinct entity, a compound of the two ; it is not that the greater and prior suffers any diminution of its own nature ; the lesser and secondary is such from its very beginning ; it is in its own nature the lesser thing it becomes, and if it suffers the consequences, such suffer ing is merited : all our reasonings on these questions must take account of previous living as the source from which the present takes its rise.

5- There is, then, a Providence, which permeates the Kosmos from first to last, not everywhere equal, as in a numerical distribution, but pro portioned, differing, according to the grades of place — just as in some one animal, linked from first to last, each member has its own function, the nobler organ the higher activity while others successively concern the lower degrees of the life, each part acting of itself, and experiencing what belongs to its own nature and what comes from its relation with every other. Strike, and what is designed for utterance gives forth the appropriate volume of sound while other parts take the blow in silence

but react in their own especial movement ; the total of all the utterance and action and receptivity constitutes what we may call the personal voice, life and history of the living form. The parts, distinct in Kind, have distinct functions : the feet have their work and the eyes theirs ; the understanding serves to one end, the Intellectual Principle to another.

But all sums to a unity, a comprehensive Providence. From the inferior grade downwards is Fate : the upper is Providence alone : for in the Intellectual Kosmos all is Reason-Principle or its Priors — Divine Mind and unmingled Soul — and immediately upon these follows Provi dence which rises from Divine Mind, is the content of the Unmingled Soul, and, through this Soul, is communicated to the Sphere of living things.

This Reason-Principle comes as a thing of unequal parts, and there fore its creations are unequal, as, for example, the several members of one Living Being. But after this allotment of rank and function, all act consonant with the will of the gods keeps the sequence and is included under the providential government, for the Reason-Principle of provi dence is god-serving.

All such right-doing, then, is linked to Providence ; but it is not therefore performed by it : men or other agents, living or lifeless, are causes of certain things happening, and any good that may result is taken up again by Providence. In the total, then, the right rules and what has happened amiss is transformed and corrected. Thus, to take an example from a single body, the Providence of a living organism implies its health ; let it be gashed or otherwise wounded, and that Reason-Principle which governs it sets to work to draw it together, knit it anew, heal it, and put the affected part to rights.

In sum, evil belongs to the sequence of things, but it comes (not from Providence but) from necessity. It originates in ourselves ; it has its causes no doubt, but we are not, therefore, forced to it by Providence : some of these causes we adapt to the operation of Providence and of its subordinates, but with others we fail to make the connection ; the act instead of being ranged under the will of Providence consults the desire of the agent alone or of some other element in the Universe, something

which is either itself at variance with Providence or has set up some such state of variance in ourselves.

The one circumstance does not produce the same result wherever it acts ; the normal operation will be modified from case to case : Helen's beauty told very differently on Paris and on Idomeneus ; bring together two handsome people of loose character and two living honour ably and the resulting conduct is very different ; a good man meeting a libertine exhibits a distinct phase of his nature and, similarly, the dissolute answer to the society of their betters.

The act of the libertine is not done by Providence or in accordance with Providence ; neither is the action of the good done by Providence —it is done by the man — but it is done in accordance with Providence, for it is an act consonant with the Reason-Principle. Thus a patient following his treatment is himself an agent and yet is acting in accordance with the doctor's method inspired by the art concerned with the causes of health and sickness : what one does against the laws of health is one's act, but an act conflicting with the Providence of medicine.

6. But, if all this be true, how can evil fall within the scope of seership ? The predictions of the seers are based on observation of the Universal Circuit : how can this indicate the evil with the good ?

Clearly the reason is that all contraries coalesce. Take, for example, Shape and (its contrary) Matter : the living being (of the lower order) is a coalescence of these two ; so that to be aware of the Shape and the Reason-Principle is to be aware of the Matter on which the Shape has been imposed.

The living-being of the compound order is not present (as pure and simple Idea) like the living being of the Intellectual order : in the com pound entity, we are aware, at once, of the Reason-Principle and of the inferior element brought under form. Now the Universe is such a com pound living thing : to observe, therefore, its content is to be aware not less of its lower elements than of the Providence which operates within it.

This Providence reaches to all that comes into being ; its scope therefore includes living things with their actions and states, the total of their history at once overruled by the Reason-Principle and yet subject in some degree to Necessity.

These, then, are presented as mingled both by their initial nature and by the continuous process of their existence ; and the Seer is not able to make a perfect discrimination setting on the one side Providence with all that happens under Providence and on the other side what the substrate communicates to its product. Such discrimination is not for a man, not for a wise man or a divine man : one may say it is the pre rogative of a god. Not causes but facts lie in the Seer's province ; his art is the reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell of the ordered and never condescend to the disorderly ; the movement of the Universe utters its testimony to him and, before men and things reveal themselves, brings to light what severally and collectively they are.

Here conspires with There and There with Here, elaborating together the consistency and eternity of a Kosmos and by their correspondences revealing the sequence of things to the trained observer — for every form of divination turns upon correspondences. Universal interdependence, there could not be, but universal resemblance there must. This probably is the meaning of the saying that Correspondences maintain the Universe.

This is a correspondence of inferior with inferior, of superior with superior, eye with eye, foot with foot, everything with its fellow and, in another order, virtue with right action and vice with unrighteousness. Admit such correspondence in the All and we have the possibility of prediction. If the one order acts on the other, the relation is not that of maker to thing made — the two are coeval — it is the interplay of members of one living being ; each in its own place and way moves as its own nature demands ; to every organ its grade and task, and to every grade and task its effective organ.

7- And since the higher exists, there must be the lower as well. The Universe is a thing of variety, and how could there be an inferior

without a superior or a superior without an inferior ? We cannot com plain about the lower in the higher ; rather, we must be grateful to the higher for giving something of itself to the lower.

In a word, those that would like evil driven out from the All would drive out Providence itself.

What would Providence have to provide for ? Certainly not for itself or for the Good : when we speak of a Providence above, we mean an act upon something below.

That which resumes all under a unity is a Principle in which all things exist together and the single thing is All. From this Principle, which remains internally unmoved, particular things push forth as from a single root which never itself emerges. They are a branching into part, into multiplicity, each single outgrowth bearing its trace of the common source. Thus, phase by phase, there is finally the production into this world ; some things close still to the root, others widely separate in the continuous progression until we have, in our metaphor, bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one side all is one point of unbroken rest, on the other is the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit, all the things of process carrying ever within themselves the Reason-Principles of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in their own minor order and producing, if at all, only what is in strict gradation from themselves.

As for the abandoned spaces in what corresponds to the branches these too draw upon the root, from which, despite all their variance, they also derive ; and the branches again operate upon their own furthest extremities : operation is to be traced only from point to next point, but, in the fact, there has been both inflow and outgo (of creative or modifying force) at the very root which, itself again, has its priors.

The things that act upon each other are branchings from a far-off beginning and so stand distinct ; but they derive initially from the one source : all interaction is like that of brothers, resemblant as drawing life from the same parents.

Ennead III, Treatise 4

i. Some Existents (Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle) remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being ; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to which is due the sensitive faculty — that in any of its expression-forms — Nature and all forms of life down to the vegetable order. Even as it is present in human beings the Soul carries its Expression-form (Hypostasis) with it, but is not the dominant since it is not the whole man (humanity including the Intel lectual Principle, as well) : in the vegetable order it is the highest since there is nothing to rival it ; but at this phase it is no longer reproductive, or, at least, what it produces is of quite another order ; here life ceases ; all later production is lifeless.

What does this imply ?

Everything the Soul engenders down to this point (of sheer lifelessness) comes into being shapeless, and takes form by orientation towards its author and supporter : therefore (and even more certainly) the thing engendered on the further side can be no image of the Soul, since it is not even alive ; it must be an utter Indetermination. No doubt even in things of the nearer order there was indetermination, but within a form ; they were undetermined not utterly but only in contrast with their perfect state : at this extreme point we have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its highest degree and it becomes body by taking such shape as serves its scope ; then it becomes the recipient of its author and sustainer : this presence in body is the only example of the boundaries of Higher Existents running into the boundary of the Lower.

2. It is of this Soul especially that we read " All Soul has care for the Soulless " — though the several Souls thus care in their own degree and

way. The passage continues — " Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place "—the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form— and this means that in each " place " the phase of the soul there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle.

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme ; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule unfailingly ; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the body grows and propagates : all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the body it is what it is, what it most intensely lived.

This is why we must break away towards the High : we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of eating and procreation ; our life must be pointed towards the Intellec tive, towards the Intellectual-Principle, towards God.

Those that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those that have lived wholly to sense become animals — corresponding in species to the particular temper of the life — ferocious animals where the sensuality has been accompanied by a certain measure of spirit, gluttonous and lascivious animals where all has been appetite and satiation of appetite. Those who in their pleasures have not even lived by sensation, but have gone their way in a torpid grossness become mere growing things, for this lethargy is the entire act of the vegetative, and such men have been busy be-treeing themselves. Those, we read, that, otherwise untainted, have loved song become vocal animals ; kings ruling unreasonably but with no other vice are eagles ; futile and flighty visionaries ever soaring skyward, become high-flying birds ; observance of civic and secular virtue makes man again, or where the merit is less marked, one of the animals of communal tendency, a bee or the like.

3- What, then, is the spirit (guiding the present life and determining

the future ?)

The Spirit of here and now.

And the God ?

The God of here and now.

Spirit, God ; This in act within us, conducts every life ; for, even here and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.

That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession of the human being at birth ?

No : the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit ; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts : so that if the acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The words " You shall yourselves choose (your presiding Spirit) " are true, then ; for by our life we elect our own loftier.

But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate ?

It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there ; it operates during the lifetime ; when we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career.

That principle (of the new birth) strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit (its next higher) : if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty : the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of afhnity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises : he lives that Spirit ; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life ; this made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the height.

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life : and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the

Divine Intellect : by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower ; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself diminished.

4- But is this lower extremity of our intellective phase fettered to body for ever ?

No : if we turn, this turns by the same act.

And the Soul of the All — are we to think that when it turns from this sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws ?

No : for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself ; it never knew any coming, and therefore never came down ; it remains unmoved above, and the material frame of the Universe draws close to it, and, as it were, takes light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it.

But has the Universe, then, no sensation ? "It has no Sight," we read, since it has no eyes, and obviously it has not ears, nostrils, or tongue. Then has it perhaps such a consciousness as we have of our own inner conditions ?

No : where all is the working out of one nature, there is nothing but still rest ; there is not even enjoyment. Sensibility is present as the quality of growth is, unrecognised. But the Nature of the World will be found treated elsewhere ; what stands here is all that the question of the moment demands.

5- But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by the Soul in the over-world, how can anything be left to our independent action here ?

The answer is that that very choice in the over-world is merely an allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a total character which it must express wherever it operates.

But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force and, in the Soul, the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it ? The Soul's quality exists before any bodily life ; it has exactly what it chose to have ; and, we read, it never changes its chosen spirit ; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life ?

Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but becomes the one or the other by force of act ?

But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a dis ordered body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious ?

The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the entire decision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted conditions to their own particular quality.

The Timseus indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves : it is not entirely outside of ourselves ; is not bound up with our nature ; is not the agent in our action ; it belongs to us as belonging to our Soul, but not in so far as we are particular human beings living a life to which it is superior : take the passage in this sense and it is consistent ; under stand this Spirit otherwise and there is contradiction. And the descrip tion of the Spirit, moreover, as " the power which consummates the chosen life," is, also, in agreement with this interpretation ; for while its presidency saves us from falling much deeper into evil, the only direct agent within us is some thing neither above it nor equal to it but under it : Man cannot cease to be characteristically Man.

6. What, then, is the achieved Sage ?

One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul.

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit (equivalent in all men) as co-operator in the life : the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle (the diviner phase of the human Soul) which there fore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual Principle as possess ing for presiding spirit the Prior to the Intellectual Principle : how then does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that he now is ?

The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth— though, before all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out towards its own.

An instinct which the Sage finally rectifies in every respect ?

Not in every respect : the Soul is so constituted that its life-history and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but also to the conditions among which it acts.

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Under world ceases to be its guardian — except when the Soul resumes (in its later choice) the former state of life.

But, meanwhile, what happens to it ?

From the passage (in the Phaedo) which tells how it presents the Soul to judgment we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life — a time not so much of living as of expiation.

But the Souls that enter into brute bodies, are they controlled by some thing less than this presiding Spirit ? No : theirs is still a Spirit, but an evil or a foolish one.

And the Souls that attain to the highest ?

Of these higher Souls some live in the world of Sense, some above it : and those in the world of Sense inhabit the Sun or another of the planetary bodies ; the others occupy the fixed Sphere (above the plane tary) holding the place they have merited through having lived here the superior life of reason.

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic Soul. The world Soul is distributed so as to produce the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers : so with our Souls ; they must have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul : each must give out its own special act ; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and constituting the principle of the life ; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary spirit.

But here some further precision is needed.

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have; taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of -earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not (arithmetical, not) a matter of magni tudes ; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire ; its unity can always be reconstructed : when living things — animal or vegetal — (distribute themselves and) produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence — the life principle in plants for instance — in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue — for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is produced from one organism.

A power corresponding to this in the All must reach down and co-operate in the life of our world — in fact the very same power.

If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to live. With this Spirit it embarks in the skiff of the universe : the " spindle of Necessity " then takes control and appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of the lot in life.

The Universal circuit is like a breeze, and the voyager, still or stirring, is carried forward by it. He has a hundred varied experiences, fresh sights, changing circumstances, all sorts of events. The vessel itself furnishes incident, tossing as it drives on. And the voyager also acts of himself in virtue of that individuality which he retains because he is on the vessel in his own person and character. Under identical circumstances individuals answer very differently in their movements and acts : hence it comes about that, be the occurrences and conditions of life similar or dissimilar, the result may differ from man to man, as on the other hand a similar result may be produced by dissimilar conditions : this (personal answer to incident) it is that constitutes destiny.

Ennead III, Treatise 5

i. What is Love ? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind ? Or is it, perhaps, sometimes to be thought of as a God or Spirit and sometimes merely as an experience ? And what is it essentially in each of these respects ?

These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing opinions on the matter, the philosophical treatment it has received and, especially, the theories of the great Plato who has many passages dealing with Love, from a point of view entirely his own.

Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls ; he also makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the birth of Eros, under definite circumstances and by a certain parentage.

Now everyone recognises that the emotional state for which we make this " Love " responsible rises in souls aspiring to be knit in the closest union with some beautiful object, and that this aspiration takes two forms, that of the good whose devotion is for beauty itself, and that other which seeks its consummation in some vile act. But this generally admitted distinction opens a new question : we need a philosophical investigation into the origin of the two phases.

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. The vile and ugly is in clash, at once, with Nature and with God : Nature produces by looking to the Good, for it looks towards Order — which has its being in the con sistent total of the good, while the unordered is ugly, a member of the system of evil — and besides Nature itself, clearly, springs from the divine realm, from Good and Beauty ; and when anything brings delight and the sense of kinship, its very image attracts.

Reject this explanation, and no one can tell how the mental state rises and what are its causes : it is the explanation of even copulative love which is the will to beget in beauty ; Nature seeks to produce the beautiful and therefore by all reason cannot desire to procreate in the

ugly.

Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the beauty found on earth, the beauty of image and of body ; it is because they are strangers to the Archetype, the source of even the attraction they feel towards what is lovely here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that hi the higher realm and these love the earthly as an image ; those that have not attained to this memory do not understand what is happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy the beauty of earth ; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is sin.

Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether there is Reminiscence or not ; but there are those that feel, also, a desire of such immortality as lies within mortal reach ; and these are seeking Beauty in their demand for perpetuity, the desire of the eternal ; Nature teaches them to sow the seed and to beget in beauty, to sow towards eternity, but in beauty through their own kinship with the beautiful. And indeed the eternal is of the one stock with the beautiful, the Eternal-Nature is the first shaping of beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from it.

The less' the desire for procreation, the greater is the contentment with beauty alone, yet procreation aims at the engendering of beauty ;

it is the expression of a lack ; the subject is conscious of insufficiency and, wishing to produce beauty, feels that the way is to beget in a beautiful form. Where the procreative desire is lawless or against the purposes of nature, the first inspiration has been natural, but they have diverged from the way, they have slipped and fallen, and they grovel ; they neither understand whither Love sought to lead them nor have they any instinct to production ; they have not mastered the right use of the images of beauty ; they do not know what the Authentic Beauty is.

Those that love beauty of person without carnal desire love for beauty's sake ; those that have — for women, of course — the copulative love, have the further purpose of self-perpetuation : as long as they are led by these motives, both are on the right path, though the first have taken the nobler way. But, even in the right, there is the difference that the one set, worshipping the beauty of earth, look no further, while the others, those of recollection, venerate also the beauty of the other world while they, still, have no contempt for this in which they recognise, as it were, a last outgrowth, an attenuation of the higher. These, in sum, are innocent frequenters of beauty, not to be confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall into the ugly — for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into an evil often.

So much for love, the state.

Now we have to consider Love, the God.

2. The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely ; it is supported by Theologians (Orphic teachers) and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an already existing impulse thither. All this requires philosophical examination. A cardinal passage is that in The Banquet where we are told Eros was not a child of Aphrodite but born on the day of Aphrodite's birth, Penia, Poverty, being the mother, and Poros, Possession, the father.

The matter seems to demand some discussion of Aphrodite since in

any case Eros is described as being either her son or in some association with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and in what sense is Love either her child or born with her or in some way both her child and her birthfellow ?

Tot us Aphrodite is twofold ; there is the heavenly Aphrodite,

daughter of Ouranos or Heaven : and there is the other the daughter

of Zeus and Dione, this is the Aphrodite who presides over earthly

unions ; the higher was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages

» for in Heaven there is no marrying.

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos (Saturn) who is no other than the Intellectual Principle — must be the Soul at its divinest : unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled ; remaining ever Above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter — and therefore mythically " the unmothered " — justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within itself.

Any Nature springing directly from the Intellectual Principle must be itself also a clean thing : it will derive a resistance of its own from its nearness to the Highest, for all its tendency, no less than its fixity, centres upon its author whose power is certainly sufficient to maintain it Above.

Soul then could never fall from its sphere ; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the light it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still.

But following upon Kronos — or, if you will, upon Heaven, (Ouranos) the father of Kronos — the Soul directs its Act towards him and holds closely to him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to look towards him. This Act of the Soul has produced an Hypostasis, a Real-Being ; and the mother and this Hypostasis — her offspring, noble Love — gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer ;

by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first ; before it becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight ; it is first, therefore, and not even in the same order — for desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it.

3- That Love is a Hypostasis (a " Person ") a Real-Being sprung from a Real -Being — lower than the parent but authentically existent — is beyond doubt.

For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it : it had life ; it was a constituent in the Real-Being of all that authentically is — in the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision ; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking ; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect ; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. Thus ; there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the Soul ; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated ; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it ; Eros taking its name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an emotion, will take its name from Love, the Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior to what lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular act directed towards a particular object ; but it must not be confused with the Absolute Love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal Soul must be of one temper with it ; it must itself look aloft as being of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very offspring ; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of the Gods.

Once that Soul which is the primal source of light to the heavens is

recognised as an Hypostasis standing distinct and aloof, it must be admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so loftily celestial a being as the Soul. Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart ; so, we must think of this Love — as essentially resident where the unmingling Soul inhabits.

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All : at once there is another Love — the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards — like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe — not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life ; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages ; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire ; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring.

4- Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial reality ?

Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that of the Universe contain such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal Soul should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life.

This indwelling love is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature. It implants the characteristic desire ; the particular Soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding spirit realising its worth and the quality of its Being.

As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love : and as closely as the single Soul holds to the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul ; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will.

In the same way we must conceive many Aphrodites in the All, Spirits entering it together with Love, all emanating from an Aphrodite of the All, a train of particular Aphrodites dependent upon the first, and each with the particular Love in attendance : this multiplicity cannot be denied, if Soul be the mother of Love, and Aphrodite mean Soul, and Love be an act of a Soul seeking good.

This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to The Good, is twofold : the Love in the loftier Soul would be a god ever linking the Soul to the divine ; the Love in the mingling Soul will be a celestial spirit.

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5- But what is the Nature of this Spirit — of the Supernals in general ?

The Spirit-Kind is treated in the Symposium where, with much about the others, we learn of Eros — Love — born to Penia — Poverty — and Poros — Possession — who is son of Metis — Resource — at Aphrodite's birth feast.

But (the passage has been misunderstood for) to take Plato as mean ing, by Eros, this Universe — and not simply the Love native within itinvolves much that is self-contradictory.

For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as selfsufficing, while this " Love " is confessedly neither divine nor selfsufficing but in ceaseless need.

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul ; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily be a constituent part of Eros, (not mother but) dominant member ! A man is the man's Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphro dite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos ! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being ? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.

Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children : does this apply to the Universe ? Love is represented as homeless, bedless and bare-footed : would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and quite out of the truth ?

6. What then, in sum, is to be thought of Love and of his " birth " as we are told of it ?

Clearly we have to establish the significance, here, of Poverty and Possession, and show in what way the parentage is appropriate : we have also to bring these two into line with the other Supernals since one spirit nature, one spirit essence, must characterise all unless they are to have merely a name in common.

We must, therefore, lay down the grounds on which we distinguish the Gods from the Celestials — that is, when we emphasise the separate nature of the two orders and are not, as often in practice, including these Spirits under the common name of Gods.

It is our teaching and conviction that the Gods are immune to all passion while we attribute experience and emotion to the Celestials which, though eternal Beings and directly next to the Gods, are already a step towards ourselves and stand between the divine and the human.

But by what process (of degeneration) was the immunity lost ? What in their nature led them downwards to the inferior ?

And other questions present themselves.

Does the Intellectual Realm include no member of this spirit order, not even one ? And does the Kosmos contain only these spirits, God being confined to the Intellectual ? Or are there Gods in the sub-celestial too, the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and the Powers down to the Moon being all Gods as well ?

It is best not to use the word " Celestial " of any Being of that Realm ; the word " God " may be applied to the Essential-Celestial — the auto-daimon — and even to the Visible Powers of the Universe of Sense down to the Moon ; Gods, these too, visible, secondary, sequent upon

the Gods of the Intellectual Realm, consonant with Them, held about Them, as the radiance about the star.

What, then, are these spirits ?

A Celestial is the representative generated by each Soul when it enters the Kosmos.

And why, by a Soul entering the Kosmos ?

Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a God ; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite the Pure Soul, as a God.

But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an Eros, a Love ? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods ?

On the first question :— Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul towards the good and beautiful is an Eros ; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial ; but other Spirit-Beings, equally born from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul, have other functions : they are for the direct service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire. The Soul of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function but to its entire charge.

But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what Matter ?

Certainly none in bodily Matter ; that would make them simply living things of the order of sense. And if, even, they are to invest themselves in bodies of air or of fire, the nature must have already been altered before they could have any contact with the corporeal. The Pure does not mix, unmediated, with body — though many think that the Celestial-Kind, of its very essence, comports a body aerial or of fire.

But (since this is not so) why should one order of Celestial descend to body and another not ? The difference implies the existence of some cause or medium working upon such as thus descend. What would con stitute such a medium ?

We are forced to assume that there is a Matter of the Intellectual

Order, and that Beings partaking of it are thereby enabled to enter into the lower Matter, the corporeal.

7- This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of Love.

The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, " wine yet not existing " ; Love is born before the realm of sense has come into being : Penia (Poverty) had participation in the Intellectual before the lower image of that divine Realm had appeared ; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly of Form but partly also of that indetermination which belongs to the Soul before she attains the Good and when all her knowledge of Reality is a foreintimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered : in this state (of fore-feeling and desiring The Good) Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love.

This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated : the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not self-sufficient, but unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving and the selfsufficient Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle but not purely so ; for it includes within itself an aspiration ill-defined, unreasoned, unlimited — it can never be sated as long as it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love, then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concen trated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad ; it is without resource in itself ; even winning its end, it is poor again.

It cannot be satisfied because a thing of mixture never can be so : true satisfaction is only for what has its plenitude in its own being ; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at some given moment but it does not last. Love, then, has on the one side the powerlessness of its native inadequacy, on the other the resource inherited from the Reason-Kind.

Such must be the nature and such the origin of the entire Spirit Order, each — like its fellow, Love — has its appointed sphere, is powerful there, and wholly devoted to it, and, like Love, none is ever complete of itself but always straining towards some good which it sees in things of the partial sphere.

We understand, now, why good men have no other Love — no other Eros of life — than that for the Absolute and Authentic Good, and never follow the random attractions known to those ranged under the lower Spirit Kind.

Each human being is set under his own Spirit-Guides, but this is mere blank possession when they ignore their own and live by some other spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the operative part of the Soul in them. Those that go after evil are natures that have merged all the Love-Principles within them in the evil desires springing in their hearts and allowed the right reason, which belongs to our kind, to fall under the spell of false ideas from another source.

All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good ; in a lesser Soul, inferior in rank and in scope ; in the greater Soul, superior ; but all belong to the order of Being. Those forms of Love that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perver sion : in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations of any Reality ; for they are no true issue of Soul ; they are merely accompani ments of a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct.

In a word ; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being : anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it : a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly denned, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence — and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authen tically knowable and by the Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form.

In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the authentic Intellective Act and of the authentically knowable object — though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are not these in the absolute and not exclusively these — and hence our longing for absolute things : it is the expression of our intellective activities : if we sometimes care for the partial, that affection is not direct but accidental, like our knowledge that a given triangular figure is made up of two right angles because the absolute triangle is so.

8. But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered ? And what is the garden ?

We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe : we have still to explain Zeus and his garden.

We cannot take Zeus to be the Soul, which we have agreed is repre sented by Aphrodite.

Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader — though elsewhere he seems to rank him as one of three — but in the Philebus he speaks more plainly when he says that there is in Zeus not only a royal Soul, but also a royal Intellect.

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause ; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause : Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite (=the habra, delicate) indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul.

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls — to every Intellectual Principle its companion Soul — we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the Soul of Zeus ; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call Aphrodite's star (" Venus ") the star of Hera.

9- This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle of all that exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the supreme Intellect ; but being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch Soul, be in Soul, (as the next lower principle) .

For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect is native to it : nothing enters from without ; but " Poros intoxicated " is some Power deriving satisfaction outside itself : what, then, can we understand by this member of the Supreme filled with Nectar but a Reason-Principle falling from a loftier essence to a lower ? This means that the Reason-Principle upon " the birth of Aphrodite " left the Intellectual for the Soul, breaking into the garden of Zeus.

A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth : all the loveli ness that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the Reason-Principle within him ; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine Intellect upon the Divine Soul, which it has penetrated. What could the Garden of Zeus indicate but the images of his Being and the splendours of his glory ? And what could these divine splendours and beauties be but the Ideas streaming from him ?

These Reason-Principles — this Poros who is the lavishness, the abundance of Beauty — are at one and are made manifest ; this is the Nectar-drunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than what the god-nature essentially demands ; and this is the Reason pouring down from the divine Mind.

The Intellectual Principle possesses Itself to satiety, but there is no " drunken " abandonment in this possession which brings nothing alien to it. But the Reason-Principle — as its offspring, a later hypostasis — is already a separate Being and established in another Realm, and so is said to lie in the garden of this Zeus who is divine Mind ; and this lying in the garden takes place at the moment when, in our way of speaking, Aphrodite enters the realm of Being.

10. " Our way of speaking " — for myths, if they are to serve their pur pose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ in rank and faculty ; they will relate the births of the unbegotten and dis criminate where all is one substance ; the truth is conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to bring all together again.

On this principle we have, here, Soul (successively) dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas — the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely — Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life ; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love— ' born at the banquet of the gods " —has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good ; as long as Soul has been, Love has been.

Still this Love is of mixed quality. On the one hand there is in it the lack which keeps it craving : on the other, it is not entirely destitute ; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly nothing absolutely void of good would ever go seeking the good.

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy ; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor : the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination ; there is a lack of shape and of Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good,

and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the striving (with attainment) will leave it still unchanged in Kind : when it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the present ment of Matter to the incoming power.

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul ; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very birth, strives towards It.

Ennead III, Treatise 6

i. In our theory, feelings are not states ; they are action upon experi ence, action accompanied by judgment : the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere ; they may be referred to the vitalised body ; the judgment resides in the Soul, and is distinct from the state — for, if it is not distinct, another judgment is demanded, one that is distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever.

Still, this leaves it undecided whether in the act of judgment the judging faculty does or does not take to itself something of its object.

If (as is sometimes asserted) the judging faculty does actually receive an imprint, then it partakes of the state — though what are called the Impressions may be of quite another nature than is supposed ; they may be like Thought, that is to say they may be acts rather than states ; there may be, here too, awareness without participation.

For ourselves, it could never be in our system — or in our liking — to bring the Soul down to participation in such modes and modifications as the warmth and cold of material frames.

What is known as the Impressionable faculty of the soul — to pathetikon — would need to be identified : we must satisfy ourselves as to whether this too, like the Soul as a unity, is to be classed as immune or, on the contrary, as precisely the only part susceptible of being affected ;

this question, however, may be held over ; we proceed to examine its preliminaries.

Even in the superior phase of the Soul — that which precedes the impressionable faculty and any sensation — how can we reconcile immunity with the indwelling of vice, false notions, ignorance ? Inviolability ; and yet likings and dislikings, the Soul enjoying, grieving, angry, grudg ing, envying, desiring, never at peace but stirring and shifting with every thing that confronts it !

If the Soul were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult, indeed quite impossible, to make it appear to be immune, unchangeable, when any of such emotions lodge in it. And even considering it as an Authentic Being, devoid of magnitude and necessarily indestructible, we must be very careful how we attribute any such experiences to it or we will find ourselves unconsciously making it subject to dissolution. If its essence is a Number or as we hold a Reason-Principle, under neither head could it be susceptible of feeling. We can think, only, that it enter tains unreasoned reasons and experiences unexperienced, all transmuted from the material frames, foreign and recognised only by parallel, so that it possesses in a kind of non-possession and knows affection without being affected. How this can be demands enquiry.

2. Let us begin with virtue and vice in the Soul. What has really occurred when, as we say, vice is present ? In speaking of extirpating evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to replace a former ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the Soul.

Now when we make virtue a harmony, and vice a breach of harmony, we accept an opinion approved by the ancients ; and the theory helps us decidedly to our solution. For if virtue is simply a natural concordance among the phases of the Soul, and vice simply a discord, then there is no further question of any foreign presence ; harmony would be the result of every distinct phase or faculty joining in, true to itself; discord would mean that not all chimed in at their best and truest. Consider, for example, the performers in a choral dance ; they sing together

though each one has his particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the others are silent ; and each brings to the chorus some thing of his own ; it is not enough that all lift their voices together ; each must sing, choicely, his own part to the music set for him. Exactly so in the case of the Soul ; there will be harmony when each faculty performs its appropriate part.

Yes : but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the Soul must depend upon a previous virtue, that of each several faculty within itself ; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the vice of the single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual presence of vice as they can be good only by the presence of virtue. It is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with ignorance in the reasoning faculty of the Soul ; ignorance is not a positive thing ; but in the presence of false judgments — the main cause of vice — must it not be admitted that something positive has entered into the Soul, something perverting the reasoning faculty ? So, the initiative faculty ; is it not, itself, altered as one varies between timidity and boldness ? And the desiring faculty, similarly, as it runs wild or accepts control ?

Our teaching is that when the particular faculty is sound it performs the reasonable act of its essential nature, obeying the reasoning faculty in it which derives from the Intellectual Principle and communicates to the rest. And this folio whig of reason is not the acceptance of an imposed shape ; it is like using the eyes ; the Soul sees by its act, that of looking towards reason. The faculty of sight in the performance of its act is essentially what it was when it lay latent ; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the relation that belongs to its essential character ; it knows — that is, sees — without suffering any change : so, precisely, the reasoning phase of the Soul stands towards the Intellectual Principle ; this it sees by its very essence ; this vision is its knowing faculty ; it takes in no stamp, no impression ; all that enters it is the object of vision — possessed, once more, without possession ; it possesses by the fact of knowing but " without possession " in the sense that there is no incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the impression of the seal on sealing-wax.

And note that we do not appeal to stored-up impressions to account for memory : we think of the mind awakening its powers in such a way as to possess something not present to it.

Very good : but is it not different before and after acquiring the memory ?

Be it so ; but it has suffered no change — unless we are to think of the mere progress from latency to actuality as change — nothing has been introduced into the mind ; it has simply achieved the Act dictated by its nature.

It is universally true that the characteristic Act of immaterial entities is performed without any change in them — otherwise they would at last be worn away — theirs is the Act of the unmoving ; where act means suffering change, there is Matter : an immaterial Being would have no ground of permanence if its very Act changed it.

Thus in the case of Sight, the seeing faculty is in act but the material organ alone suffers change : judgements, (true or false, are not changes within the Soul ; they) are similar to visual experiences.

But how explain the alternation of timidity and daring in the initia tive faculty ?

Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the Reason-Principle or by looking towards some inferior phase of it or by some defect in the organs of action — some lack or flaw in the bodily equipment —or by outside prevention of the natural act or by the mere absence of adequate stimulus : boldness would arise from the reverse conditions : neither implies any change, or even any experience, in the Soul.

So with the faculty of desire : what we call loose living is caused by its acting unaccompanied ; it has done all of itself ; the other faculties, whose business it is to make their presence felt in control and to point the right way, have lain in abeyance ; the Seer in the Soul was occupied elsewhere, for, though not always at least sometimes, it has leisure for a certain degree of contemplation of other concerns.

Often, moreover, the vice of the desiring faculty will be merely some ill condition of the body, and its virtue, bodily soundness ; thus there would again be no question of anything imported into the Soul.

3- But how do we explain likings and aversions ? Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear — are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the Soul ?

This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious facts. But, while we recognise this, we must make very sure what it is that changes. To represent the Soul or Mind as being the seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or turn pale ; it is to forget that while the Soul or Mind is the means, the effect takes place in the distinct organism, the animated body.

At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul ; but the body is occupied by the Soul — not to trouble about words — is, at any rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter ; and so, is affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. Fear begins in the mind ; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the body ; the purely mental phase has not reached the point of sensation : the same is true of pain. So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise ; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows.

When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved — as in desire, reasoning, judging — we do not mean that it is driven into its act ; these movements are its own acts.

In the same way when we call Life a movement we have no idea of a changing substance ; the naturally appropriate act of each member of the living thing makes up the Life, which is, therefore, not a shifting thing.

To bring the matter to the point : put it that life, tendency, are no changements ; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealing-wax ; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the Soul — as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness are importations into body— but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries.

4- We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase

of the Soul. This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its choice : but more is required ; we must begin by forming a clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the Soul.

In general terms it means the centre about which we recognise the affections to be grouped ; and by affections we mean those states upon which follow pleasure and pain.

Now among these affections we must distinguish. Some are pivoted upon judgements ; thus, a Man judging his death to be at hand may feel fear ; foreseeing some fortunate turn of events, he is happy : the opinion lies in one sphere ; the affection is stirred in another. Some times the affections take the lead and automatically bring in the notion which thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty : but as we have explained, an act of opinion does not introduce any change into the Soul or Mind : what happens is that from the notion of some impending evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in turn, becomes known in that part of the Mind which is said under such circumstances to harbour fear.

But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind ?

The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. It should, however, be quite clear that the Soul or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation — both the higher representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower representa tion which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the " Nature " of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the body, belongs to the sense-order ; trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. The Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such

symptoms : besides, in that case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited.

None the less, there is an affective phase of the Soul or Mind and this is not corporeal ; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form.

Now Matter is the one field of the desiring faculty, as of the principles of nutrition growth and engendering, which are root and spring to desire and to every other affection known to this Ideal-form. No Ideal-form can be the victim of disturbance or be in any way affected : it remains in tranquillity ; only the Matter associated with it can be affected by any state or experience induced by the movement which its mere presence suffices to set up. Thus the vegetal Principle induces vegetal life but it does not, itself, pass through the processes of vegetation ; it gives growth but it does not grow ; in no movement which it originates is it moved with the motion it induces ; it is in perfect repose, or, at least, its movement, really its act, is utterly different from what it causes elsewhere.

The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity ; it operates by its mere presence : it is as if Melody itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection ; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently — and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not — but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement may be likened to the musician ; what is moved is like the strings of his instru ment, and, once more, the Melodic Principle itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody.

5- But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it is thus (like the Melodic Principle of our illustration) immune from the beginning ?

Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil : this amounts to an affection and Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the well-being of the Soul which by the mere absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present.

Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances presented before the Soul or Mind from without but taken (for practical purposes) to be actual experiences within it — then Philosophy's task is like that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking condition the mind that is breeding them.

But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body to which it is essentially a stranger ?

The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone ; it is pure when it keeps no company ; when it looks to nothing without itself ; when it entertains no alien thoughts — be the mode or origin of such notions or affections what they may, a subject on which we have already touched — when it no longer sees in the world of image, much less elaborates images into veritable affections. Is it not a true purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly things ?

Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer entering into the body to lie at its mercy ; it is to stand as a light, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all.

In the particular case of the affective phase of the Soul, purification is its awakening from the baseless visions which beset it, the refusal to see them ; its separation consists in limiting its descent towards the lower and accepting no picture thence, and of course in the banning for its part too of all which the higher Soul ignores when it has arisen from the trouble storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by the chains of sensuality and of multiplicity but has subdued to itself the body and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignity, tranquilly, over all.

6. That the Intellectual Essence, wholly of the order of Ideal-form, must be taken as impassive has been already established.

But Matter also is an incorporeal, though after a mode of its own ; we must examine, therefore, how this stands, whether it is passive, as is commonly held, a thing that can be twisted to every shape and Kind, or whether it too must be considered impassive and in what sense and fashion so. But in engaging this question and denning the nature of matter we must correct certain prevailing errors about the nature of the Authentic Existent, about Essence, about Being.

The Existent — rightly so called — is that which has authentic exist ence, that, therefore, which is existent completely, and therefore again, that which at no point fails in existence. Having existence perfectly, it needs nothing to preserve it in being ; it is, on the contrary, the source and cause from which all that appears to exist derives that appearance. This admitted, it must of necessity be in life, in a perfect life : if it failed it would be more nearly the non-existent than the existent. But : The Being thus indicated is Intellect, is wisdom unalloyed. It is, there fore, determined and rounded off ; it is nothing potentially that is not of the same determined order, otherwise (that is if it contained even potentially the undetermined) it would be in default.

Hence its eternity, its identity, its utter irreceptivity and imper meability. If it took in anything, it must be taking in something outside itself, that is to say, Existence would at last include non-existence. But it must be Authentic Existence all through ; it must, therefore, present itself equipped from its own stores with all that makes up Existence so that all stands together and all is one thing. The Existent (Real Being) must have thus much of determination : if it had not, then it could not be the source of the Intellectual Principle and of Life which would be importations into it originating in the sphere of non-Being ; and Real Being would be lifeless and mindless ; but mindlessness and lifelessness are the characteristics of non-being and must belong to the lower order, to the outer borders of the existent ; for Intellect and Life rise from the Beyond-Existence (the Indefinable Supreme) — though Itself

has no need of them — and are conveyed from It into the Authentic Existent.

If we have thus rightly described the Authentic Existent, we see that it can not be any kind of body nor the under-stuff of body : in such entities the Being is simply the existing of things outside of Being.

But body, a non-existence ? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a non-existence ? Mountain and rock, the wide solid earth, all that resists, all that can be struck and driven, surely all proclaims the real existence of the corporeal ? And how, it will be asked, can we, on the contrary, attribute Being, and the only Authentic Being, to entities like Soul and Intellect, things having no weight or pressure, yielding to no force, offering no resistance, things not even visible ?

Yet even the corporeal realm witnesses for us ; the resting earth has certainly a scantier share in Being than belongs to what has more motion and less solidity — and less than belongs to its own most upward element, for fire begins, already, to flit up and away outside of the bodykind.

In fact, it appears to be precisely the most self-sufficing that bear least hardly, least painfully, on other things, while the heaviest and earthiest bodies — deficient, falling, unable to bear themselves upward — these, by the very down-thrust due to their feebleness, offer the resistance which belongs to the falling habit and to the lack of buoyancy. It is lifeless objects that deal the severest blows ; they hit hardest and hurt most ; where there is life — that is to say participation in Being — there is beneficence towards the environment, all the greater as the measure of Being is fuller.

Again, Movement, which is a sort of life within bodies, an imitation of true Life, is the more decided where there is the least of body — a sign that the waning of Being makes the object affected more distinctly corporeal.

The changes known as affections show even more clearly that where the bodily quality is most pronounced susceptibility is at its intensest — earth more susceptible than other elements, and these others again more or less so in the degree of their corporeality : sever the other

elements and, failing some preventive force, they join again ; but earthy matter divided remains apart indefinitely. Things whose nature repre sents a diminishment have no power of recuperation after even a slight disturbance and they perish ; thus what has most definitely become body, having most closely approximated to non-being lacks the strength to reknit its unity : the heavy and violent crash of body against body works destruction, and weak is powerful against weak, non-being against its like.

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision. The sphere of sense, the Soul in its slumber ; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body : in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed ; the veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things ; for these, belonging to the Kind directly opposed to Soul, present to it what is directly opposed to its essential existence : their origin, their flux, and their perishing are the warning of their exclusion from the Kind whose Being is Authentic.

7- We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter

and the things believed to be based upon it ; investigation will show us that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected.

Matter must be bodiless — for body is a later production, a compound made by Matter in conjunction with some other entity. Thus it is in cluded among incorporeal things in the sense that body is something that is neither Real-Being nor Matter.

Matter is not Soul ; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle ; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination ; it is not a power, for what does it produce ?

It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no title to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being,

and this in the sense not of movement (aw,ay from Being) or station (in Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence ; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is in itself invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based upon it ; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive ; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdrawnot even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it failed to accept strength from the Intellectual Principle, so absolute its lack of all Being.

Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie ; it pretends to be great and it is little, to be more and it is less ; and the Existence with which it masks itself is no Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of all that seems to be present in it, phantasms within a phantasm ; it is like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are really elsewhere, filled in appearance but actually empty, containing nothing, pretending everything. Into it and out of it move mimicries of the Authentic Existents, images playing upon an image devoid of Form, visible against it by its very formlessness ; they seem to modify it but in reality effect nothing, for they .are ghostly and feeble, have no thrust and meet none in Matter either ; they pass through it leaving no cleavage, as through water ; or they might be compared to shapes projected so as to make some appearance upon what we can know only as the Void.

Further : if visible objects were of the rank of the originals from which they have entered into Matter we might believe Matter to be really affected by them, for we might credit them with some share of the power inherent in their Senders : but the objects of our experiences are of very different virtue than the realities they represent, and we deduce that the seeming modification of matter by visible things is unreal since the visible thing itself is unreal, having at no point any similarity with its source and cause. Feeble, in itself, a false thing and projected upon a falsity, like an image in dream or against water or on a mirror, it can but leave Matter unaffected ; and even this is saying too

little, for water and mirror do give back a faithful image of what presents itself before them.

8. It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be opposed in faculty, and in quality to the forces that enter and act upon it.

Thus where heat is present, the change comes by something that chills, where damp by some drying agency : we say a subject is modified when from warm it becomes cold, from dry wet.

A further evidence is in our speaking of a fire being burned out, when it has passed over into another element ; we do not say that the Matter has been burned out : in other words, modification affects what is subject to dissolution ; the acceptance of modification is the path towards dissolution ; susceptibility to modification and susceptibility to dissolution go necessarily together. But Matter can never be dis solved. What into ? By what process ?

Still : — Matter harbours heat, cold, qualities beyond all count ; by these it is differentiated ; it holds them as if they were of its very sub stance and they blend within it — since no quality is found isolated to itself — Matter lies there as the meeting ground of all these qualities with their changes as they act and react in the blend : how, then, can it fail to be modified in keeping ? The only escape would be to declare Matter utterly and for ever apart from the qualities it exhibits ; but the very notion of Substance implies that any and every thing present in it has some action upon it.

9- In answer : — It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a " presence " which acts by changing the object — for good or for ill — as we see in the case of bodies, especially where there is life. But there is also a " presence " which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the Soul. Then there is the case represented by the stamping of a design

upon wax, where the " presence " of the added pattern causes no modi fication in the substance nor does its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example of Light whose presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object illuminated. A stone becoming cold does not change its nature in the process ; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a drawing for being coloured.

The intermediary mass on which these surface changes appear is certainly not transmuted by them ; but might there not be a modification of the underlying Matter ?

No : it is impossible to think of Matter being modified by, for instance, colour — for, of course we must not talk of modification when there is no more than a presence, or at most a presenting of shape.

Mirrors and transparent objects, even more, offer a close parallel ; they are quite unaffected by what is seen in or through them : material things are reflections, and the Matter on which they appear is further from being affected than is a mirror. Heat and cold are present in Matter, but the Matter itself suffers no change of temperature : growing hot and growing cold have to do only with quality ; a quality enters and brings the impassible Substance under a new state — though, by the way, research into nature may show that cold is nothing positive but an absence, a mere negation. The qualities come together into Matter, but in most cases they can have no action upon each other ; certainly there can be none between those of unlike scope : what effect, for example, could fragrance have on sweetness or the colour-quality on the quality of form, any quality on another of some unrelated order ? The illus tration of the mirror may well indicate to us that a given substratum may contain something quite distinct from itself — even something standing to it as a direct contrary — and yet remain entirely unaffected by what is thus present to it or merged into it.

A thing can be hurt only by something related to it, and similarly things are not changed or modified by any chance presence : modification comes by contrary acting upon contrary ; things merely different leave each other as they were. Such modification by a direct contrary can obviously not occur in an order of things to which there is no contrary :

Matter, therefore (the mere absence of Reality) cannot be modified : any modification that takes place can occur only in some compound of Matter and reality, or, speaking generally, in some agglomeration of actual things. The Matter itself — isolated, quite apart from all else, utterly simplex — must remain immune, untouched in the midst of all the inter acting agencies ; just as when people fight within their four walls, the house and the air in it remain without part in the turmoil.

We may take it, then, that while all the qualities and entities that appear upon Matter group to produce each the effect belonging to its nature, yet Matter itself remains immune, even more definitely immune than any of those qualities entering into it which, not being contraries, are not affected by each other.

10. Further : — If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must acquire something by the incoming of the new state ; it will either adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way different from what it was. Now upon this first incoming quality suppose a second to supervene ; the recipient is no longer Matter but a modification of Matter : this second quality, perhaps, departs but it has acted and therefore leaves some thing of itself after it ; the substratum is still further altered. This process proceeding, the substratum ends by becoming something quite different from Matter ; it becomes a thing settled in many modes and many shapes ; at once it is debarred from being the all-recipient ; it will have closed the entry against many incomers. In other words, the Matter is no longer there : Matter is destructible.

No : if there is to be a Matter at all, it must be always identically as it has been from the beginning : to speak of Matter as changing is to speak of it as not being Matter.

Another consideration : it is a general principle that a thing chang ing must remain within its constitutive Idea so that the alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential thing ; the changing object must retain this fundamental permanence, and the permanent substance cannot be the member of it which accepts modification.

Therefore there are only two possibilities : the first, that Matter itself changes and so ceases to be itself, the second that it never ceases to be itself and therefore never changes.

We may be answered that it does not change in its character as Matter : but no one could tell us in what other character it changes ; and we have the admission that the Matter in itself is not subject to change.

Just as the Ideal Principles stand immutably in their essence — which consists precisely in their permanence — so, since the essence of Matter consists in its being Matter (the substratum to all material things) it must be permanent in this character ; because it is Matter, it is im mutable. In the Intellectual realm we have the immutable Idea ; here we have Matter, itself similarly immutable.

ii. I think, in fact, that Plato had this in mind where he justly speaks of the Images of Real Exist ents " entering and passing out " : these particular words are not used idly : he wishes us to grasp the precise nature of the relation between Matter and the Ideas.

The difficulty on this point is not really that which presented itself to most of our predecessors — how the Ideas enter into Matter — it is rather the mode of their presence in it.

It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact, unaffected by Ideal-forms present within it, especially seeing that these are affected by each other. It is surprising, too, that the entrant Forms should regularly expel preceding shapes and qualities, and that the modi fication (which cannot touch Matter) should affect what is a compound (of Idea with Matter) and this, again, not at haphazard but precisely where there is need of the incoming or outgoing of some certain Idealform, the compound being deficient through the absence of a particular principle whose presence will complete it.

But the reason is that the fundamental nature of Matter can take no increase by anything entering it, and no decrease by any withdrawal : what from the beginning it was, it remains. It is not like those things

in. 6. iaj THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE UNEMBODIED 83

whose lack is merely that of arrangement and order which can be supplied without change of substance as when we dress or decorate something bare or ugly.

But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature, the base original must be transmuted : it can leave ugliness for beauty only by a change of substance. Matter, then, thus brought to order must lose its own nature in the supreme degree unless its baseness is an accidental : if it is base in the sense of being Baseness the Absolute, it could never participate in order, and if evil in the sense of being Evil the Absolute, it could never participate in good.

We conclude that Matter's participation in Idea is not by way of modification within itself : the process is very different ; it is a bare seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the difficulty as to how Matter, essentially evil, can be reaching towards The Good : there would be (in this " seeming ") no such participation as would destroy its essential nature. Given this mode of pseudo-participation — in which Matter would, as we say, retain its nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been — there is no longer any reason to wonder as to how, while essentially evil, it yet participates in Idea : for, by this mode, it does not abandon its own character : participation is the law, but it participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under a mode of participation which allows it to remain on its own footing, its essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever the Idea, within that limit, may communicate to it : it is by no means the less evil for remaining immut ably in its own order. If it had authentic participation in The Good and were veritably changed, it would not be essentially evil.

In a word, when we call Matter evil we are right only if we mean that it is not amenable to modification by The Good ; but that means simply that it is subject to no modification whatever.

12. This is Plato's conception : to him participation does not, in the case of Matter, comport any such presence of an Ideal form in a Sub stance to be shaped by it as would produce one compound thing made

up of the two elements changing at the same moment, merging into one another, modified each by the other.

In his haste to his purpose he raises many difficult questions, but he is determined to disown that view ; he labours to indicate in what mode Matter can receive the Ideal-forms without being, itself, modified. The direct way is debarred since it is not easy to point to things actually present in a base and yet leaving that base unaffected : he therefore devises a metaphor for participation without modification (patternless wax, alone taking a clear impression) one which supports, also, his thesis that all appearing to the senses is void of substantial existence and that the region of mere seeming is vast.

Holding, as he does, that it is the patterns displayed upon^ Matter that cause all experience in living bodies while the Matter itself remains unaffected, he chooses this way of stating its immutability, leaving us to make out for ourselves that those very patterns impressed upon it do not comport any experience, any modification, in itself.

In the case, no doubt, of the living bodies that take one pattern or shape after having borne another, it might be said that there was a change, the variation of shape being made verbally equivalent to a real change : but since Matter is essentially without shape or magnitude, the appearing of shape upon it can by no freedom of phrase be described as a change within it. On this point if one must have " a rule for thick and thin " one may safely say that the underlying Kind contains nothing whatever in the mode commonly supposed.

But if we reject even the idea of its really containing at least the patterns upon it, how is it, in any sense, a recipient ?

The answer is that in the metaphor cited we have some reasonably adequate indication of the impassibility of Matter coupled with the presence upon it of what may be described as images of things not present.

But we cannot leave the point of its impassibility without a warning against allowing ourselves to be deluded by sheer custom of speech.

Plato speaks of Matter as becoming dry, wet, inflamed, but we must remember the words that follow : " and taking the shape of air and of water " : this blunts the expressions " becoming wet, becoming inflamed " ; once we have Matter thus admitting these shapes, we learn that it has not itself become a shaped thing but that the shapes remain distinct as they entered. We see, further, that the expression " becoming inflamed " is not to be taken strictly : it is rather a case of becoming fire. Becoming fire is very different from becoming inflamed which implies an outside agency and, therefore, susceptibility to modification. Matter, being itself a portion of fire, cannot be said to catch fire. To sug gest that the fire not merely permeates the matter, but actually sets it on fire is like saying that a statue permeates its bronze (and " statufies " it).

Further, if what enters must be an Ideal-Principle how could it set Matter aflame ? But what if it is a pattern or condition ? No : the object set aflame is so in virtue of the combination of Matter and con dition.

But how can this follow on the conjunction when no unity has been produced by the two ?

Even if such a unity had been produced, it would be a unity of things not mutually sharing experiences but acting upon each other. And the question would then arise whether each was effective upon the other or whether the sole action was not that of one (the form) preventing the other (the Matter) from slipping away ?

But (another difficulty) when any material thing is severed, must not the Matter be divided with it ? Surely the bodily modification and other experience that have accompanied the sundering, must have occurred, identically, within the Matter ?

This reasoning would force the destructibility of Matter upon us : " the body is dissolved ; then the Matter is dissolved." We would have to allow Matter to be a thing of quantity, a magnitude. But since it is not a magnitude it could not have the experiences that belong to magni tude and, on the larger scale, since it is not body it cannot know the experiences of body.

In fact those that declare Matter subject to modification may as well declare it body right out.

13- Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that Matter tends to slip away from its form (the Idea) . Can we conceive it stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else envelops it ?

And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases rebels and sometimes not. For if once it makes away of its own will, why should it not always escape ? If it is fixed despite itself, it must be enveloped by some Ideal-Form for good and all. This, however, leaves still the question why a given portion of Matter does not remain constant to any one given form : the reason lies mainly in the fact that the Ideas are constantly passing into it.

In what sense, then, is it said to elude form ?

By very nature and for ever ?

But does not this precisely mean that it never ceases to be itself, in other words that its one form is an invincible formlessness ? In no other sense has Plato's dictum any value to those that invoke it.

Matter (we read) is " the receptacle and nurse of all generation."

Now if Matter is such a receptacle and nurse, all generation is distinct from it ; and since all the changeable lies in the realm of genera tion, Matter, existing before all generation, must exist before all change.

" Receptacle " and " nurse " ; then it " retains its identitjr ; it is not subject to modification. Similarly if it is " (as again we read) " the ground on which individual things appear and disappear," and so, too, if it is a " place, a base." Where Plato describes and identifies it as " a ground to the ideas " he is not attributing any state to it ; he is probing after its distinctive manner of being.

And what is that ?

This which we think of as a Nature-Kind cannot be included among Existents but must utterly rebel from the Essence of Real Beings and be therefore wholly something other than they — for they are Reason-Principles and possess Authentic Existence — it must inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to the point of being per manently closed against them and, more, of rejecting close participation in any image of them.

Only on these terms can it be completely different : once it took any Idea to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant Idea will enter as an image, the untrue entering the untruth.

But, at least, in a true entry ?

No : How could there be a true entry into that which, by being falsity, is banned from ever touching truth ?

Is this then a pseudo-entry into a pseudo-entity — something merely brought near, as faces enter the mirror, there to remain just as long as the people look into it ?

Yes : if we eliminated the Authentic Existents from this Sphere nothing of all now seen in sense would appear one moment longer.

Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an Ideal-Form of a Kind (has some degree of Real Being) ; but bare Matter, which is no Idea, is not a visible thing ; if it were, it would have been visible in its own character before anything else appeared upon it. The condition of Matter may be illustrated by that of air penetrated by light and remaining, even so, unseen because it is invisible whatever happens.

The reflections in the mirror are not taken to be real, all the less since the appliance on which they appear is seen and remains while the images disappear, but Matter is not seen either with the images or without them. But suppose the reflections on the mirror remaining and the mirror itself not seen, we would never doubt the solid reality of all that appears.

If, then, there is, really, something in a mirror, we may suppose objects of sense to be in Matter in precisely that way : if in the mirror there is nothing, if there is only a seeming of something, then we may judge that in Matter there is the same delusion and that the seeming is to be traced to the Substantial-Existence of the Real-Beings, that Sub stantial-Existence in which the Authentic has the real participation while only an unreal participation can belong to the unauthentic since

their condition must differ from that which they would know if the parts were reversed, if the Authentic Existents were not and they were.

But would this mean that if there were no Matter nothing would

exist ?

Precisely as in the absence of a mirror,, or something of similar power, there would be no reflection.

A thing whose very nature is to be lodged in something else cannot exist where the base is lacking — and it is the character of a reflection to appear in something not itself.

Of course supposing anything to desert from the Authentic Beings, this would not need an alien base : but these Beings are not subject to flux, and therefore any outside manifestation of them implies something other than themselves, something offering a base to what never enters, something which by its presence, in its insistence, by its cry for help, in its beggardom, strives as it were by violence to acquire and is always disappointed so that its poverty is enduring, its cry unceasing.

This alien base exists and the myth represents it as a pauper to exhibit its nature, to show that Matter is destitute of The Good. The claimant does not ask for all the Giver's store, but it welcomes whatever it can get ; in other words, what appears in Matter is not Reality.

The name, too (Poverty), conveys that Matter's need is never met. The union with Poros, Possession, is designed to show that Matter does not attain to Reality, to Plenitude, but to some bare sufficiency—in point of fact to imaging skill.

It is, of course, impossible that an outside thing belonging in any degree to Real-Being — whose Nature is to engender Real-Beings— should utterly fail of participation in Reality : but here we have something per plexing ; we are dealing with utter Non-Being, absolutely without part in Reality ; what is this participation by the non-participant, and how does mere neighbouring confer anything on that which by its own nature is precluded from any association ?

The answer is that all that impinges upon this Non-Being is flung

back as from a repelling substance ; we may think of an Echo returned from a repercussive plane surface ; it is precisely because of the lack of retention that the phenomenon is supposed to belong to that particular place and even to arise there.

If Matter were participant and received Reality to the extent which we are apt to imagine, it would be penetrated by a Reality thus sucked into its constitution. But we know that the Entrant is not thus absorbed : Matter remains as it was, taking nothing to itself : it is the check to the forthwelling of Authentic Existence ; it is a ground that repels ; it is a mere receptacle to the Realities as they take their common path (of emanation) and here meet and mingle. It resembles those reflecting vessels, filled with water, which are often set against the sun to produce fire : the heat rays — prevented, by their contrary within, from being absorbed are flung out as one mass.

It is in this sense and way that Matter becomes the cause of the generated realm ; the combinations within it hold together only after some such reflective mode.

Now the objects attracting the sun-rays to themselves — illuminated by a fire of the sense-order — are necessarily of the sense-order ; there is perceptibility because there has been a union of things at once external to each other and continuous, contiguous, in direct contact, two extremes in one line. But the Reason-Principle operating upon Matter is external to it only in a very different mode and sense : exteriority in this case is amply supplied by contrariety of essence and can dispense with any opposite ends (any question of lineal position) ; or, rather, the difference is one that actually debars any local extremity ; sheer incongruity of essence, the utter failure in relationship, inhibits admixture (between Matter and any form of Being).

The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant principle neither possesses it nor is possessed by it. Consider, as an example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in the mind ; there is no admixture ; the notion that came goes in its time,

still integrally itself alone, taking nothing with it, leaving nothing after it, because it has not been blended with the mind ; there is no " outside " in the sense of contact broken, and the distinction between base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the reason.

In that example, no doubt, the mental representation — though it seems to have a wide and unchecked control — is an image, while the Soul (Mind) is in its nature not an image (but a Reality) : none the less the Soul or Mind certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some analogous relation. The representation, however, does not cover the Mind over ; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there ; however urgently it presses in, it never effects such an obliteration as to be taken for the Soul ; it is confronted there by indwelling powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack.

Matter — feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of the Authentic Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity — lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it is ; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating thought may arrive at it, discriminating it from Authentic Existence ; then, it is discerned as something abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every shape and property and appearing to follow — yet in fact not even following.

16. An Ideal-Principle approaches and leads Matter towards some desired dimension, investing this non-existent underlie with a magnitude from itself which never becomes incorporate — for Matter, if it really incorporated magnitude, would be a mass.

Eliminate this Ideal-Form and the substratum ceases to be a thing of magnitude, or to appear so : the mass produced by the Idea was, let us suppose, a man or a horse ; the horse-magnitude came upon the Matter when a horse was produced upon it ; when the horse ceases to exist upon the Matter, the magnitude of the horse departs also. If we are told that the horse implies a certain determined bulk and that this

bulk is a permanent thing, we answer that what is permanent in this case is not the magnitude of the horse but the magnitude of mass in general. That same Magnitude might be fire or earth ; on their disappearance their particular magnitudes would disappear with them. Matter, then, can never take to itself either pattern or magni tude ; if it did, it would no longer be able to turn from being fire, let us say, into being something else ; it would become and be fire once for all.

In a word, though Matter is far extended — so vastly as to appear co-extensive with all this sense-known Universe — yet if the Heavens and their content came to an end, all magnitude would simultaneously pass from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its other properties ; it would be abandoned to its own Kind, retaining nothing of all that which, in its own peculiar mode, it had hitherto exhibited.

Where an entrant force can effect modification it will inevitably leave some trace upon its withdrawal ; but where there can be no modi fication, nothing can be retained ; light comes and goes, and the air is as it always was.

That a thing essentially devoid of magnitude should come to a certain size is no more astonishing than that a thing essentially devoid of heat should become warm : Matter's essential existence is quite separate from its existing in bulk, since, of course, magnitude is an immaterial principle as pattern is. Besides, if we are not to reduce Matter to nothing, it must be all things by way of participation, and Magnitude is one of those all things.

In bodies, necessarily compounds, Magnitude — though not a deter mined Magnitude — must be present as one of the constituents ; it is implied in the very notion of body ; but Matter — not a Body — excludes even undetermined Magnitude.

Nor can we, on the other hand, think that matter is simply Absolute Magnitude.

Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle ; it is an Ideal- Principle :

it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the All-Soul, desires expansion (and thereby engenders secondaries) : in its images — aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act — is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own deriva tives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Imagemaking phase (of Intellect or All-Soul) runs forth into the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe ; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter : the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter — which never possesses a con tent — to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else ; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe.

The Magnitude inherent in each Ideal-Principle — that of a horse or of anything else — combines with Magnitude the Absolute with the result that, irradiated by that Absolute, Matter entire takes Magnitude and every particle of it becomes a mass ; in this way, by virtue at once of the totality of Idea with its inherent magnitude and of each several specific Idea, all things appear under mass ; Matter takes on what we conceive as extension ; it is compelled to assume a relation to the All and, gathered under this Idea and under Mass, to be all things — in the degree in which the operating power can lead the really nothing to become all.

By the conditions of Manifestation, colour rises from non-colour (=from the colourless prototype of colour in the Ideal Realm). Quality, known by the one name with its parallel in the sphere of Primals, rises, similarly, from non-quality : in precisely the same mode, the Magnitude appearing upon Matter rises from non-Magnitude or from that Primal which is known to us by the same name ; so that material things become visible through standing midway between bare underlie and Pure Idea. All is perceptible by virtue of this origin in the Intellectual Sphere but

all is falsity since the base in which the manifestation takes place is a non-existent.

Particular entities thus attain their Magnitude through being drawn out by the power of the Existents which mirror themselves and make space for themselves in them. And no violence is required to draw them into all the diversity of Shapes and Kinds because the phenomenal All exists by Matter (by Matter's essential all-receptivity) and because each several Idea, moreover, draws Matter its own way by the power stored within itself, the power it holds from the Intellectual Realm. Matter is manifested in this sphere as Mass by the fact that it mirrors the Absolute Magnitude ; Magnitude here is the reflection in the mirror. The Ideas meet all of necessity in Matter (the Ultimate of the emanatory progress) : and Matter, both as one total thing and in its entire scope, must submit itself, since (by definition) it is the Material of the entire Here, not of any one determined thing : what is, in its own character, no determined thing may become determined by an outside force — though, in becoming thus determined, it does not become the definite thing in question, for thus it would lose its own characteristic indetermination.

18. The Ideal Principle possessing the Intellection ( = Idea, Noesis) of Magnitude — assuming that this Intellection is of such power as not merely to subsist within itself but to be urged outward as it were by the intensity of its life — will necessarily realise itself in a Kind (= Matter) not having its being in the Intellective Principle, not previously possessing the Idea of Magnitude or any trace of that Idea or any other.

What then will it produce (in this Matter) by virtue of that power ?

Not horse or cow : these are the product of other Ideas.

No : this Principle comes from the source of Magnitude ( = is primal " Magnitude ") and therefore Matter can have no extension, in which to harbour the Magnitude of the Principle, but can take in only its reflected appearance.

To the thing which does not enjoy Magnitude in the sense of having mass-extension in its own substance and parts, the only possibility is

that it present some partial semblance of Magnitude, such as being continuous, not here and there and everywhere, that its parts be related within it and ungapped. An adequate reflection of a great mass cannot be produced in a small space — mere size prevents — but the greater, pur suing the hope of that full self -presentment, makes progress towards it and brings about a nearer approach to adequate mirroring in the parallel from which it can never withhold its radiation : thus it confers Magnitude upon that (= Matter) which has none and cannot even muster up the appearance of having any, and the visible resultant exhibits the Magnitude of mass.

Matter, then, wears Magnitude as a dress thrown about it by its association with that Absolute Magnitude to whose movement it must answer ; but it does not, for that, change its Kind ; if the Idea which has clothed it were to withdraw, it would once again be what it per manently is, what it is by its own strength, or it would have precisely the Magnitude lent to it by any other form that happens to be present in it.

The (Universal) Soul — containing the Ideal Principles of Real-Beings, and itself an Ideal Principle — includes all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is complete and selfcontained : it, therefore, sees these principles of sensible things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and advancing to it : but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind ; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active power may choose to send. In what is thus sent, from the Reason-Principle in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained a degree of the partial object that is to be formed : in the image-making impulse within the Reason-Principle there is already a step (towards the lower manifestation) or we may put it that the down ward movement from the Reason-Principle is a first form of the partial : utter absence of partition would mean no movement but (sterile) repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the Soul is : if it were so, it would belong to the Intellective Sphere. It must be (like the Soul) all-recipient but not in that partless mode. It is to be the Place

of all things, and it must therefore extend universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval : thus it will be a thir^ unconfined to any moment (of space or time) but laid out in submission to all that is to be.

But would we not expect that some one particularised form should occupy Matter (at once) and so exclude such others as are not able to enter into combination ?

No : for there is no first Idea — except the Ideal Principle of the Universe — and, by this Idea, Matter is (the seat of) all things at once and of the particular thing in its parts — for the Matter of a living being is disparted according to the specific parts of the organism : if there were no such partition nothing would exist but the Reason-Principle.

19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother (to be ' born into the Universe ") affect it neither for better nor for worse.

Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other ; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata — which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms — Heat (the Principle) annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness ; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is affected which enters into combinations : being affected is losing something of self-identity.

In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change : in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. (Body is modified : Mind knows) but the Matter concerned remains unaffected ; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy.

So the appellation " Recipient and Nurse " is the better description : Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated ; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing

to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother (Matter) does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as Matter but as being (in some degree) an Ideal-Form ; for only the Idea is generative ; the contrary Kind is sterile.

This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the genera tive organ always in active posture ; this is to convey that the generator of things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle : the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it in its representation as the All-Mother.

This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that it is the source of things in the sense of being their underlie : it is an approximate name chosen for a general conception ; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a precisely true presentment ; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy : this they accomplish by exhibiting Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male, but castrated of that impregnating power which belongs only to the unchangeably masculine.

Ennead III, Treatise 7

i. Eternity and Time ; two entirely separate things, we explain " the one having its being in the everlasting Kind, the other in the realm of Process, in our own Universe " ; and, by continually using the words and assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to think that, both by instinct and by the more detailed attack of thought, we hold an adequate experience of them in our minds without more ado.

When, perhaps, we make the effort to clarify our ideas and close

into the heart of the matter we are at once unsettled : our doubts throw us back upon ancient explanations ; we choose among the various theories, or among the various interpretations of some one theory, and so we come to rest, satisfied, if only we can counter a question with an approved answer, and glad to be absolved from further enquiry.

Now, we must believe that some of the venerable philosophers of old discovered the truth ; but it is important to examine which of them really hit the mark and by what guiding principle we can ourselves attain to certitude.

What, then, does Eternity really mean to those who (thus casually) describe it as something different from Time ? We begin with Eternity, since when the standing Exemplar is known, its representation in image —which Time is understood to be — will be clearly apprehended — though it is of course equally true, admitting this relationship of Time as image to Eternity the original, that if we chose to begin by identifying Time we could thence proceed upwards by Recognition (the Platonic Anamnesis) and become aware of the Kind which it images.

2. What definition are we to give of Eternity ?

Can it be identified with the (divine or) Intellectual Substance itself ?

This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of Heavens and Earth — an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something most august ; most august, too, is the Intellectual Kind ; and there is no possibility of saying that the one is more majestic than the other, since no such degrees can be asserted in the Above- World ; there is therefore a certain excuse for the identification — all the more since the Intellectual Substance and Eternity have the one scope and content.

Still ; by the fact of representing the one as contained within the

other, by making Eternity a predicate to the Intellectual Existents—

' the Nature of the^Exemplar," we read, " is eternal " —we cancel the

identification ; Eternity becomes a separate thing, something surrounding

that Nature or lying within it or present to it. And the majestic quality of both does not prove them identical : it might be transmitted from the one to the other. So, too, Eternity and the Divine Nature envelop the same entities, yes ; but not in the same way : the Divine may be thought of as enveloping parts, Eternity as embracing its content in an unbroken whole, with no implication of part, but merely from the fact that all eternal things are so by conforming to it.

May we, perhaps, identify Eternity with Repose-There as Time has been identified with Movement-Here ?

This would bring on the counter-question whether Eternity is pre sented to us as Repose in the general sense or as the Repose that envelops the Intellectual Essence.

On the first supposition we can no more talk of Repose being eternal than of Eternity being eternal : to be eternal is to participate in an outside thing, Eternity.

Further, if Eternity is Repose, what becomes of Eternal Movement, which, by this identification, would become a thing of Repose ?

Again, the conception of Repose scarcely seems to include that of per petuity — I am speaking of course not of perpetuity in the time-order (which might follow on absence of movement) but of that which we have in mind when we speak of Eternity.

If, on the other hand, Eternity is identified with the Repose of the divine Essence, all species outside of the divine are put outside of Eternity.

Besides, the conception of Eternity requires not merely Repose but also unity — and, in order to keep it distinct from Time, a unity including interval — but neither that unity nor that absence of interval enters into the conception of Repose as such.

Lastly, this unchangeable Repose in unity is a predicate asserted of Eternity, which, therefore, is not itself Repose, the absolute, but a participant in Repose.

3- What, then, can this be, this something in virtue of which we declare the entire divine Realm to be Eternal, everlasting ? We must come to

some understanding of this perpetuity with which Eternity is either identical or in conformity.

It must at once, be at once something in the nature of unity and yet a notion compact of diversity, or (more exactly) a Kind, a Nature, that waits upon the Existents of that Other World, either associated with them or known in and upon them, they collectively being this Nature which, with all its unity, is yet diverse in power and essence. Considering this multifarious power, we declare it to be Essence in its relation to this sphere which is substratum or underlie to it ; where we see life we think of it as Movement ; where all is unvaried self-identity we call it Repose ; and we know it as, at once, Difference and Identity when we recognise that all is unity with variety.

Then we reconstruct ; we sum all into a collected unity once more, a sole Life in the Supreme ; we concentrate Diversity and all the endless production of act : thus we know Identity, a concept or, rather, a Life never varying, not becoming what previously it was not, the thing immutably itself, broken by no interval ; and knowing this, we know Eternity.

X We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding the Universal content (time, space and phenomena) in actual presence ; not this now and now that other, but always all ; not existing now in one mode and now in another, but a consummation without part or interval. All its content is in immediate concentration as at one point ; nothing in it ever knows development : all remains identical within itself, knowing nothing of change, for ever in a Now since nothing of it has passed away or will come into being, but what it is now, that it is ever.

Eternity, therefore — while not the Substratum (not the essential foundation of the Divine or Intellectual Principle) — may be considered as the radiation of this Substratum : it exists as the announcement of the Identity in the Divine, of that state — of being thus and not otherwise— which characterises what has no futurity but eternally is.

What future, in fact, could bring to that Being anything which it now does not possess ; and could it come to be anything which it is not once for all ?

There exists no source or ground from which anything could make its way into that standing present ; any imagined entrant will prove to be not alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be anything at present outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot include any past ; what can there be that once was in it and now is gone ? Futurity, similarly, is banned ; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no ground is left for its existence but that it be what it is.

That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being ; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor having ever changed — that is Eternity. Thus we come to the definition : the Life — instantaneously entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part — which belongs to the Authentic Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we were probing for — this is Eternity. ,

4- We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an accidental from outside

grafted upon that Nature : it is native to it, integral to it.

It is discerned as present essentially in that Nature like everything else that we can predicate There — all immanent, springing from that Essence and inherent to that Essence. For whatsoever has primal Being must be immanent to the Firsts and be a First — Eternity equally with The Good that is among them and of them and equally with the truth that is among them.

In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of the All-Being ; but in another aspect it is inherent in the All taken as a totality, since that Authentic All is not a thing patched up out of external parts, but is authentically an all because its parts are engendered by itself. It is like the truthfulness in the Supreme which is not an agreement with some outside fact or being but is inherent in each member about which it is the truth. To an authentic All it is not enough that it be everything that exists : it must possess all-ness in the full sense that nothing what ever is absent from it. .Then nothing is in store for it : if anything were to come, that thing must have been lacking to it, and it was, therefore, not All. And what, of a Nature contrary to its own, could enter into it

when it is (the Supreme and therefore) immune ? Since nothing can accrue to it, it cannot seek change or be changed or ever have made its way into Being.

Engendered things are in continuous process of acquisition ; elimi nate futurity, therefore, and at once they lose their being ; if the nonengendered are made amenable to futurity they are thrown down from the seat of their existence, for, clearly, existence is not theirs by their nature if it appears only as a being about to be, a becoming, an advancing from stage to stage.

The essential existence of generated things seems to lie in their existing from the time of their generation to the ultimate of time after which they cease to be : but such an existence is compact of futurity, and the annulment of that futurity means the stopping of the life and therefore of the essential existence.

Such a stoppage would be true, also, of the (generated) All in so far as it is a thing of process and change : for this reason it keeps hastening towards its future, dreading to rest, seeking to draw Being to itself by a perpetual variety of production and action and by its circling in a sort of ambition after Essential Existence.

And here we have, incidentally, lighted upon the cause of the Circuit of the All ; it is a movement which seeks perpetuity by way of futurity.

The Primals, on the contrary, in their state of blessedness have no such aspiration towards anything to come : they are the whole, now ; what life may be thought of as their due, they possess entire ; they, therefore, seek nothing, since there is nothing future to them, nothing external to them in which any futurity could find lodgement.

Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive essence of the Authentic Existent does not consist merely in the completeness inherent in its members ; its essence includes, further, its established immunity from all lack with the exclusion, also, of all that is without Being— for not only must all things be contained in the All and Whole, but it can contain nothing that is, or was ever, non-existent — and this State and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity : in our very word, Eternity means Ever-Being (aion=aei on).

5- This Ever-Being is realised when upon examination of an object I am able to say — or rather, to know — that in its very Nature it is incapable of increment or change ; anything that fails by that test is no Ever-Existent or, at least, no Ever- All-Existent.

But is perpetuity enough in itself to constitute an Eternal ?

No : the object must, farther, include such a Nature-Principle as to give the assurance that the actual state excludes all future change, so that it is found at every observation as it always was.

Imagine, then, the state of a being which cannot fall away from the vision of this but is for ever caught to it, held by the spell of its grandeur, kept to it by virtue of a nature itself unfailing — or even the state of one that must labour towards Eternity by directed effort, but then to rest in it, immoveable at any point, assimilated to it, co-eternal with it, con templating Eternity and the Eternal by what is Eternal within the self.

Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent —one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that is now receiving none and will never receive any — we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement also of perdurance and of Eternity : perdurance is the corresponding state arising from the (divine) substratum and inherent in it ; Eternity (the Principle as distinguished from the property of everlastingness) is that substratum carrying that state in manifestation.

Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great ; it proves on investigation to be identical with God : it may fitly be described as God made manifest, as God declaring what He is, as existence without jolt or change, and therefore as also the firmly living.

And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it ; each of the Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue of unlimited force ; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is pre-eminently the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its own substance .

Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a life limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possesses itself intact for ever. To the notion of a Life (a Living-Principle) allcomprehensive add that it never spends itself, and we have the statement of a Life instantaneously infinite.

6. Now the Principle this stated, all good and beauty, and everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its law ; and it is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato — finely, and by no means inadvertently but with profound intention — wrote those words of his " Eternity stable in Unity " ; he wishes to convey that Eternity is not merely something circling on its traces into a final unity but has (instantaneous) Being about The One as the unchanging Life of the Authentic Existent. This is certainly what we have been seeking : this Principle, at rest within the One, is Eternity ; possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute self-identical and none the less the active manifestation of an unchanging Life set towards the Divine and dwelling within It, untrue, therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side of Life — this will be Eternity (the Real-Being we have sought).

Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing variety in the mode of existence : Being is, therefore, self-identical throughout, and, therefore, again is one undistinguishable thing. Being can have no this and that ; it cannot be treated in terms of intervals, unfoldings, progression, extension ; there is no grasping any first or last in it.

If, then, there is no first or last in this Principle, if existence is its most authentic possession and its very self, and this in the sense that its existence is Essence or Life — then, once again, we meet here what we have been discussing, Eternity. /

Observe that such words as " always, never, sometimes " must be

taken as mere conveniences of exposition : thus " always " — used in the sense not of time but of incorruptibility and endlessly complete scope — might set up the false notion of stage and interval. We might perhaps prefer to speak of " Being," without any attribute ; but since this term is applicable to Essence and some writers have used the word Essence for things of process, we cannot convey our meaning to them without introducing some word carrying the notion of perdurance.

There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being ; just as there is none between a philosopher and a true philosopher : the attribute " true " came into use because there arose what masqueraded as philosophy ; and for similar reasons " everlasting " was adjoined to " Being," and " Being " to " everlasting," and we have (the tautology of) " Everlasting Being." We must take this " Everlasting " as express ing no more than Authentic Being : it is merely a partial expression of a potency which ignores all interval or term and can look forward to nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The Principle of which this is the statement will be the All-Existent, and, as being all, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one point complete and at some other lacking.

Things and Beings in the Time order — even when to all appearance complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a soul — are still bound to sequence ; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which they need : let them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete ; completeness is attributed to them only by an accident of language.

But the conception of Eternity demands something which is in its nature complete without sequence ; it is not satisfied by something measured out to any remoter time or even by something limitless, but, in its limitless reach, still having the progression of futurity : it requires something immediately possessed of the due fullness of Being, something whose Being does not depend upon any quantity (such as instalments of time) but subsists before all quantity.

Itself having no quantity, it can have no contact with anything quantitative since its Life cannot be made a thing of fragments, in contradiction to the-partlessness which is its character ; it must be without parts in the Life as in the essence.

The phrase " He was good " (used by Plato of the Demiurge) refers to the Idea of the All ; and its very indefiniteness signifies the utter absence of relation to Time : so that even this Universe has had no temporal beginning; and if we speak of something " before "it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects it as inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms.

7- Now comes the question whether, in all this discussion, we are not merely helping to make out a case for some other order of Beings and talking of matters alien to ourselves.

But how could that be ? What understanding can there be failing some point of contact ? And what contact could there be with the utterly alien ?

We must then have, ourselves, some part or share in Eternity. /

Still, how is this possible to us who exist in Time ?

The whole question turns on the distinction between being in Time and being in Eternity, and this will be best realised by probing to the Nature of Time. We must, therefore, descend from Eternity to the investigation of Time, to the realm of Time : till now we have been taking the upward way ; we must now take the downward — not to the lowest levels but within the degree in which Time itself is a descent from Eternity.

If the venerable sages of former days had not treated of Time, our method would be to begin by linking to (the idea of) Eternity (the idea of) its Next (its inevitable downward or outgoing subsequent in the same order), then setting forth the probable nature of such a Next and proceeding to show how the conception thus formed tallies with our own doctrine.

But, as things are, our best beginning is to range over the most noteworthy of the ancient opinions and see whether any of them accord with ours.

Existing explanations of Time seem to fall into three classes : — Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some phenomenon of Movement : obviously it cannot be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since, in its characteristic idea, it is concerned with change.

Of those that explain it as Movement, some identify it with Absolute Movement (or with the total of Movement), others with that of the All. Those that make it a moved object would identify it with the orb of the All. Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of Movement treat it, severally, either as a standard of measure or as something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite.

8. Movement Time cannot be — whether a definite act of moving is meant or a united total made up of all such acts — since movement, in either sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any move ment not in Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable.

In a word, Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes place.

And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is decisive : Movement can come to rest, can be intermittent ; Time is continuous.

We will be told that the Movement of the All is continuous (and so may be identical with Time) .

But, if the reference is to the Circuit of the heavenly system (it is not strictly continuous, or equable, since) the time taken in the return path is not that of the outgoing movement ; the one is twice as long as the other : this Movement of the All proceeds, therefore, by two different degrees ; the rate of the entire journey is not that of the first half.

Further, the fact that we hear of the Movement of the outermost sphere being the swiftest confirms our theory. Obviously, it is the swiftest

of movements by taking the lesser time to traverse the greater space— the very greatest — all other moving things are slower by taking a longer time to traverse a mere segment of the same extension : in other words, Time is not this movement.

And, if Time is not even the movement of the Kosmic Sphere much less is it the sphere itself though that has been identified with Time on the ground of its being in motion.

Is it, then, some phenomenon or connection of Movement ?

Let us, tentatively, suppose it to be extent, or duration, of Move ment.

Now, to begin with, Movement, even continuous, has no unchanging extent (as Time the equable has), since, even in space, it may be faster or slower ; there must, therefore, be some unit of standard outside it, by which these differences are measurable, and this outside standard would more properly be called Time. And failing such a measure, which extent would be Time, that of the fast or of the slow — or rather which of them all, since these speed-differences are limitless ?

Is it the extent of the subordinate Movement ( = movement of things of earth) ?

Again, this gives us no unit since the movement is infinitely variable ; we would have, thus, not Time but Times.

The extent of the Movement of the All, then ?

The Celestial Circuit may, no doubt, be thought of in terms of quantity. It answers to measure — in two ways. First there is space ; the movement is commensurate with the area it passes through, and this area is its extent. But this gives us, still, space only, not Time. Secondly, the circuit, considered apart from distance traversed, has the extent of its continuity, of its tendency not to stop but to proceed indefinitely : but this is merely amplitude of Movement ; search it, tell its vastness, and, still, Time has no more appeared, no more enters into the matter, than when one certifies a high pitch of heat ; all we have discovered is Motion in ceaseless succession, like water flowing ceaselessly, motion and extent of motion.

Succession or repetition gives us Number — dyad, triad, etc. — and the extent traversed is a matter of Magnitude ; thus we have Quantity of Movement — in the form of number, dyad, triad, decade, or in the form of extent apprehended in what we may call the amount of the Movement : but, the idea of Time we have not. That definite Quantity is (not Time but) merely something occurring within Time, for, otherwise Time is not everywhere but is something belonging to Movement which thus would be its substratum or basic-stuff : once more, then, we would be making Time identical with Movement ; for the extent of Movement is not some thing outside it but is simply its continuousness, and we need not halt upon the difference between the momentary and the continuous, which is simply one of manner and degree. The extended movement and its extent are not Time ; they are in Time. Those that explain Time as extent of Movement must mean not the extent of the movement itself but something which determines its extension, something with which the movement keeps pace in its course. But what this something is, we are not told ; yet it is, clearly, Time, that in which all Movement pro ceeds. This is what our discussion has aimed at from the first : " What, essentially, is Time ? ' It comes to this : we ask " What is Time ? " and we are answered, ' Time is the extension of Movement in Time ! "

On the one hand Time is said to be an extension apart from and outside that of Movement ; and we are left to guess what this extension may be : on the other hand, it is represented as the extension of Move ment ; and this leaves the difficulty what to make of the extension of Rest — though one thing may continue as long in repose as another in motion, so that we are obliged to think of one thing Time that covers both Rest and Movements, and, therefore, stands distinct from either.

What then is this thing of extension ? To what order of beings does it belong ?

It obviously is not spatial, for place, too, is something outside it.

9- " A Number, a Measure, belonging to Movement ? '

This, at least, is plausible since Movement is a continuous thing ; but let us consider.

To begin with, we have the doubt which met us when we probed its identification with extent of Movement : is Time the measure of any and every Movement ?

Have we any means of calculating disconnected and lawless Move ment ? What number or measure would apply ? What would be the principle of such a Measure ?

One Measure for movement slow and fast, for any and every move ment : then that number and measure would be like the decade, by which we reckon horses and cows, or like some common standard for liquids and solids. If Time is this Kind of Measure, we learn, no doubt, of what objects it is a Measure — of Movements — but we are no nearer understanding what it is in itself.

Or : we may take the decade and think of it, apart from the horses or cows, as a pure number ; this gives us a measure which, even though not actually applied, has a definite nature. Is Time, perhaps, a Measure in this sense ?

No : to tell us no more of Time in itself than that it is such a number is merely to bring us back to the decade we have already rejected, or to some similar collective figure.

If, on the other hand, Time is (not such an abstraction but) a Measure possessing a continuous extent of its own, it must have quantity, like a foot-rule ; it must have magnitude ; it will, clearly, be in the nature of a line traversing the path of Movement. But, itself thus sharing in the movement, how can it be a Measure of Movement ? Why should the one of the two be the measure rather than the other ? Besides an accompanying measure is more plausibly considered as a measure of the particular movement it accompanies than of Movement in general. Further, this entire discussion assumes continuous movement, since the accompanying principle, Time, is itself unbroken (but a full explanation implies justification of Time in repose).

The fact is that we are not to think of a measure outside and apart, but of a combined thing, a measured Movement, and we are to discover what measures it.

Given a Movement measured, are we to suppose the measure to be a magnitude ?

If so, which of these two would be Time, the measured movement or the measuring magnitude ? For Time (as measure) must be either the movement measured by magnitude, or the measuring magnitude itself or something using the magnitude like a yard-stick to appraise the move ment. In all three cases, as we have indicated, the application is scarcely plausible except where continuous movement is assumed ; unless the Movement proceeds smoothly, and even unintermittently and as embrac ing the entire content of the moving object, great difficulties arise in the identification of Time with any kind of measure.

Let us, then, suppose Time to be this " measured Movement," measured by quantity. Now the Movement if it is to be measured requires a measure outside itself ; this was the only reason for raising the question of the accompanying measure. In exactly the same way the measuring magnitude, hi turn, will require a measure, because only when the standard shows such and such an extension can the degree of movement be appraised. Time then will be, not the magnitude accom panying the Movement, but that numerical value by which the magnitude accompanying the Movement is estimated. But that number can be only the abstract figure which represents the magnitude, and it is difficult to see how an abstract figure can perform the act of measuring.

And, supposing that we discover a way in which it can, we still have not Time, the measure, but a particular quantity of Time, not at all the same thing : Time means something very different from any definite period : before all question as to quantity is the question as to the thing of which a certain quantity is present.

Time, we are told, is the number outside Movement and measuring it, like the tens applied to the reckoning of the horses and cows but not inherent in them : we are not told what this Number is ; yet, applied or not, it must, like that decade, have some nature of its own.

Or "it is that which accompanies a Movement and measures it by its successive stages " ; but we are still left asking what this thing recording the stages may be.

In any case, once a thing — whether by point or standard or any other means — measures succession, it must measure according to time : this number appraising movement degree by degree must, therefore, if it is to serve as a measure at all, be something dependent upon time and in contact with it : for, either, degree is spatial, merely — the beginning and end of the Stadium, for example — or in the only alternative, it is a pure matter of Time : the succession of early and late is stage of Time, Time ending upon a certain Now or Time beginning from a Now.

Time, therefore, is something other than the mere number measuring Movement, whether Movement in general or any particular tract of Movement.

Further : — Why should the mere presence of a number give us Time —a number measuring or measured ; for the same number may be either — if Time is not given us by the fact of Movement itself, the movement which inevitably contains in itself a succession of stages ? To make the number essential to Time is like saying that magnitude has not its full quantity unless we can estimate that quantity.

Again, if Time is, admittedly, endless, how can number apply to it?

Are we to take some portion of Time and find its numerical state ment ? That simply means that Time existed before number was applied to it.

We may, therefore, very well think that it existed before the Soul or Mind that estimates it — if, indeed, it is not to be thought to take its origin from the Soul — for no measurement by anything is necessary to its existence ; measured or not, it has the full extent of its being.

And suppose it to be true that the Soul is the appraiser, using Mag nitude as the measuring standard, how does this help us to the conception of Time ?

10. Time, again, has been described as some sort of a sequence upon Movement, but we learn nothing from this, nothing is said, until we know what it is that produces this sequential thing ; probably the cause and not the result would turn out to be Time.

And, admitting such a thing, there would still remain the question whether it came into being before the movement, with it, or after it ; and, whether we say before or with or after, we are speaking of order in Time : and thus our definition is " Time is a sequence upon movement in Time ! '

Enough. Our main purpose is to show what Time is, not to refute false definition. To traverse point by point the many opinions of our many predecessors would mean a history rather than an identification ; we have treated the various theories as fully as is possible in a cursory review : and, notice, that which makes Time the Measure of the All-Movement is refuted by our entire discussion and, especially, by the observations upon the Measurement of Movement in general, for all the argument — except, of course, that from irregularity — applies to the All as much as to particular Movement.

We are, thus, at the stage where we are to state what Time really is.

II. To this end we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity, unwavering Life, undivided totality, limitless, knowing no divagation, at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet : or at least it did not exist for the Eternal Beings, though its being was implicit in the Idea and Principle of progressive derivation.

But from the Divine Beings thus at rest within themselves, how did this Time first emerge ?

We can scarcely call upon the Muses to recount its origin since they were not in existence then — perhaps not even if they had been. The engendered thing, Time, itself, can best tell us how it rose and became manifest ; something thus its story would run :

Time at first — in reality before that " first " was produced by desire of succession — Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent : it was not yet Time ; it was merged in the Authentic and motionless with it. But there was an active principle there, one set on governing itself and realising itself ( = the All-Soul), and it chose to aim at something more than its present : it stirred from its rest, and Time stirred with it. And we (i.e. human Souls as summed in the principle of developing Life, the All-Soul ?) we, stirring to a ceaseless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the establishment of ever new difference, traversed a portion of the outgoing path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time.

For the Soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of trans lating elsewhere what it saw in the Authentic Realm, and it could not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its possession.

A Seed is at rest ; the nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards, makes way towards what seems to it a large life ; but by that partition it loses ; it was a unity self-gathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it fritters its unity away ; it advances into a weaker greatness. It is so with this faculty of the Soul, when it produces the Kosmos known to sense — the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in the very move ment of the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to reproduce that of the Divine. To bring this Kosmos into being, the Soul first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time ; this world of its fashioning it then gave over to be a servant to Time, making it at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the bournes of Time. For the Kosmos moves only in Soul — the only Space within the range of the All open to it to move in — and therefore its Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in Soul.

Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of novelty, the Soul produces succession as well as act ; taking up new purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not existed in that former period when its purpose was still dormant and its life was not as it since became : the life is changed and that change carries with it a change of Time. Time, then, is contained in differentiation of

Life ; the ceaseless forward movement of Life brings with it unending Time ; and Life as it achieves its stages constitutes past Time.

Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another ?

Yes ; for Eternity, we have said, is Life in repose, unchanging, selfidentical, always endlessly complete ; and there is to be an image of Eternity — Time — such an image as this lower All presents of the Higher Sphere. Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the Soul ; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be the movement of some partial phase ; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts ; over against that oneness without extent or interval there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession ; over against the immediately infinite and allcomprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity ; over against the Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. The lesser must always be working towards the increase of its Being, this will be its imitation of what is immediately complete, self-realised, endless without stage : only thus can its Being reproduce that of the Higher.

Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of Soul ; Eternity is not outside of the Authentic Existent : nor is it to be taken as a sequence or succession to Soul, any more than Eternity is to the Divine. It is a thing seen upon Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as Eternity to the Intellectual Realm.

12. We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural- Principle — Time — a certain expanse (a quantitative phase) of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other — a Principle, then, whose Act is (not one like that of the Supreme but) sequent.

But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and with draw from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and unending activity of an ever-existent soul not self-contained or selfintent but concerned about doing and engendering : imagine it no longer accomplishing any Act, setting a pause to this work it has in augurated ; let this outgoing phase of the Soul become once more, equally with the rest, turned to the Supreme, to Eternal Being, to the tranquilly stable.

What would then exist but Eternity ?

All would remain in unity ; how could there be any diversity of things ? What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or short-lasting ? What ground would lie ready to the Soul's operation but the Supreme in which it has its Being ? Or, indeed, what operative tendency could it have even to That since a prior separation is the neces sary condition of tendency ?

The very sphere of the Universe would not exist ; for it cannot antedate Time : it, too, has its Being and its Movement in Time ; and if it ceased to move, the Soul-Act (which is the essence of Time) con tinuing, we could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it.

/ If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear : the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the Soul's tendency towards the production of the sensible universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how " Time " —as we read — " came into Being simultaneously" with this All : the Soul begot at once the Universe and Time ; in that activity of the Soul this Universe sprang into being ; the activity is Time, the Universe is a con tent of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read also of " the orbit of the Stars being Times " : but do not forget what follows ; " the stars exist," we are told, " for the display and delimitation of Time," and " that there may be a manifest Measure." No indication of Time could be derived from (observation of) the Soul ; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting ; therefore the Soul brings into

being night and day ; in their difference is given Duality— from which, we read, arises the concept of Number.

We observe the tract between a sunrise and its return and, as the movement is uniform, we thus obtain a Time-interval upon which to support ourselves, and we use this as a standard. We have thus a measure of Time. Time itself is not a measure. How would it set to work ? And what kind of thing is there of which it could say, " I find the extent of this equal to such and such a stretch of my own extent ? " What is this " I " ? Obviously something by which measurement is known. Time, then, serves towards measurement but is not itself the Measure : -;the Movement of the All will be measured according to Time, but Time will not, of its own Nature, be a Measure of Movement : primarily a Kind to itself, it will incidentally exhibit the magnitudes of that movement.

And the reiterated observation of Movement — the same extent found to be traversed in such and such a period — will lead to the conception of a definite quantity of Time past. /

This brings us to the fact that, in a certain sense, the Movement, the orbit of the universe, may legitimately be said to measure Timein so far as that is possible at all — since any definite stretch of that circuit occupies a certain quantity of Time, and this is the only grasp we have of Time, our only understanding of it : what that circuit measures —by indication, that is— will be Time, manifested by the Movement but not brought into being by it.

This means that the measure of the Spheric Movement has itself been measured by a definite stretch of that Movement and therefore is something different ; as measure, it is one thing and, as the measured, it is another ; (its being measure or) its being measured cannot be of its essence.

We are no nearer knowledge than if we said that the foot-rule measures Magnitude while we left the concept Magnitude undefined ; or, again, we might as well define Movement — whose limitlessness puts it out of our reach — as the thing measured by Space ; the definition would be parallel since we can mark off a certain space which the Movement has traversed and say the one is equivalent to the other.

13- The Spheral Circuit, then, performed in Time, indicates it : but when we come to Time itself there is no question of its being " within " something else : it must be primary, a thing " within itself." It is that in which all the rest happens, in which all movement and rest exist smoothly and under order ; something following a definite order is necessary to exhibit it and to make it a subject of knowledge — though not to produce it — it is known by order whether in rest or in motion ; in motion especially, for Movement better moves Time into our ken than rest can, and it is easier to estimate distance traversed than repose maintained.

This last fact has led to Time being called a measure of Movement when it should have been described as something measured by Move ment and then denned in its essential nature ; it is an error to define it by a mere accidental concomitant and so to reverse the actual order of things. Possibly, however, this reversal was not intended by the authors of the explanation : but, at any rate, we do not understand them ; they plainly apply the term Measure to what is in reality the measured and leave us unable to grasp their meaning : our perplexity may be due to the fact that their writings — addressed to disciples acquainted with their teaching — do not explain what this thing, measure, or measured object, is in itself.

Plato does not make the essence of Time consist in its being either a measure or a thing measured by something else.

Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to : but when his purpose is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it sprang into Being simul taneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of Eternity, its image in motion, Time necessarily unresting as the Life with which it must keep pace : and " coeval with the Heavens " because it is this same Life (of the Divine Soul) which brings the Heavens also into being ; Time and the Heavens are the work of the one Life.

Suppose that Life, then, to revert— an impossibility— to perfect unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the Heavens, no longer maintained by that Life, would end at once.

It is the height of absurdity to fasten on the succession of earlier and later occurring in the life and movement of this sphere of ours, to declare that it must be some definite thing and to call it Time, while denying the reality of the more truly existent Movement, that of the Soul, which has also its earlier and later : it cannot be reasonable to recognise succession in the case of the Soulless Movement — and so to associate Time with that— while ignoring succession and the reality of Time in the Movement from which the other takes its imitative existence ; to ignore, that is, the very Movement in which succession first appears, a self-actuated movement which, engendering its own every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all which, it is the cause of existence, at once, and of every consequent.

But :— we treat the Kosmic Movement as overarched by that of the Soul and bring it under Time; yet we do not set under Time that Soul-Movement itself with all its endless progression : what is our explanation of this paradox ?

Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior (not Time but) Eternity which knows neither its progression nor its extension. The descent towards Time begins with this Soul-Movement ; it made Time and harbours Time as a concomitant to its Act.

And this is how Time is omnipresent : that Soul is absent from no fragment of the Kosmos just as our Soul is absent from no particle of ourselves. As for those who pronounce Time a thing of no substantial existence, of no reality, they clearly belie God Himself whenever they say " He was " or "He will be " : for the existence indicated by the " was and will be " can have only such reality as belongs to that in which it is said to be situated :— but this school demands another style of

argument.

Meanwhile we have a supplementary observation to make.

Take a man walking and observe the advance he has made ; that advance gives you the quantity of movement he is employing : and

when you know that quantity — represented by the ground traversed by his feet, for, of course, we are supposing the bodily movement to corre spond with the pace he has set within himself — you know also the move ment that exists in the man himself before the feet move.

You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the man's soul.

But the Movement within the Soul — to what are you to (relate) refer that ?

Let your choice fall where it may, from this point there is nothing but the unext ended : and this is the primarily existent, the container to all else, having itself no container, brooking none.

And, as with Man's Soul, so with the Soul of the All.

" Is Time, then, within ourselves as well ? "

Time is in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form in all ; for all the Souls are the one Soul.

And this is why Time can never be broken apart, any more than Eternity which, similarly, under diverse manifestations, has its Being as an integral constituent of all the eternal Existences.

Ennead III, Treatise 8

i. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end — and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these — and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in mimicry and in image — we would scarcely find

anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a light handling of our own ideas.

Well — in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of Contemplation ?

Yes ; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation : our play aims at Vision ; and there is every reason to believe that child or man, in sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every act is an effort towards Vision ; the compulsory act, which tends rather to bring the Vision down to outward things, and the act thought of as voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort towards Vision.

The case of Man will be treated later on : let us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what is the nature of Contemplation in them, how we relate to any Contemplative activity the labour and productiveness of the earth, how Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of conscious representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of the Contemplation which it does not possess.

2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any imple ment borrowed or inherent : Nature needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form ; its productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern ?

The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours ; all they can do is to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere. None the less there is a parallel which demands attention : in the case of workers in such arts there must be something locked up within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all their creation ; and this observation should have indicated a similar phenome non in Nature ; it should be clear that this indwelling efficacy, which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman—

but, there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgoing force as against that remaining within ; the only moved thing is Matter ; there can be no moved phase in this Nature-Principle ; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover ; this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity ; it is the unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos.

We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt, un moved, but that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by motion.

But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the Reason-Principle ; and any part of it that is unmoved is the Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a compound of Form and Matter ; there is no need for it to possess (such a changeable element as) Matter, hot and cold : the Matter that underlies it, on which it exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when brought under Reason : Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a Reason-Principle.

This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a Reason-Principle producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring, which, in turn, while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the underlie, Matter.

The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further : that which produces in the created realm is the living Reason-Principle — brother, no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having life-giving power.

3- But if this Reason-Principle (Nature) is in act — and produces by the process indicated — how can it have any part in Contempla tion ?

To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative

act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct from that Idea : the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work ; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation. Taking the Reason-Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act (in the higher Logos) and is itself a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated (i.e. of being the conscious pro duct of a Contemplation ?), but above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as All-Soul and, next, that operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle.

And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contempla tion ?

Wholly and solely ?

From self-contemplation, then ? Or what are we to think ? It derives from a Contemplation and some contemplating Being ; how are we to suppose it to have Contemplation itself ?

The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty — that, I mean, of planning its own content, it does not possess.

But why not, since it is a phase of Life, a Reason-Principle and a creative Power ?

Because to plan for a thing is to lack it : Nature does not lack ; it creates because it possesses. Its creative act is simply its possession of its own characteristic Essence ; now its Essence, since it is a Reason-Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an object of contemplation. In other words, the Nature-Principle produces by virtue of being an act of contemplation, an object of contemplation and a Reason-Principle ; on this triple character depends its creative efficacy.

Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contem plation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation.

4- And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it cared to listen and to speak : —

" It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson ? This ; that whatsoever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create vision by the vision-seeing faculty within me. The mathe maticians from their vision draw their figures : but I draw nothing : I gaze and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation. As with my Mother (the All-Soul) and the Beings that begot me so it is with me : they are born of a Con templation and my birth is from them, not by their Act but by their Being ; they are the loftier Reason- Principles, they contem plate themselves and I am born."

Now what does this tell us ?

It tells : that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life ; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself ; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence ; that, in this immutability accompanied by what may be called Self-Consciousness, it possesses — within the measure of its possibility — a knowledge of the realm of subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and consciousness ; and, achieving thus a resplendent and delicious spectacle, has no further aim.

Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of " understanding " or " perception " in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense applicable to other beings ; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed from the wake.

For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a self-intuition, a spectacle laid before it by virtue of its unaccompanied self-concentra tion and by the fact that in itself it belongs to the order of intuition. It

is a Vision silent but somewhat blurred, for there exists another a clearer of which Nature is the image : hence all that Nature produces is weak ; the weaker act of intuition produces the weaker object.

In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contem plation, find in action their trace of vision and of reason : their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation ; they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize the vision ; yet they long for it ; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of vision — attenua tion if the doer was aiming only at the thing done ; complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the mere work produced.

Given the power to contemplate the Authentic, who would run, of choice, after its image ?

The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way duller children, inapt to study and speculation, take to crafts and manual labour.

5- This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is

a Contemplation : we may now take the matter up to the higher Soul ; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it — in itself, all one object of Vision — to produce another Vision (that of the Kosmos) : it is just as a given science, complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul.

The primal phase of the Soul— inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its participation in the Supreme, filled and illuminated — remains unchangeably There ; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life ; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out. But, travel as far as it may, it never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the outgoing began : if it did, it would no longer be everywhere (its continuous Being would be broken and) it would be present at the end, only, of its course.

None the less that which goes forth cannot be equal to that which remains.

In sum, then : —

The Soul is to extend throughout the Universe, no spot void of its energy : but, a prior is always different from its secondary, and energy is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act ; act, however, is not at this stage existent since it depends upon contemplation : there fore the Soul while its phases differ must, in all of them, remain a con templation and what seems to be an act done under contemplation must be in reality that weakened contemplation of which we have spoken : the engendered must respect the Kind, but in weaker form, dwindled in the descent.

All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things : it is a Soul in vision and* by this vision, creating its own subsequent — this Principle (of Nature), itself also con templative but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its prior — a Vision creates the Vision.

(Such creative contemplation is not inexplicable) for no limit exists either to contemplation or to its possible objects, and this explains how the Soul is universal : where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical thing in every Soul ? Vision is not cabined within the bournes of magnitude.

This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same strength in each and every place and thing — any more than that it is at the same strength in each of its own phases.

The Charioteer (the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus Myth) gives the two horses (its two dissonant faculties) what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what made that vision ; there was something lacking to them : if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for — and that was vision, and an object of vision.

6. Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contem plation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as their object ; what they have not been able to achieve by the direct path, they hope to come at by the circuit.

Further : suppose they succeed ; they desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind : their success is the laying up of a vision. We act for the sake of some good ; this means not for something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we may possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where ? Where but in the mind ?

Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation : for (mind or) Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper.

This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses ; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further ; the contemplation, in one so conditioned, remains absorbed within as having acquired certainty to rest upon. The brighter the certainty, the more tranquil is the contemplation as having acquired the more perfect unity ; and — for now we come to the serious treatment of the subject —

In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge.

As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other ; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to

m.8.7J NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE 127

one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or Soul remain idle.

Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own.

The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active ; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellec tual, it sees (in its outgoing act) as a stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intel lectual Principle ; but its function is to see a (lower) realm which these do not see.

For, it is not a complete thing : it has a lack ; it is incomplete in regard to its Prior ; yet it, also, has a tranquil vision of what it produces. What it has once brought into being it produces no more, for all its productiveness is determined by this lack : it produces for the purpose of Contemplation, in the desire of knowing all its content : when there is question of practical things it adapts its content to the outside order.

The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil ; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contem plative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the object of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by observation. It leaves its native realm and busies itself elsewhere ; then it returns, and it possesses its vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted. The self-indwelling Soul inclines less to such experiences.

The Sage, then, is the man made over into a Reason-Principle : to others he shows his act but in himself he is Vision : such a man is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards what is one and at rest : all his faculty and life are inward-bent.

7- Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established — some selfevident, others brought out by our treatment above : —

All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision — manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing ; all impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to pro duce Ideal-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all produce objects of vision, Ideal-forms. In the engendering of these sub-existences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that the creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge ; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition ; the starting point is, universally, the goal.

When living things reproduce their Kind, it is that the Reason-Principles within stir them ; the procreative act is the expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many forms, many objects of contemplation, so that the universe may be filled full with Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as nearly as possible, endless : to bring anything into being is to produce an Idea-Form and that again is to enrich the universe with contemplation : all the failures, alike in being and in doing, are but the swerving of visionaries from the object of vision : in the end the sorriest craftsman is still a maker of forms, ungracefully. So Love, too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form.

8. From this basis we proceed : —

In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual- Principle itself — the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more

intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them ; and in the advanced Soul the objects of knowledge, well on the way towards the Intellectual-Principle, are close to identity with their container.

Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing ; we cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts ; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity.

The Supreme must be an entity in which the two are one ; it will, therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an object of vision like things existing in something other than themselves : what exists in an outside element is some mode of living-thing ; it is not the Self -Living.

Now admitting the existence of a living thing that is at once a Thought and its object, it must be a Life distinct from the vegetative or sensitive life or any other life determined by Soul.

In a certain sense no doubt all lives are thoughts — but qualified as thought vegetative, thought sensitive and thought psychic.

What, then, makes them thoughts ?

The fact that they are Reason-Principles. Every life is some form of thought, but of a dwindling clearness like the degrees of life itself. The first and clearest Life and the first Intelligence are one Being. The First Life, then, is an Intellection and the next form of Life is the next Intellection and the last form of Life is the last form of Intellection. Thus every Life, of the order strictly so called, is an Intellection.

But while men may recognise grades in life they reject grade in thought ; to them there are thoughts (full and perfect) and anything else is no thought.

This is simply because they do not seek to establish what Life is.

The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that whatever exists is a bye-work of visioning : if, then, the truest Life is such by virtue of an Intellection and is identical with the truest Intellection, then the truest Intellection is a living being ; Contemplation and its object constitute a living thing, a Life, two inextric ably one.

The duality, thus, is a unity ; but how is this unity also a plurality ?

The explanation is that in a unity there can be no seeing (a pure unity has no room for vision and an object) ; and in its Contemplation the One is not acting as a Unity ; if it were, the Intellectual-Principle cannot exist. The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began ; all unknown to itself, it became manifold ; it grew, as it were, pregnant : desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were better had it never known the desire by which a Secondary came into being : it is like a Circle (in the Idea) which in projection becomes a figure, a sur face, a circumference, a centre, a system of radii, of upper and lower segments. The Whence is the better ; the Whither is less good : the Whence is not the same as the Whence-followed-by-a- Whither ; the Whence all alone is greater than with the Whither added to it.

The Intellectual- Principle on the other hand was never merely the Principle of an inviolable unity ; it was a universal as well and, being so, was the Intellectual-Principle of all things. Being, thus, all things and the Principle of all, it must essentially include this part of itself (this element-of-plurality) which is universal and is all things : otherwise, it contains a part which is not Intellectual- Principle : it will be a juxta position of non-Intellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass of things into the Intellectual-Principle !

We conclude that this Being is limitless and, that in all the outflow from it there is no lessening either in its emanation since this also is the entire universe, nor in itself, the starting point, since it is no assemblage of parts (to be diminished by any outgo) .

9- Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent ; there

must exist that which transcends it, that Being (the Absolute), to which all our discussion has been leading.

In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The Intellectual-Principle is a number (=the expression of a plurality) ; and number

derives from unity : the source of a number such as this must be the authentically One. Further, it is the sum of an Intellectual-Being with the object of its Intellection, so that it is a duality ; and, given this duality, we must find what exists before it.

What is this ?

The Intellectual-Principle taken separately, perhaps ?

No : an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible object ; eliminate the intelligible, and the Intellectual- Principle disappears with it. If, then, what we are seeking cannot be the Intellectual-Principle but must be something that rejects the duality there present, then the Prior demanded by that duality must be something on the further side of the Intellectual-Principle.

But might it not be the Intelligible object itself ?

No : for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality with the Intellectual-Principle:

If, then, neither the Intellectual- Principle nor the Intelligible Object can be the First Existent, what is ?

Our answer can only be : —

The source of both.

What will This be ; under what character can we picture It ?

(We will be told that) It must be either Intellective or without Intellection : if Intellective it is the Intellectual-Principle ; if not, it will be without even knowledge of itself — so that, either way, what is there so august about it ?

If we define it as The Good and the wholly simplex, we will, no doubt, be telling the truth, but we will not be giving any certain and lucid account of it as long as we have in mind no entity in which to lodge the conception by which we define it.

Yet : our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our intelli gence ; our power is that of knowing the intelligible by means of the intelligence : but this Entity transcends all of the intellectual nature ; by what direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our grasp ?

To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the degree of human faculty : we indicate it by virtue of what in ourselves is like it.

For in us, also, there is something of that Being ; nay, nothing, ripe for that participation, can be void of it.

Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this omni present Being that in you which is capable of drawing from It, and you have your share in it : imagine a voice sounding over a vast waste of land, and not only over the emptiness alone but over human beings ; wherever you be in that great space you have but to listen and you take the voice entire — entire though yet with a difference.

And what do we take when we thus point the Intelligence ?

The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins : essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over to those powers within it which tend upward ; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it must become something more than Intellect.

For the Intellectual- Principle is the earliest form of Life : it is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal Order — the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous process.

In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things in their precise forms and not merely in the agglomerate mass — for this would be to contain them (against its specific character) imperfectly and inarticulately — it must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect and of the Universe.

For the Universe is not a Principle and Source : it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the All since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but the Source of plurality since universally a begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has engendered the Intellectual-Principle must be more simplex than the Intellectual-Principle.

We may be told that this engendering Principle is the One-and-All.

But, at that, it must be either each separate entity from among all or it will be all things in the one mass.

Now if it were the massed total of all, it must be of later origin than any of the things of which it is the sum ; if it precedes the total, it

differs from the things that make up the total and they from it : if it and the total of things constitute a co-existence, it is not a Source. But what we are probing for must be a Source ; it must exist before all, that all may be fashioned as sequel to it.

As for the notion that it may be each separate entity of the All, this would make a self-Identity into a what you like, where you like, in differently, and would, besides, abolish all distinction in things them selves.

Once more we see that this can be no thing among things but must be prior to all things.

10. And what will such a Principle essentially be ?

The potentiality of the Universe : the potentiality whose nonexistence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life.

This Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life — for that Manifestation of Life which is the Universe of things is not the First Activity ; it is itself poured forth, so to speak, Like water from a spring.

Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself ; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by what they take, but remains always integrally as it was ; the tides that proceed from it are at one within it before they run their several ways, yet all, in some sense, know beforehand down what channels they will pour their streams.

Or : — think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree while yet it is the stationary Principle of the whole, in no sense scattered over all that extent but, as it were, vested in the root : it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself, not manifold but the Principle of that manifold life.

And this surprises no one : though it is in fact astonishing how all that varied vitality springs from the unvarying, and how that very manifoldness could not be unless before the multiplicity there were something all singleness ; for, the Principle is not broken into parts to

make the total ; on the contrary, such partition would destroy both ; nothing would come into being if its cause, thus broken up, changed character.

Thus we are always brought back to The One.

Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced ; the All has its One, its Prior but not yet the Absolute One ; through this we reach that Absolute One, where all such reference comes to an end.

Now when we reach a One — the stationary Principle — in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All — we have in every case the most powerful, the precious element : when we come to the One in the Authentically Existent Beings — their Principle and source and potentiality — shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being — nothing ?

Certainly this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source —its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it — not existence, not essence, not life — since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more — understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power.

Another approach :—

The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees ; therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective.

This implies the distinction of Matter and Form in it — as there must be in all actual seeing — the Matter in this case being the Intelligibles which the Intellectual-Principle contains and sees. All actual seeing implies duality ; before the seeing takes place there is the pure unity (of the power of seeing). That unity (of principle) acquires duality (in the act of seeing), and the duality is (always to be traced back to) a unity.

Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realisation, so the vision in the Intellectual-Principle demands, for its completion, The Good.

It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or to perform any other Act ; for The Good is the centre of all else, and it is by means of The Good that every thing has Act, while the Good is in need of nothing and therefore possesses nothing beyond itself.

Once you have uttered " The Good," add no further thought : by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency.

Do not even say that it has Intellection ; you would be dividing it ; it would become a duality, Intellect and the Good. The Good has no need of the Intellectual-Principle which, on the contrary, needs it, and, attaining it, is shaped into Goodness and becomes perfect by it : the Form thus received, sprung from the Good, brings it to likeness with the Good.

Thus the traces of the Good discerned upon it must be taken as indication of the nature of that Archetype : we form a conception of its Authentic Being from its image playing upon the Intellectual-Prin ciple. This image of itself, it has communicated to the Intellect that contemplates it : thus all the striving is on the side of the Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer. The Being beyond neither strives, since it feels no lack, nor attains, since it has no striving. And this marks it off from the Intellectual-Principle, to which characteristically belongs the striving, the concentrated strain towards its Form.

Yet : The Intellectual-Principle ; beautiful ; the most beautiful of all ; lying lapped in pure light and in clear radiance ; circumscribing the Nature of the Authentic Existents ; the original of which this beau tiful world is a shadow and an image ; tranquil in the fullness of glory since in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing dark or out of rule ; a living thing in a life of blessedness : this, too, must overwhelm with awe any that has seen it, and penetrated it, to become a unit of its Being.

But : — As one that looks up to the heavens and sees the splendour of the stars thinks of the Maker and searches, so whoever has contemplated the Intellectual Universe and known it and wondered for it must search after its Maker too. What Being has raised so noble a fabric ? And

where ? And how ? Who has begotten such a child, this Intellectual-Principle, this lovely abundance so abundantly endowed ?

The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect ; nor can it be an abun dant power : it must have been before Intellect and abundance were ; these are later and things of lack ; abundance had to be made abundant and Intellection needed to know.

These are very near to the un-needing, to that which has no need of Knowing, they have abundance and intellection authentically, as being the first to possess. But, there is That before them which neither needs nor possesses anything, since, needing or possessing anything else, it would not be what it is — The Good.

Ennead III, Treatise 9

i. "The Intellectual-Principle" (=the Divine Mind) — we read (in

the Timaeus) — " looks upon the Ideas indwelling hi that Being which is the Essentially Living ( = according to Plotinus, the Intellectual Realm), and then " — the text proceeds — " the Creator judged that all the content of that essentially living Being must find place in this lower universe also."

Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before the Intellectual-Principle so that it " sees them " as previously existent ?

The first step is to make sure whether the " Living Being " of the text is to be distinguished from the Intellectual-Principle as another thing than it.

It might be argued that the Intellectual-Principle is the Contemplator and therefore that the Living-Being contemplated is not the Intellectual-Principle but must be described as the Intellectual Object so that the Intellectual-Principle must possess the Ideal realm as something outside of itself.

But this would mean that it possesses images and not the realities, since the realities are in the Intellectual Realm which it contemplates :

Reality — we read — is in the Authentic Existent which contains the essen tial form of particular things.

No : even though the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Object are distinct, they are not apart except for just that distinction.

Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that these two constitute one substance — though, in a unity, admitting that distinction, of the intellectual act (as against passivity), without which there can be no question of an Intellectual-Principle and an Intel lectual Object : what is meant is not that the contemplatory Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it contains the Intellectual Realm within itself.

The Intelligible Object is the Intellectual-Principle itself in its repose, unity, immobility : the Intellectual-Principle, contemplator of that object — of the Intellectual- Principle thus in repose — is an active mani festation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating, stands as Intellectual-Principle to that of which it has the intellection : it is Intellectual-Principle in virtue of having that intellection, and at the same time is Intellectual Object, by assimilation.

This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower Universe what it saw existing in the Supreme, the four orders of living beings.

No doubt the passage (of the Timaeus) seems to imply tacitly that this planning Principle is distinct from the other two : but the three— the Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-Principle and this planning Principle — will, to others, be manifestly one : the truth is that, by a common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the discrimination.

We have dealt with the first two ; but the third — this Principle which decides to work upon the objects (the Ideas) contemplated by the Intellectual-Principle within the Essentially-Living, to create them, to establish them in their partial existence — what is this third ?

It is possible that in one aspect the Intellectual-Principle is the principle of partial existence, while in another aspect it is not.

The entities thus particularised from the unity are products of the Intellectual-Principle which thus would be, to that extent, the separating agent. On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible ; division begins with its offspring which, of course, means with Souls : and thus a Soul — with its particular Souls — may be the separative principle.

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third Principle and begins within the Third : for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the Intel lectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division.

2. . . . For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments ; in each distinct item is latent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail : and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature : when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm ; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme.

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being : it never arrived, for it never knew place ; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it : hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure — they come from the All-Soul — and they have a place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend : but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun.

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it ; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards non-Being : and this is the step it takes when it is set on self ; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an

image of itself— a non-Being — and so is wandering, as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from Authentic Being.

As long as it remains at the mid-stage it is in its own peculiar region ; but when, by a sort of inferior orientation, it looks downward, it shapes that lower image and flings itself joyfully thither.

3- (A) ... How, then, does Unity give rise to Multiplicity ?

By its omnipresence : there is nowhere where it is not ; it occupies, therefore, all that is ; at once, it is manifold — or, rather, it is all things.

If it were simply and solely everywhere all would be this one thing alone : but it is, also, in no place, and this gives in the final result that while all exists by means of it, in virtue of its omnipresence, all is distinct from it in virtue of its being nowhere.

But why is it not merely present everywhere but in addition nowhere-present ?

Because, universality demands a previous unity. It must, therefore, pervade all things and make all, but not be the universe which it makes.

(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing — with the Intellectual-Principle as the object of its vision — it is undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see : in other words, Soul is Matter to (its deter minant) the Intellectual-Principle.

(C) When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously, observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to have that intellection.

We know, and it is ourselves that we know ; therefore we know the reality of a knowing nature : therefore, before that intellection in Act, there is another intellection, one at rest, so to speak.

Similarly, that self-intellection is an act upon a reality and upon a life ; therefore, before the Life and Real-Being concerned in the intellec tion there must be another Being and Life. In a word, intellection is

vested in the activities themselves : since, then, the activities of selfintellection are intellective-forms, We, the Authentic We, are the Intelligibles and self-intellection conveys the Image of the Intellectual Sphere.

(D) The Primal is a potentiality of Movement and of Repose— and so is above and beyond both — its next subsequent has rest and move ment about the Primal. Now this subsequent is the Intellectual-Principle —so characterised by having intellection of something not identical with itself whereas the Primal is without intellection. A knowing principle has duality (that entailed by being the knower of something) and, moreover, it knows itself as deficient since its virtue consists in this knowing and not in its own bare Being.

(E) In the case of everything which has developed from possibility to actuality the actual is that which remains self-identical for its entire duration — and this it is which makes perfection possible even in things of the corporeal order, as for instance in fire — but the actual of this kind cannot be everlasting since (by the fact of their having once existed only in potentiality) Matter has its place in them. In anything, on the contrary, not composite (=* never touched by Matter or potentiality) and possessing actuality, that actual existence is eternal. . . . There is, however, the case, also, in which a thing, itself existing in actuality, stands as potentiality to some other form of Being.

(F) . . . But the First is not to be envisaged as made up from Gods of a transcendent order : no ; the Authentic Existents constitute the Intellectual-Principle with Which motion and rest begin. The Primal touches nothing, but is the centre round which those other Beings lie in repose and in movement. For Movement is aiming, and the Primal aims at nothing ; what could the Summit aspire to ?

Has It, even, no Intellection of Itself ?

It possesses Itself and therefore is said in general terms to know itself. . . . But intellection does not mean self-ownership ; it means turning the gaze towards the Primal : now the act of intellection is itself the Primal Act, and there is therefore no place for any earlier one. The Being projecting this Act transcends the Act so that Intellection is

secondary to the Being in which it resides. Intellection is not the transcendently venerable thing — neither Intellection in general nor even the Intellection of The Good. Apart from and over any Intellection stands The Good itself.

The Good therefore needs no consciousness.

What sort of consciousness can be conceived in it ?

Consciousness of the Good as existent or non-existent ?

If of existent Good, that Good exists before and without any such consciousness : if the act of consciousness produces that Good, then The Good was not previously in existence — and, at once, the very consciousness falls to the ground since it is no longer consciousness of The Good.

But would not all this mean that the First does not even live ?

The First cannot be said to live since it is the source of Life.

All that has self-consciousness and self-intellection is derivative ; it observes itself in order, by that activity, to become master of its Being : and if it study itself this can mean only that ignorance inheres in it and that it is of its own nature lacking and to be made perfect by Intellection.

All thinking and knowing must, here, be eliminated : the addition introduces deprivation and deficiency.

Ennead IV, Treatise 1

i. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle (Divine Mind) as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come thence : that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division.

There the Intellectual-Principle is a concentrated all — nothing of it distinguished or divided — and in that kosmos of unity all souls are concentrated also, with no spatial discrimination.

But there is a difference : —

The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to partition. Soul, there without distinction and partition, has yet a nature lending itself to divisional existence : its division is secession, entry into body.

In view of this seceding and the ensuing partition we may legitimately speak of it as a partible thing.

But if so, how can it still be described as indivisible ?

In that the secession is not of the soul entire ; something of it holds its ground, that in it which recoils from separate existence.

The entity, therefore, described as “ consisting of the undivided soul and of the soul divided among bodies,” contains a soul which is at once above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this sphere, like a radius from a centre.

Thus it is that, entering this realm, it possesses still the vision inherent to that superior phase in virtue of which it unchangingly maintains its integral nature. Even here it is not exclusively the partible soul : it is still the impartible as well : what in it knows partition is parted without partibility ; undivided as giving itself to the entire body, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective in every part.

Ennead IV, Treatise 2

i. In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony. The theory that it is some final development, some entelechy, we pass by, holding this to be neither true as presented nor practically definitive.

No doubt we make a very positive statement about it when we declare it to belong to the Intellectual Kind, to be of the divine order ; but a deeper penetration of its nature is demanded.

In that allocation we were distinguishing things as they fall under the Intellectual or the sensible, and we placed the soul in the former class ; now, taking its membership of the Intellectual for granted, we must investigate by another path the more specific characteristics of its nature.

There are, we hold, things primarily apt to partition, tending by sheer nature towards separate existence : they are things in which no part is identical either with another part or with the whole, while, also their part is necessarily less than the total and whole : these are magnitudes of the realm of sense, masses, each of which has a station of its own so that none can be identically present in entirety at more than one point at one time.

But to that order is opposed Essence (Real-Being) ; this is in no degree susceptible of partition ; it is unparted and impartible ; interval is foreign to it, cannot enter into our idea of it : it has no need of place and is not, in diffusion or as an entirety, situated within any other being : it is poised over all beings at once, and this is not in the sense of using

them as a base but in their being neither capable nor desirous of existing independently of it ; it is an essence eternally unvaried : it is common to all that follows upon it : it is like the circle’s centre to which all the radii are attached while leaving it unbrokenly in possession of itself, the starting point of their course and of their essential being, the ground in which they all participate : thus the indivisible is the principle of these divided existences and in their very outgoing they remain enduringly in contact with that stationary essence.

So far we have the primarily indivisible — supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent — and we have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense ; but there is also another Kind, of earlier rank than the sensible yet near to it and resident within it — an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity ; we may think of colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations. In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility.

But, on the other hand, that first utterly indivisible Kind must be accompanied by a subsequent Essence, engendered by it and holding indivisibility from it but, in virtue of the necessary outgo from source, tending firmly towards the contrary, the wholly partible ; this secondary Essence will take an intermediate place between the first substance, the undivided, and that which is divisible in material things and resides in them. Its presence, however, will differ in one respect from that of colour and quantity ; these, no doubt, are present identically and entire throughout diverse material masses, but each several manifestation of them is as distinct from every other as the mass is from the mass.

The magnitude present in any mass is definitely one thing, yet its identity from part to part does not imply any such community as would

entail common experience ; within that identity there is diversity, for it is a condition only, not (as in the case of soul) the actual Essence.

The Essence, very near to the impartible, which we assert to belong to the Kind we are now dealing with, is at once an Essence and an entrant into body ; upon embodiment, it experiences a partition unknown before it thus bestowed itself.

In whatsoever bodies it occupies — even the vastest of all, that in which the entire universe is included — it gives itself to the whole without abdicating its unity.

This unity of an Essence is not like that of body, which is a unit by the mode of continuous extension, the mode of distinct parts each occupying its own space. Nor is it such a unity as we have dealt with in the case of quality.

The nature, at once divisible and indivisible, which we affirm to be soul has not the unity of an extended thing : it does not consist of separate sections ; its divisibility lies in its presence at every point of the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in the total and entire in any part.

To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and its power, the divinity and wonder of its being, as a nature transcending the sphere of Things.

Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass : it exists here and yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered identity : thus it is " parted and not parted,” or, better, it has never known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a self-gathered integral, and is " parted among bodies ” merely in the sense that bodies, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot receive it unless in some partitive mode ; the partition, in other words, is an occurrence in body not in soul.

2. It can be demonstrated that soul must necessarily be of just this nature, and that there can be no other soul than such a being, one neither wholly partible but both at once.

If it had the nature of body it would consist of isolated members each unaware of the conditions of every other ; there would be a particular soul — say a soul of the finger — answering as a distinct and independent entity to every local experience ; in general terms, there would be a multiplicity of souls administering each individual ; and, moreover, the universe would be governed not by one soul but by an incalculable number, each standing apart to itself. But without a dominant unity, continuity is meaningless.

The theory that “ Impressions reach the leading-principle by progressive stages ” must be dismissed as mere illusion.

In the first place, it affirms without investigation a “ leading ” phase of the soul.

What can justify this assigning of parts to the soul, and distinguishing one part from another ? What quantity, or what difference of quality, can apply to a thing defined as a self-consistent whole of unbroken unity ?

Again, would perception be vested in that leading principle alone, or in the other phases as well ?

If a given experience bears only on that " leading principle,” it would not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism ; if, on the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul — one not constituted for sensation — that phase cannot transmit any experience to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation.

Again, suppose sensation vested in the “ leading-principle ” itself : then, a first alternative, it will be felt in some one part of that (some specifically sensitive phase), the other part excluding a perception which could serve no purpose ; or, in the second alternative, there will be many distinct sensitive phases, an infinite number, with difference from one to another. In that second case, one sensitive phase will declare “ I had this sensation primarily ” ; others will have to say “ I felt the sensation that rose elsewhere ” ; but either the site of the experience will be a matter of doubt to every phase except the first, or each of the parts of the soul will be deceived into allocating the occurrence within its own particular sphere.

If, on the contrary, the sensation is vested not merely in the “ leading principle,” but in any and every part of the soul, what special function raises the one rather than the other into that leading rank, or why is the sensation to be referred to it rather than elsewhere ? And how, at this, account for the unity of the knowledge brought in by diverse senses, by eyes, by ears ?

On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity — utterly strange to part, a self -gathered whole — if it continuously eludes all touch of multiplicity and divisibility — then, no whole taken up into it can ever be ensouled ; soul will stand as circle-centre to every object (remote on the circumference), and the entire mass of a living being is soulless still.

There is, therefore, no escape : soul is, in the degree indicated, one and many, parted and impartible. We cannot question the possibility of a thing being at once a unity and multi-present, since to deny this would be to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the universe : there must be a Kind which encircles and supports all and conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence is multiple, and yet is one soul always since a container must be a unity : by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the multiplicity of the series of an all ; by its impartible unity, it will conduct a total to wise ends.

In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the “ leadingprinciple ” is their mere unity — a lower reproduction of the soul’s efficiency.

This is the deeper meaning of the profound passage (in the Timaeus), where we read “ By blending the impartible, eternally unchanging essence with that in division among bodies, he produced a third form of essence partaking of both qualities.”

Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many ; the Ideal-Form resident in body is many and one ; bodies themselves are exclusively many ; the Supreme is exclusively one.

Ennead IV, Treatise 3

i. The soul : what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt — with, at least, the gain of recognising 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 not 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 idealform 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 vve 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.

2. 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 kosmos, nor to anything else, and yet vested with all the function inherent to the kosmic 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 Kosmos ; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls ; thus all alike (kosmic soul and particular souls) would be partial and of one nature ; and, at that, there would be no reason for making any such distinction.

3- 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, can not 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 still remain one thing.

A possible solution may be offered : —

The unit soul (it may be conceived) 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 total of 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.

5- 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.

6. But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a kosmos, 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 kosmos, 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 towards 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.

7- 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 the 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 kosmos 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 (not as a part, or as a different being, but) as " the soul when its wing is broken.”

As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic 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 Kosmic Circuit ; but against all this we oppose another soul in us (the Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalising) proven to be distinct by that power of opposition.

As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother’s.

8. 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 organisation 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 unbroken ; over its entire range it exists in every several part of everything having even vegeta 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 newcoming 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.

9- 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 kosmos 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 kosmos 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 kosmic 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 (and such) things as constituting a total — though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the (kosmic) 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 rationalising 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 sovran 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 kosmos 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.

12. 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 kosmic 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 kosmos ; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with the kosmic 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 Intellect, 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 kosmic 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.

13- The Ineluctable, the Kosmic 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 kosmos, 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 (or decreed system) 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.

14. Thus it comes about that this kosmos, 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 Promethean, 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 kosmos as harmonises with our explanation of the universal system.

15. 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 kosmos, 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.

16. The punishment justly overtaking the wicked must therefore be ascribed to the kosmic order which leads all in accordance with the right.

But what of chastisements, poverty, illness, falling upon the good outside of all justice ? These events, we will be told, are equally interwoven into the world order and fall under prediction, and must consequently have a cause in the general reason : are they therefore to be charged to past misdoing ?

No : such misfortunes do not answer to reasons established in the nature of things ; they are not laid up in the master-facts of the universe, but were merely accidental sequents : a house falls, and anyone that chances to be underneath is killed, no matter what sort of man he be : two objects are moving in perfect order — or one if you like — but anything getting in the way is wounded or trampled down. Or we may reason that the undeserved stroke can be no evil to the sufferer in view of the beneficent interweaving of the All or again, no doubt, that nothing is unjust that finds justification in a past history.

We may not think of some things being fitted into a system with others abandoned to the capricious ; if things must happen by cause, by natural sequences, under one Reason-Principle and a single set scheme, we must admit that the minor equally with the major is fitted into that order and pattern.

Wrong-doing from man to man is wrong in the doer and must be imputed, but, as belonging to the established order of the universe is not a wrong even as regards the innocent sufferer ; it is a thing that had to be, and, if the sufferer is good, the issue is to his gain. For we cannot think that this ordered combination proceeds without God and justice ; we must take it to be precise in the distribution of due, while, yet, the reasons of things elude us, and to our ignorance the scheme presents matter of censure.

Various considerations explain why the Souls going forth from the Intellectual proceed first to the heavenly regions. The heavens, as the noblest portion of sensible space, would border with the least exalted of the Intellectual, and will, therefore, be first ensouled, first to participate as most apt ; while what is of earth is at the very extremity of progression, least endowed towards participation, remotest from the unembodied.

All the souls, then, shine down upon the heavens and spend there the main of themselves and the best ; only their lower phases illuminate the lower realms ; and those souls which descend deepest show their light furthest down — not themselves the better for the depth to which they have penetrated.

There is, we may put it, something that is centre ; about it, a circle of light shed from it ; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, light from light ; outside that again, not another circle of light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow.

The last we may figure to ourselves as a revolving circle, or rather a sphere, of a nature to receive light from that third realm, its next higher, in proportion to the light which that itself receives. Thus all begins with the great light, shining self-centred ; in accordance with the reigning plan (that of emanation) this gives forth its brilliance ; the later (divine) existents (souls) add their radiation — some of them remaining above, while there are some that are drawn further downward, attracted by the splendour of the object they illuminate. These last

find that their charges need more and more care : the steersman of a storm-tossed ship is so intent on saving it that he forgets his own interest and never thinks that he is recurrently in peril of being dragged down with the vessel ; similarly the souls are intent upon contriving for their charges and finally come to be pulled down by them ; they are fettered in bonds of sorcery, gripped and held by their concern for the realm of Nature.

If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect, selfsufficing, in peril from no outside influence — the soul now spoken of as indwelling would not occupy the body ; it would infuse life while clinging, entire, within the Supreme.

18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it has left the body.

Reasoning is for this sphere ; it is the act of the soul fallen into perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength : the need of deliberation goes with the less self-sufficing intelligence ; craftsmen faced by a difficulty stop to consider ; where there is no problem their art works on by its own forthright power.

But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be called reasoning souls ?

One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy issue, should occasion arise : but all is met by repudiating the particular kind of reasoning intended (the earthly and discursive type) ; we may represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows uninterruptedly from the Intellectual-Principle in them, an inherent state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real ; in this way they would be users of reason even when in that over-world. We certainly cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though they may occupy bodies in the heavenly region, they are essentially in the Intellectual : and very surely the deliberation of doubt and difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There ; all their act must

fall into place by sheer force of their nature ; there can be no question of commanding or of taking counsel ; they will know, each, what is to be communicated from another, by present consciousness. Even in our own case here, eyes often know what is not spoken ; and There all is pure, every being is, as it were, an eye, nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech, everything is seen and known. As for the Celestials (the Daimones) and souls in the air, they may well use speech ; for all such are simply Animate = Beings.

Are we to think of the indivisible phase of the soul and the divided as making one thing in a coalescence ; or is the indivisible in a place of its own and under conditions of its own, the divisible being a sequent upon it, a separate part of it, as distinct as the reasoning phase is from the unreasoning ?

The answer to this question will emerge when we make plain the nature and function to be attributed to each.

The indivisible phase is mentioned (in the passage of Plato) without further qualification ; but not so the divisible ; “ that soul” we read “ which becomes divisible in bodies ” — and even this last is presented as becoming partible, not as being so once for all.

“ In bodies ” : we must, then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is required to produce life in the corporeal, and what there must be of soul present throughout such a body, such a completed organism.

Now, every sensitive power — by the fact of being sensitive throughout — tends to become a thing of parts : present at every distinct point of sensitiveness, it may be thought of as divided. In the sense, however, that it is present as a whole at every such point, it cannot be said to be wholly divided ; it “ becomes divisible in body.” We may be told that no such partition is implied in any sensations but those of touch ; but this is not so ; where the participant is body (of itself insensitive and non-transmitting) that divisibility in the sensitive agent will be a condition of all other sensations, though in less degree than in the case of touch. Similarly the vegetative function in the soul, with that of growth.

indicates divisibility ; and, admitting such locations as that of desire at the liver and emotional activity at the heart, we have the same result. It is to be noted, however, as regards these (the less corporeal) sensations, that the body may possibly not experience them as a fact of the conjoint thing but in another mode, as rising within some one of the elements of which it has been participant (as inherent, purely, in some phase of the associated soul) : reasoning and the act of the intellect, for instance, are not vested in the body ; their task is not accomplished by means of the body which in fact is detrimental to any thinking on which it is allowed to intrude.

Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the divisible ; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole consisting of parts, each part a self -standing thing having its own peculiar virtue. None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power, then this one same thing (the soul in body) may be at once indivisible and divisible ; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its own divisible self with, in addition, the quality that it derives from above itself.

20. Here a question rises to which we must find an answer : — whether these and the other powers which we call “ parts ” of the Soul are situated, all, in place ; or whether some have place and standpoint, others not ; or whether again none are situated in place.

The matter is difficult : if we do not allot to each of the parts of the Soul some form of place, but leave all unallocated — no more within the body than outside it — we leave the body soulless, and are at a loss to explain plausibly the origin of acts performed by means of the bodily organs : if, on the other hand, we suppose some of those phases to be (capable of situation) in place but others not so, we will be supposing that those parts to which we deny place are ineffective in us, or, in other words, that we do not possess our entire soul.

This simply shows that neither the soul entire nor a

may be considered to be within the body as in a space : space is a container, a container of body ; it is the home of such things as consist of isolated parts, things, therefore, in which at no point is there an entirety ; now, the soul is not a body and is no more contained than containing.

Neither is it in body as in some vessel : whether as vessel or as place of location, the body would remain, in itself, unensouled. If we are to think of some passing-over from the soul — that self-gathered thing — to the containing vessel, then soul is diminished by just as much as the vessel takes.

Space, again, in the strict sense is unembodied, and is not, itself, body ; why, then, should it need soul ?

Besides (if the soul were contained as in space) contact would be only at the surface of the body, not throughout the entire mass.

Many other considerations equally refute the notion that the soul is in body as (an object) in space ; for example, this space would be shifted with every movement, and a thing itself would carry its own space about.

Of course if by space we understand the interval separating objects, it is still less possible that the soul be in body as in space : such a separating interval must be a void ; but body is not a void ; the void must be that in which body is placed ; body (not soul) will be in the void.

Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum : anything in a substratum is a condition affecting that — a colour, a form — but the soul (is no condition of something else), is a separate existence.

Nor is it present as a part in the whole ; soul is no part of body. If we are asked to think of soul as a part in the living total we are faced with the old difficulty : — How it is in that whole. It is certainly not there as the wine is in the wine jar, or as the jar in the jar, or as some absolute is self-present.

Nor can the presence be that of a whole in its part : It would be absurd to think of the soul as a total of which the body should represent the parts.

It is not present as Form is in Matter ; for the Form as in Matter is inseparable, and, further, is something superimposed upon an already

existent thing ; soul, on the contrary, is that which engenders the Form residing within the Matter and therefore is not the Form. If the reference is not to the Form actually present, but to Form as a thing existing apart from all formed objects, it is hard to see how such an entity has found its way into body, and at any rate this makes the soul separable.

How comes it then that everyone speaks of soul as being in body ?

Because the soul is not seen and the body is : we perceive the body, and by its movement and sensation we understand that it is ensouled, and we say that it possesses a soul ; to speak of residence is a natural sequence. If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full force to the very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in body ; we would say the minor was within the major, the contained within the container, the fleeting within the perdurable.

21. What does all this come to ? What answer do we give to any who, with no opinion of his own to assert, asks us to explain this presence ? And what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase ?

Of the modes currently accepted for the presence of one thing in another, none really meets the case of the soul’s relation to the body. Thus we are given as a parallel the steersman in the ship ; this serves adequately to indicate that the soul is potentially separable, but the mode of presence, which is what we are seeking, it does not exhibit.

We can imagine it within the body in some incidental way — for example, as a voyager in a ship— but scarcely as the steersman : and, of course, too, the steersman is not omnipresent to the ship as the soul is to the body.

May we, perhaps, compare it to the science or skill that acts through its appropriate instruments — through a helm, let us say, which should happen to be a live thing— so that the soul effecting the movements dictated by seamanship is an indwelling directive force ?

No : the comparison breaks down, since the science is something outside of helm and ship.

Is it any help to adopt the illustration of the steersman taking the helm, and to station the soul within the body as the steersman may be thought to be within the material instrument through which he works ? Soul, whenever and wherever it chooses to operate, does in much that way move the body.

No ; even in this parallel we have no explanation of the mode of presence within the instrument ; we cannot be satisfied without further search, a closer approach.

22. May we think that the mode of the soul’s presence to body is that of the presence of light to the air ?

This certainly is presence with distinction : the light penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces ; the light is the stable thing, the air flows in and out ; when the air passes beyond the lit area it is dark ; under the light it is lit : we have a true parallel to what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the light quite as much as the light in the air.

Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All he puts the body in its soul and not its soul in the body, and says that while there is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region to which body does not enter — certain powers, that is, with which body has no concern. And what is true of the All-Soul is true of the others.

There are, therefore, certain soul-powers whose presence to body must be denied.

The phases present are those which the nature of body demands : they are present without being resident — either in any parts of the body or in the body as a whole.

For the purposes of sensation the sensitive phase of the soul is present to the entire sensitive being : for the purposes of act, differentiation begins ; every soul phase operates at a point peculiar to itself.

23- I explain : — A living body is illuminated by soul : each organ and member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to itself ; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle of the soul-faculty under which the function is performed ; thus the seeing faculty acts through the eyes, the hearing faculty through the ears, the tasting faculty through the tongue, the faculty of smelling through the nostrils, and the faculty of sentient touch is present throughout, since in this particular form of perception the entire body is an instrument in the soul's service.

The vehicles of touch are mainly centred in the nerves — which moreover are vehicles of the faculty by which the movements of the living being are affected — in them the soul-faculty concerned makes itself present ; the nerves start from the brain. The brain therefore has been considered as the centre and seat of the principle which determines feeling and impulse and the entire act of the organism as a living thing ; where the instruments are found to be linked, there the operating faculty is assumed to be situated. But it would be wiser to say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating faculty : the power to be exercised by the operator — in keeping with the particular instrument — must be considered as concentrated at the point at which the instrument is to be first applied ; or, since the soul’s faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act.

Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the sensitive and representative soul ; it draws upon the Reason-Principle immediately above itself ; downward, it is in contact with an inferior of its own : on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat ; they lodged it in the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to body — at the point most receptive of the act of reason — while something, utterly isolated from body must be in contact with that superior thing

which is a form of soul (and not merely of the vegetative or other quasicorporeal forms but) of that soul apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle.

Such a linking there must be, since in perception there is some element of judging, in representation something intuitional, and since impulse and appetite derive from representation and reason. The reasoning faculty, therefore, is present where these experiences occur, present not as in a place but in the fact that what is there draws upon it. As regards perception we have already explained in what sense it is local.

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood ; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins ; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver : from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place ; the phase of the soul, which has to do with desire, was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood — subtle, light, swift, pure — is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit : the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature.

24. Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body ; where does itgo?

It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for it ; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to hold it : it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing within itself something of that which lures it.

If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that element naturally belongs and tends.

The space open to the soul’s resort is vast and diverse ; the difference will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the justice reigning in things. No one can ever escape the suffering entailed

by ill deeds done : the divine law is ineluctable, carrying bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of rising from those places of pain — all by power of the harmony that maintains the universal scheme.

Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment ; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere ; body-free, containing nothing of body — there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be.

If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are — and in your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one seeking for body.

25- Now comes the question, equally calling for an answer, whether those souls that have quitted the places of earth retain memory of their lives — all souls or some, of all things, or of some things, and, again, for ever or merely for some period not very long after their withdrawal.

A true investigation of this matter requires us to establish first what a remembering principle must be — I do not mean what memory is, but in what order of beings it can occur. The nature of memory has been indicated, laboured even, elsewhere ; we still must try to understand more clearly what characteristics are present where memory exists.

Now a memory has to do with something brought into ken from without, something learned or something experienced ; the Memory-Principle, therefore, cannot belong to such beings as are immune from experience and from time.

No memory, therefore, can be ascribed to any divine being, or to

the Authentic-Existent or the Intellectual-Principle : these are intangibly immune ; time does not approach them ; they possess eternity centred around Being ; they know nothing of past and sequent ; all is an unbroken state of identity, not receptive of change. Now a being rooted in unchanging identity cannot entertain memory, since it has not and never had a state differing from any previous state, or any new intellection following upon a former one, so as to be aware of contrast between a present perception and one remembered from before.

But what prevents such a being (from possessing memory in the sense of) perceiving, without variation in itself, such outside changes as, for example, the kosmic periods ?

Simply the fact that following the changes of the revolting kosmos it would have perception of earlier and later : intuition and memory are distinct.

We cannot hold its self-intellections to be acts of memory ; this is no question of something entering from without, to be grasped and held in fear of an escape ; if its intellections could slip away from it (as a memory might) its very Essence (as the Hypostasis of inherent Intellection) would be in peril.

For the same reason memory, in the current sense, cannot be attributed to the soul in connection with the ideas inherent in its essence : these it holds not as a memory but as a possession, though, by its very entrance into this sphere, they are no longer the mainstay of its Act.

The Soul-action which is to be observed seems to have induced the Ancients to ascribe memory, and “ Recollection,” (the Platonic Anamnesis) to souls bringing into outward manifestation the ideas they contain : we see at once that the memory here indicated is another kind ; it is a memory outside of time.

But, perhaps, this is treating too summarily a matter which demands minute investigation. It might be doubted whether that recollection, that memory, really belongs to the highest soul and not rather to another, a dimmer, or even to the Couplement, the Living-Being. And if to that dimmer soul, when and how has it come to be present ; if to the Couplement, again when and how ?

We are driven thus to enquire into these several points : in which of the constituents of our nature is memory vested — the question with which we started — if in the soul, then in what power or part ; if in the Animate or Couplement — which has been supposed, similarly to be the seat of sensation then by what mode it is present, and how we are to define the Couplement ; finally whether sensation and intellectual acts may be ascribed to one and the same agent, or imply two distinct principles.

26. Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of that double nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts : the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the body to the tool employed : the body is passive and menial ; the soul is active, reading such impressions as are made upon the body or discerned by means of the body, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the bodily experiences.

In such a process it is at once clear that the sensation is a shared task ; but the memory is not thus made over to the Couplement, since the soul has from the first taken over the impression, either to retain or to reject.

It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily constitution determines our memories good or bad ; but the answer would come that, whether the body happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the soul. And in the case of matters learned (and not merely felt, as corporeal experiences), how can we think of the Couplement of soul and body as the remembering principle ? Here, surely, it must be soul alone ?

We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of something entirely distinct formed from the two elements (so that it might have memory though neither soul nor body had it). But, to begin with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither body nor

soul ; these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the animate whole. And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the

sweetness will be due to the honey.

It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body — it may reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in such a manner as to retain them (thus in some sense possessing memory.)

But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes (are not of corporeal nature at all) ; there is no resemblance to seal impressions, no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust (as of the seal) nor (the acceptance) as in the wax : the process is entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense ; and what kind of resistance (or other physical action) can be affirmed in matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or bodily quality as a means ?

Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul ; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never came to the body : the body can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know.

If the soul is to have any significance — to be a definite principle with a function of its own — we are forced to recognise two orders of fact, an order in which the body is a means but all culminates in soul, and an order which is of the soul alone. This being admitted, aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a consequence, will that memory of the aspiration and of its attainment or frustration, without which the soul’s nature would fall into the category of the unstable (that is to say of the

undivine, unreal). Deny this character of the soul and at once we refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of comparison, almost any understanding. Yet these powers of which, embodied, it becomes the source cannot be absent from its own nature. On the contrary ; it possesses certain activities to be expressed in various functions whose accomplishment demands bodily organs ; at its entry it brings with it (as vested in itself alone) the powers necessary for some of these functions, while in the case of others it brings the very activities themselves.

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body : even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness ; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is a stability ; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering — Lethe stream may be understood in this sense — and memory is a fact of the soul.

27. But of what soul ; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All ?

Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared memories ; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as one ; when they stand apart, assuming that both exist and endure, each soon forgets the other’s affairs, retaining for a longer time its own. Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions — this “ Shade,” as I take it, being the characteristically human part — remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career was mainly of the hero’s personal shaping ; the other souls (soul-phases) going to constitute the joint-being could, for all their different standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same life, doings which they knew from the time of their association : perhaps they would add also some moral judgement.

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told : what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would recount ?

The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and

felt ; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.

Then, free and alone at last, what will it have to remember ?

The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty of the soul memory resides.

28. Is memory vested in the faculty by which we perceive and learn ? Or does it reside in the faculty by which we set things before our minds as objects of desire or of anger, the passionate faculty ?

This will be maintained on the ground that there could scarcely be both a first faculty in direct action and a second to remember what that first experiences. It is certain that the desiring faculty is apt to be stirred by what it has once enjoyed ; the object presents itself again ; evidently, memory is at work ; why else, the same object with the same attraction ?

But, at that, we might reasonably ascribe to the desiring faculty the very perception of the desired objects and then the desire itself to the perceptive faculty, and so on all through, and in the end conclude that the distinctive names merely indicate the function which happens to be uppermost.

Yet the perception is very different from faculty to faculty ; certainly it is sight and not desire that sees the object ; desire is stirred merely as a result of the seeing, by a transmission ; its act is not in the nature of an identification of an object seen ; all is simply blind response (automatic reaction). Similarly with rage ; sight reveals the offender and the passion leaps ; we may think of a shepherd seeing a wolf at his flock, and a dog, seeing nothing, who springs to the scent or the sound.

In other words the desiring faculty has had the emotion, but the trace it keeps of the event is not a memory ; it is a condition, something passively accepted : there is another faculty that was aware of the enjoyment and retains the memory of what has happened. This is confirmed by the fact that many satisfactions which the desiring faculty has enjoyed are not retained in the memory : if memory resided in the desiring faculty, such forgetfulness could not be.

29- Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance ?

Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold.

[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is not the faculty that perceives, but some other thing, then the rememAnd further if the perceptive faculty (=the memory) deals with matters learned (as well as with matters of observation and feeling) it will be the faculty for the processes of reason also : but these two orders certainly require two separate faculties.

Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension (one covering both sense perceptions and ideas) and assign memory in both orders to this ?

The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for objects of sense and objects of the Intellectual-Kind ; but if these stand in definite duality, then, for all we can say or do, we are left with two separate principles of memory ; and, supposing each of the two orders of soul to possess both principles, then we have four.

And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the principle by which we perceive should be the principle by which we remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one faculty ? Why must the seat of our intellectual action be also the seat of our remembrance of that action ? The most powerful thought does not

always go with the readiest memory ; people of equal perception are not equally good at remembering ; some are especially gifted in perception, others, never swift to grasp, are strong to retain.

But, once more, admitting two distinct principles, something quite separate remembering what sense-perception has first known still this something must have felt what it is required to remember ?

No \ we may well conceive that where there is to be memory of a sense-perception, this perception becomes a mere presentment, and that to this image-grasping power, a distinct thing, belongs the memory, the retention of the object : for in this imaging faculty the perception culminates ; the impression passes away but the vision remains present to the imagination.

By the fact of harbouring the presentment of an object that has disappeared, the imagination is, at once, a seat of memory : where the persistence of the image is brief, the memory is poor ; people of powerful memory are those in whom the image-holding power is firmer, not easily allowing the record to be jostled out of its grip.

Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty ; and memory deals with images. Its differing quality or degree from man to man, we would explain by difference or similarity in the strength of the individual powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily conditions present or absent, producing change and disorder or not — a point this, however, which need not detain us here.

30. But what of the memory of mental acts : do these also fall under the imaging faculty ?

If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained. But if there is no such necessary image, another solution must be sought. Perhaps memory would be the reception, into the image-making faculty, of the Reason-Principle which accompanies the mental conception : this mental conception — an indivisible thing, and one that never rises

to the exterior of the consciousness — lies unknown below ; the Reason-Principle — the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the imagetaking faculty — exhibits the concept as in a mirror ; the apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.

This explains, also, another fact : — the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection ; only when it acts upon this image-making faculty does its intellection become a human perception : intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another : we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware : the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-percept ions .

31. But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said, possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there must be two such faculties. Now that is all very well as long as the two souls stand apart ; but, when they are at one in us, what becomes of the two faculties, and in which of them is the imaging faculty vested ?

If each soul has its own imaging faculty the images must in all cases be duplicated, since we cannot think that one faculty deals only with intellectual objects, and the other with objects of sense, a distinction which inevitably implies the co-existence in man of two life-principles utterly unrelated.

And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what difference is there in the souls ; and how does the fact escape our knowledge ?

The answer is that, when the two souls chime each with each, the two imaging faculties no longer stand apart ; the union is dominated by the more powerful of the faculties of the soul, and thus the image perceived is as one ; the less powerful is like a shadow attending upon the dominant, like a minor light merging into a greater : when they are in conflict, in discord, the minor is distinctly apart, a self -standing thing

— though its isolation is not perceived, for the simple reason that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation.

The two have run into a unity in which, yet, one is the loftier : this loftier knows all ; when it breaks from the union, it retains some of the experiences of its companion, but dismisses others ; thus we accept the talk of our less valued associates, but, on a change of company, we remember little from the first set and more from those in whom we recognise a higher quality.

But the memory of friends, children, wife ? Country too, and all that the better sort of man may reasonably remember ?

All these, the one (the lower man) retains with emotion, the authentic man passively : for the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from which, however, the best of such impressions pass over to the graver soul in the degree in which the two are in communication.

The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the activities of the higher : this will be especially so when it is itself of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are better from the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher.

The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower : for one reason, there is always the possibility that the very excellence of the lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending to keep it down by sheer force of vitality. In any case the more urgent the intention towards the Supreme, the more extensive will be the soul’s forgetfulness, unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with : in this world itself, all is best when human interests have been held aloof ; so, therefore, it must be with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that the good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity ; it seeks to escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it free from entanglement, light-footed, selfconducted. Thus it is that even in this world the soul which has the

desire of the other is putting away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. It brings there very little of what it has gathered here ; as long as it is in the heavenly regions only, it will have more than it can retain.

The Hercules of the heavenly regions would still tell of his feats : but there is the other man to whom all of that is trivial ; he has been translated to a holier place ; he has won his way to the Intellectual Realm ; he is more than Hercules, proven in the combats in which the combatants are the wise.

Ennead IV, Treatise 4

i. What, then, will be the Soul’s discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence ?

Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is ; failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is not there. Of things of earth it will know nothing ; it will not, for example, remember an act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had contemplation of the Supreme.

When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is room for nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object ; and in the knowing there is not included any previous knowledge ; all such assertion of stage and progress belongs to the lower and is a sign of the altered ; this means that, once purely in the Intellectual, no one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further ; if all intellection is timeless — as appears from the fact that the Intellectual beings are of eternity not of time — there can be no memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things but none whatever: all is presence There ; for nothing passes away, there is no change from old to new.

This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists in

that realm — downwards from the Supreme to the Ideas, upward from the Ideas to the Universal and to the Supreme. Admitting that the Highest, as a self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the soul which has attained to the Supreme from exerting its own characteristic Act : it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part.

But that would be in the nature of grasping a pure unity ?

No : in the nature of grasping all the intellectual facts of a many that constitutes a unity. For since the object of vision has variety (distinction within its essential oneness) the intuition must be multiple and the intuitions various, just as in a face we see at the one glance eyes and nose and all the rest.

But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity ?

No : there has already been discrimination within the Intellectual-Principle ; the Act of the soul is little more than a reading of this.

First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not bring time into the soul’s intuition of earlier and later among them. There is a grading by order as well : the ordered disposition of some growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point, but, to one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and last than simply that of the order.

Still, the soul (in this intuition within the divine) looks to what is a unity ; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is : how explain this grasping first of the unity and later of the rest ?

The explanation is that the unity of this power (the Supreme) is such as to allow of its being multiple to another principle (the soul), to which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one indivisible object of intuition : its activities do not (like its essence) fall under the rule of unity ; they are for ever multiple in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually become all things.

For with the Intellectual or Supreme — considered as distinct from the One — there is already the power of harbouring that Principle of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its superior.

2. Enough on that point : we come now to the question of memory of the personality ?

There will not even be memory of the personality ; no thought that the contemplator is the self — Socrates, for example — or that it is Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in mind that, in contemplative vision, especially when it is vivid, we are not at the time aware of our own personality ; we are in possession of ourselves, but the activity is towards the object of vision with which the thinker becomes identified ; he has made himself over as matter to be shaped ; he takes ideal form under the action of the vision while remaining, potentially, himself. This means that he is actively himself when he has intellection of nothing.

Or, if he is himself (pure and simple), he is empty of all : if, on the contrary, he is himself (by the self-possession of contemplation) in such a way as to be identified with what is all, then by the act of selfintellection he has the simultaneous intellection of all : in such a case self-intuition by personal activity brings the intellection, not merely of the self, but also of the total therein embraced ; and similarly the intuition of the total of things brings that of the personal self as included among all.

But such a process would appear to introduce into the Intellectual that element of change against which we ourselves have only now been protesting ?

The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the borders of the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change ; it has, for example, its inward advance, and obviously anything that attains position near to something motionless does so by a change directed towards that unchanging goal and is not itself motionless in the same degree. Nor is it really change to turn from the self to the constituents of self or from those constituents to the self ; and in this case the contemplator is the total ; the duality has become unity.

None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own ?

No : once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same unchangeableness : for it possesses identity of essence ; when it is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears ; the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the Intellectual-Principle but not to its own destruction : the two are one, and two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change : the soul, without motion (but by right of its essential being) would be intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its self-awareness ; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the Supreme.

3- But it leaves that conjunction ; it cannot suffer that unity ; it falls in love with its own powers and possessions, and desires to stand apart ; it leans outward so to speak : then, it appears to acquire a memory of itself.

In this self-memory a distinction is to be made ; the memory dealing with the Intellectual Realm upbears the soul, not to fall ; the memory of things here bears it downwards to this universe ; the intermediate memory dealing with the heavenly sphere holds it there too ; and, in all its memory, the thing it has in mind it is and grows to ; for this bearingin -mind must be either intuition (i.e. knowledge with identity) or representation by image : and the imaging in the case of the soul is not a taking in of something (as of an impression) but is vision and condition — so much so, that, in its very sense-sight, it is the lower in the degree in which it penetrates the object. Since its possession of the total of things is not primal but secondary, it does not become all things perfectly (in becoming identical with the All in the Intellectual) ; it is of the boundary order, situated between two regions, and has tendency to both.

In that realm it has also vision, through the Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as not to reach the soul ; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance — and, indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the tertiaries.

If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the same principle of penetration comes into play, and it possesses itself, by memory and imagination, of the thing it desired : and hence the memory, even dealing with the highest, is not the highest. Memory, of course, must be understood not merely of what might be called the sense of remembrance, but so as to include a condition induced by the past experience or vision. There is such a thing as possessing more powerfully without consciousness than in full knowledge ; with full awareness the possession is of something quite distinct from the self ; unconscious possession runs very close to identity, and any such approach to identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the soul.

If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in abeyance : they could not be in the nature of impressions permanently adopted — a notion which would entail absurdities — but were no more than a potentiality realised after return. When that energy of the Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it sees what it saw in the earlier state before it revisited the Supreme.

But this power which determines memory, is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective in us ?

At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us ; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed it : this principle awakens where it wakens ; and it alone has vision in that order ; for this is no matter to be brought to us by way of analogy, or

by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere ; the power which, even here, we possess of discoursing upon the Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to speak, and thus attain the vision of the Supreme, as one, standing on some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have not mounted with him

is invisible.

Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher spheres ; it is first known in the celestial period.

A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognise many other souls known in its former state — supposing that, as we have said, it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition would be natural if the bodies with which those souls are vested in the celestial must reproduce the former appearance ; supposing the spherical form (of the stars inhabited by souls in the mid-realm) means a change of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive quality of personality ; this is not fantastic ; conditions changing need not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation, this too would mean recognition.

But those whose descent from the Intellectual is complete, how is it with them ?

They will recall their memories, of the same things, but with less force than those still in the celestial, since they have had other experiences to remember, and the lapse of time will have utterly obliterated much of what was formerly present to them.

But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have turned to the sense-known kosmos, and are to fall into this sphere of process ?

They need not fall to the ultimate depth : their downward movement may be checked at some one moment of the way ; and as long as they have not touched the lowest of the region of process (the point at which non-being begins) there is nothing to prevent them rising once

more.

6. Souls that descend, souls that change their state — these, then, may be said to have memory ; which deals with what has come and gone ; but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to remain unchanged ?

The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. The enquiry entails the examination and identification of acts of understanding and of reasoning in these beings, if such acts take place.

Now if, immune from all lack, they neither seek nor doubt, and never learn, nothing being absent at any time from their knowledge — what reasonings, what processes of rational investigation, can take place in them, what acts of the understanding ?

Even as regards human concerns they have no need for observation or method ; their administration of our affairs and of earth’s in general does not go so ; the right ordering, which is their gift to the universe, is effected by methods very different.

In other words, they have seen God and they do not remember ?

Ah, no : it is that they see God still and always, and that as long as they see, they cannot tell themselves they have had the vision ; such reminiscence is for souls that have lost it.

7- Well but can they not tell themselves that yesterday, or last year, they moved round the earth, that they lived yesterday or at any given moment in their lives ?

Their living is eternal, and eternity is an unchanging unity. To identify a yesterday or a last year in their movement would be like isolating the movement of one of the feet, and finding a this or a that and an entire series in what is a single act. The movement of the celestial beings is one movement : it is our measuring that presents us with many movements, and with distinct days determined by intervening nights : There all is one day ; series has no place ; no yesterday, no last year.

Still : the space traversed is different ; there are the various sections of the Zodiac : why, then, should not the soul say “ I have traversed that section and now I am in this other ? ” If, also, it looks down over the concerns of men, must it not see the changes that befall them, that they are not as they were, and, by that observation, that the beings and the things concerned were otherwise formerly ? And does not that mean memory ?

8. But, we need not record in memory all we see ; mere incidental concomitants need not occupy the imagination ; when things vividly present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete form, it is not necessary — unless for purposes of a strictly practical administration — to pass over that direct acquaintance, and fasten upon the partial sense-presentation, which is already known in the larger knowledge, that of the Universe.

I will take this point by point : —

First : it is not essential that everything seen should be laid up in the mind ; for when the object is of no importance, or of no personal concern, the sensitive faculty, stimulated by the differences in the objects present to vision, acts without accompaniment of the will, and is alone in entertaining the impression. The soul does not take into its deeper recesses such differences as do not meet any of its needs, or serve any of its purposes. Above all, when the soul’s act is directed towards another order, it must utterly reject the memory of such things, things over and done with now, and not even taken into knowledge when they were present.

On the second point : circumstances, purely accidental, need not be present to the imaging faculty, and if they do so appear they need not be retained or even observed, and in fact the impression of any such circumstance does not entail awareness. Thus in local movement, if there is no particular importance to us in the fact that we pass through first this and then that portion of air, or that we proceed from some

particular point, we do not take notice, or even know it as we walk. Similarly, if it were of no importance to us to accomplish any given journey, mere movement in the air being the main concern, we would not trouble to ask at what particular point of place we were, or what distance we had traversed ; if we have to observe only the act of movement and not its duration, nothing to do which obliges us to think of time, the minutes are not recorded in our minds.

And finally, it is of common knowledge that, when the understanding is possessed of the entire act undertaken and has no reason to foresee any departure from the normal, it will no longer observe the detail ; in a process unfailingly repeated without variation, attention to the unvarying detail is idleness.

So it is with the stars. They pass from point to point, but they move on their own affairs and not for the sake of traversing the space they actually cover ; the vision of the things that appear on the way, the journey by, nothing of this is their concern ; their passing this or that is of accident not of essence, and their intention is to greater objects : moreover each of them journeys, unchangeably, the same unchanging way ; and again, there is no question to them of the time they spend in any given section of the journey, even supposing time division to be possible in the case. All this granted, nothing makes it necessary that they should have any memory of places or times traversed. Besides this life of the ensouled stars is one identical thing (since they are one in the All-Soul) so that their very spatial movement is pivoted upon identity and resolves itself into a movement not spatial but vital, the movement of a single living being whose act is directed to itself, a being which to anything outside is at rest, but is in movement by dint of the inner life it possesses, the eternal life. Or we may take the comparison of the movement of the heavenly bodies to a choral dance ; if we think of it as a dance which comes to rest at some given period, the entire dance, accomplished from beginning to end, will be perfect while at each partial stage it was imperfect : but if the dance is a thing of eternity, it is in eternal perfection. And if it is in eternal perfection, it has no points of time and place at which it will achieve perfection ; it will, therefore,

have no concern about attaining to any such points . it will, therefore, make no measurements of time or place ; it will have, therefore, no memory of time and place.

If the stars live a blessed life in their vision of the life inherent in their souls, and if, by force of their souls tendency to become one, and by the light they cast from themselves upon the entire heavens, they are like the strings of a lyre which, being struck in tune, sing a melody in some natural scale ... if this is the way the heavens, as one, are moved, and the component parts in their relation to the whole the sidereal system moving as one, and each part in its own way, to the same purpose, though each too hold its own place— then our doctrine is all the more surely established ; the life of the heavenly bodies is the more clearly an unbroken unity.

But Zeus — ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor

for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished — would it not seem inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities ? Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be, must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief in producing ?

Even this matter of Zeus’ memory of the kosmic periods is difficult ; it is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in time (which is not so) ; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know the number of his works.

The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue of one life for ever : it is in this sense that the All is unlimited, and thus Zeus’ knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge, for this unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself — or, to be more accurate, eternally

follows upon him — and is seen by an indwelling knowledge ; Zeus knows his own unlimited life, and, in that knowledge, knows the activity that

flows from him to the kosmos ; but he knows it in its unity not in its process.

The ordering principle is twofold ; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All ; we apply the appellation Zeus sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe.

When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must leave out all notions of stage and progress, and recognise one unchanging and timeless life.

But the life in the kosmos, the life which carries the leading principle of the universe, still needs elucidation ; does it operate without calculation, without searching into what ought to be done ?

Yes : for what must be stands shaped before the kosmos, and is ordered without any setting in order : the ordered things are merely the things that come to be ; and the principle that brings them into being is Order itself ; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. It is an unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away from it — and in doubt because it has turned away — but an unremitting soul performing an unvarying task.

The leading principle of the universe is a unity — and one that is sovran without break, not sometimes dominant and sometimes dominated. What source is there for any such multiplicity of leading principles as might result in contest and hesitation ? And this governing unity must always desire the one thing : what could bring it to wish now for this and now for that, to its own greater perplexing ? But observe : no perplexity need follow upon any development of this soul essentially a unity. The All stands a multiple thing no doubt, having parts, and parts clashing with parts, but that does not imply that it need be in

doubt as to its conduct : that soul does not take its essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals , it has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. To suppose it pursuing one new object after another is to raise the question whence that novelty comes into being : the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to its action ; its very work, the kosmos, would be the less well done by reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail.

11. The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a living unit : there is the action determined by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the principle : thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals and on the parts directly affected will often be baffled and obliged to all sorts of calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of principle and need no deliberation. And in so far as the kosmos is a conducted thing, its administration and its administrator will follow not the way of the doctor but the way of Nature.

And in the case of the universe, the administration is all the less complicated from the fact that the soul actually circumscribes, as parts of a living unity, all the members which it conducts. For all the Kinds included in the universe are dominated by one Kind, upon which they follow, fitted into it, developing from it, growing out of it, just as the Kind manifested in the bough is related to the Kind in the tree as a whole.

What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what place for memory, where wisdom and knowledge are eternal, unfailingly present, effective, dominant, administering in an identical process ?

The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more certain the unchanging identity of the producer : even in the single

animal the events produced by Nature are many and not simultaneous ; there are the age periods, the developments at fixed epochs — horns, beard, maturing breasts, the acme of life, procreation — but the principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not thereby annulled ; there is process of growth, but no diversity in the initial principle. The identity underlying all the multiplicity is confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent is exhibited unchanged, un diminished, in the offspring. We have reason, then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops both, and that this is the unalterable wisdom of the kosmos taken as a whole ; it is manifold, diverse and yet simplex, presiding over the most comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise altered within itself by this multiplicity, but stably one Reason-Principle, the concentrated totality of things : if it were not thus all things, it would be a wisdom of the later and partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme.

12. It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are the work of Nature, but that, since there is wisdom within the All, there must be also, by the side of such natural operation, acts of reasoning and of memory.

But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what in fact is unwisdom, taking the search for wisdom to be wisdom itself. For what can reasoning be but a struggle, the effort to discover the wise course, to attain the principle which is true and derives from real-being ? To reason is like playing the cithara for the sake of achieving the art, like practising with a view to mastery7, like any learning that aims at knowing. What reasoners seek, the wise hold : wisdom, in a word, is a condition in a being that possesses repose. Think what happens when one has accomplished the reasoning process : as soon as we have discovered the right course, we cease to reason : we rest because we have come to wisdom. If then we are to range the leading principle of the All among learners, we must allow it reasonings, perplexities and those acts of memory which link the past with the present and the future :

if it is to be considered as a knower, then the wisdom within it consists in a rest possessing the object (absolved, therefore, from search and from remembrance).

Again, if the leading principle of the universe knows the future as it must — then obviously it will know by what means that future is to come about ; given this knowledge, what further need is there of its reasoning towards it, or confronting past with present ? And, of course, this knowledge of things to come — admitting it to exist is not like that of the diviners ; it is that of the actual causing principles holding the certainty that the thing will exist, the certainty inherent in the alldisposers, above perplexity and hesitancy ; the notion is constituent and therefore unvarying. The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the present ; it is a knowledge in repose and thus a knowledge transcending the processes of cogitation.

If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future which it is of itself to produce, it cannot produce with knowledge or to purpose ; it will produce just what happens to come, that is to say by haphazard. As this cannot be, it must create by some stable principle ; its creations, therefore, will be shaped in the model stored up in itself ; there can be no varying, for, if there were, there could also be failure.

The produced universe will contain difference, but its diversities spring not from its own action but from its obedience to superior principles which, again, spring from the creating power, so that all is guided by Reason-Principles in their series ; thus the creating power is in no sense subjected to experimenting, to perplexity, to that preoccupation which to some minds makes the administration of the All seem a task of difficulty. Preoccupation would obviously imply the undertaking of alien tasks, some business — that would mean — not completely within the powers ; but where the power is sovran and sole, it need take thought of nothing but itself and its own will, which means its own wisdom, since in such a being the will is wisdom. Here, then, creating makes no demand, since the wisdom that goes to it is not sought elsewhere, but is the creator’s very self, drawing on nothing outside — not, therefore, on reasoning or on memory, which are handlings of the external.

13- But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the universe and the principle known as Nature ?

This Wisdom is a first (within the All-Soul) while Nature is a last : for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul, possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle : we may imagine a thick waxen seal, in which the imprint has penetrated to the very uttermost film so as to show on both sides, sharp cut on the upper surface, faint on the under. Nature, thus, does not know, it merely produces : what it holds it passes, automatically, to its next ; and this transmission to the corporeal and material constitutes its making power : it acts as a thing warmed communicating to what lies in next contact to it the principle of which it is the vehicle so as to make that also warm in some less degree.

Nature being thus a mere communicator, does not possess even the imaging act. There is (within the Soul) intellection, superior to imagination ; and there is imagination standing midway between that intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. For Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything ; imagination (the imaging faculty) has consciousness of the external, for it enables that which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience encountered, while Nature’s function is to engender — of itself though in an act derived from the active principle (of the soul) .

Thus the Intellectual-Principle possesses : the Soul of the All eternally receives from it ; this is the soul’s life ; its consciousness is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it ; what proceeds from it into Matter and is manifested there is Nature, with which — or even a little before it — the series of real being comes to an end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual order and the beginnings of the imitative.

There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul, and receives from it : soul, near to Nature but superior, operates towards Nature but without receiving in turn ; and there is the still higher phase (the purely Intellectual) with no action whatever upon body or upon Matter.

Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental

materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and vegetable forms stand to it ?

Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them ?

Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light and air remain each itself, never coalescing : is this the relation of Nature to the formed object ?

It is rather that existing between fire and the object it has warmed : the fire withdrawn, there remains a certain warmth, distinct from that in the fire, a property, so to speak, of the object warmed. For the shape which Nature imparts to what it has moulded must be recognised as a form quite distinct from Nature itself, though it remains a question to be examined whether besides this (specific) form there is also an intermediary, a link connecting it with Nature, the general principle.

The difference between Nature and the Wisdom described as dwelling in the All has been sufficiently dealt with.

But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement : Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the soul — for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity of the soul, and springs from soul — and, since time is a thing of division and (unlike eternity) comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that past must imply that even the All-Soul has memory ? We repeat, identity belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity ; otherwise there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the activities of the soul can themselves experience change.

Can we escape by the theory that, while human souls — receptive of change, even to the change of imperfection and lack — are in time, yet the Soul of the All, as the author of time, is itself timeless ? But if it is not in time, what causes it to engender time rather than eternity ?

The answer must be that the realm it engenders is not that of eternal things but a realm of things enveloped in time : it is just as the souls (under, or included in, the All-Soul) are not in time, but some of their experiences and productions are. For a soul is eternal, and is before time ; and what is in time is of a lower order than time itself : time is folded around what is in time exactly as— we read— it is folded about what is in place and in number.

16. But if in the soul thing follows thing, if there is earlier and later in its productions, if it engenders or creates in time, then it must be looking towards the future ; and if towards the future, then towards the past as well ?

No : prior and past are in the things it produces ; in itself nothing is past ; all, as we have said, is one simultaneous grouping of Reason-Principles. In the engendered, dissimilarity is not compatible with unity, though in the Reason-Principles supporting the engendered such unity of dissimilars does occur — hand and foot are in unity in the Reason-Principle (of man), but apart in the realm of sense. Of course, even in that ideal realm there is apartness, but in a characteristic mode, just as in a mode, there is priority.

Now, apartness may be explained as simply differentiation : but how account for priority unless on the assumption of some ordering principle arranging from above, and in that disposal necessarily affirming a serial order ?

There must be such a principle, or all would exist simultaneously ; but the indicated conclusion does not follow unless order and ordering principle are distinct ; if the ordering principle is Primal Order, there is no such affirmation of series ; there is simply making, the making of this thing after that thing. The affirmation would imply that the ordering principle looks away towards Order and therefore is not, itself. Order.

But how are Order and this orderer one and the same ?

Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the Intellectual-Principle : and because the succession is a fact of the things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity. The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it still, an outspreading

without interval.

The total scheme may be summarised in the illustration of The Good as a centre, the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration : the Intellectual-Principle possesses and has ever embraced that which is beyond being , the soul must seek it still : the sphere of the universe, by its possession of the soul thus aspirant, is moved to the aspiration which falls within its own nature ; this is no more than such power as body may have, the mode of pursuit possible where the object pursued is debarred from entrance j it is the motion of coiling about, with ceaseless return upon the same path — in other words, it is circuit.

T7* „ . . . ,

But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason- Principles ot

the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but that

here the later of order is converted into a later of time — bringing in all

these doubts ?

Is it because in us the governing and the answering principles are

many and there is no sovran unity ?

That condition ; and, further, the fact that our mental acts fall into a series according to the succession of our needs, being not selfdetermined but guided by the variations of the external : thus the will changes to meet every incident as each fresh need arises and as the external impinges in its successive things and events.

A variety of governing principles must mean variety in the images formed upon the representative faculty, images not issuing from one internal centre, but, by difference of origin and of acting-point, strange to each other, and so bringing compulsion to bear upon the movements and efficiencies of the self.

When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the

PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL 65

object a sort of sensation, in announcement and in picture, of the experience calling us to follow and to attain : the personality, whether it resists or follows and procures, is necessarily thrown out of equilibrium. The same disturbance is caused by passion urging revenge and by the needs of the body ; every other sensation or experience effects its own change upon our mental attitude ; then there is the ignorance of what is good and the indecision of a soul (a human soul) thus pulled in every direction ; and, again, the interaction of all these perplexities gives rise to yet others.

But do variations of judgement affect that very highest in us ?

No : the doubt and the change of standard are of the Conjoint (of the soul-phase in contact with body) ; still, the right reason of that highest is weaker by being given over to inhabit this mingled mass : not that it sinks in its own nature : it is much as amid the tumult of a public meeting the best adviser speaks but fails to dominate ; assent goes to the roughest of the brawlers and roarers, while the man of good counsel sits silent, ineffectual, overwhelmed by the uproar of his inferiors.

The lowest human type exhibits the baser nature ; the man is a compost calling to mind some inferior political organisation : in the mid-type we have a citizenship in which some better section sways a demotic constitution not out of control : in the superior type the life is aristocratic ; it is the career of one emancipated from what is base in humanity and tractable to the better ; in the finest type, where the man has brought himself to detachment, the ruler is one only, and from this master principle order is imposed upon the rest, so that we may think of a municipality in two sections, the superior city and, kept in hand by it, the city of the lower elements.

18. There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of its own — so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some individuality — or whether all it has is this Nature we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with it.

Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in

itself be as a soulless form would be : it cannot even be like air traversed by light ; it must be like air storing heat : the body holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul ; and it is body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without emotion. By “ us, the true human being ” I mean the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason : “ attached, for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it ; it is an accessory and dependent of the human being ; “ we ” means the master-principle ; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an “ ours ” ; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment.

The other, the most honourable phase of our being, is what we think of as the true man and into this we are penetrating.

Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary between soul and body and made up of both. A unity is independent : thus body alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt— in its dissolution there is no damage to the body, but merely to its unity — and soul in similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very nature is immune from evil.

But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity, there is a probable source of pain to them in the mere fact that they were inapt to partnership. This does not, of course, refer to two bodies ; that is a question of one nature ; and I am speaking of two natures. When one distinct nature seeks to associate itself with another, a different, order of being — the lower participating in the higher, but unable to take more than a faint trace of it — then the essential duality becomes also a unity, but a unity standing midway between what the lower was and what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled unity ; the association is artificial and uncertain, inclining now to this side and now to that in ceaseless vacillation ; and the total hovers between high and low, telling, downward bent, of misery but, directed to the above, of longing for

unison.

19. Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified : pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul ; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame ; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge ; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected : thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass ; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain (non-material) conditions ; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity.

And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at every point of its being, and is thereby enabled to assign every condition to the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs. Being present as a whole at every point of the body, if it were itself affected the pain would take it at every point, and it would suffer as one entire being, so that it could not know, or make known, the spot affected ; it could say only that at the place of its presence there existed pain — and the place of its presence is the entire human being. As things are, when the finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is in pain ; we class him as suffering, from his finger being painful, just as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue.

But the pain itself is in the part affected unless we include in the notion of pain the sensation following upon it, in which case we are saying only that distress implies the perception of distress. But (this does not mean that the soul is affected) we cannot describe the perception itself as distress ; it is the knowledge of the distress and, being knowledge, is not itself affected, or it could not know and convey a true message : a messenger, affected, overwhelmed by the event, would either not convey the message or not convey it faithfully.

20. As with bodily pain and pleasure so with the bodily desires ; their origin, also, must be attributed to what thus stands midway, to that

Nature we described as the corporeal.

Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter : all this must belong to what is specifically body but chooses to be something else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects, to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained untouched by life.

In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction. Similarly in the case of desire : there is the knowledge in the sensation (the sensitive phase of the soul) and in the next lower phase, that described as the “ Nature ” which carries the imprint of the soul to the body ; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is the culmination of the less formed desire in body ; sensation knows the image thence imprinted upon the Nature ; and from the moment of the sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that which subsequently entertained it.

But why, thus, two phases of desire ; why should not the body as a determined entity (the living total) be the sole desirer ?

Because there are (in man) two distinct things, this Nature and the body, which, through it, becomes a living being : the Nature precedes the determined body which is its creation, made and shaped by it ; it cannot originate the desires ; they must belong to the living body meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in its distress to alter its state, to substitute pleasure for pain, sufficiency for want : this Nature must be like a mother reading the wishes of a suffering child, and seeking to

set it right and to bring it back to herself ; in her search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to the sufferer’s desire and makes the child’s experience her own.

In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and because of, that living body ; granting or withholding belongs to another again, the higher soul.

21. That this is the phase of the human being in which desire takes its origin is shown by observation of the different stages of life : in childhood, youth, maturity, the bodily desires differ; health or sickness also may change them, while the (psychic) faculty is of course the same through all : the evidence is clear that the variety of desire in the human being results from the fact that he is a corporeal entity, a living body subject to every sort of vicissitude.

The total movement of desire is not always stirred simultaneously with what we call the impulses to the satisfaction even of the lasting bodily demands ; it may refuse assent to the idea of eating or drinking until reason gives the word : this shows us desire — the degree of it existing in the living body — advancing towards some object, with Nature (the lower soul-phase) refusing its co-operation and approval, and as sole arbiter between what is naturally fit and unfit, rejecting what does not accord with the natural need.

We may be told that the changing state of the body is sufficient explanation of the changing desires in the faculty ; but that would require the demonstration that the changing condition of a given entity could effect a change of desire in another, in one which cannot itself gain by the gratification ; for it is not the desiring faculty that profits by food, liquid, warmth, movement, or by any relief from over-plenty or any filling of a void ; all such services touch the body only.

22. And as regards vegetal forms ? Are we to imagine beneath the leading principle (the “ Nature ” phase) some sort of corporeal echo of

it, something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them ? Or are we to think that, while the earth (which nourishes them) contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire ?

The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth.

Is it one coming from the sphere of the All, a radiation upon earth from that which Plato seems to represent as the only thing possessing soul primarily ? Or are we to go by that other passage where he describes earth as the first and oldest of all the gods within the scope of the heavens, and assigns to it, as to the other stars, a soul peculiar to itself ?

It is difficult to see how earth could be a god if it did not possess a soul thus distinct : but the whole matter is obscure since Plato’s statements increase or at least do not lessen the perplexity. It is best to begin by facing the question as a matter of reasoned investigation.

That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the vegetation upon it. But we see also that it produces animals ; why then should we not argue that it is itself animated ? And, animated, no small part of the All, must it not be plausible to assert that it possesses an Intellectual-Principle by which it holds its rank as a god ? If this is true of every one of the stars, why should it not be so of the earth, a living part of the living All ? We cannot think of it as sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one appropriate to itself.

Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul and the earthly globe not ? The stars are equally corporeal, and they lack the flesh, blood, muscle, and pliant material of earth, which besides, is of more varied content and includes every form of body. If the earth’s immobility is urged in objection, the answer is that this refers only to spatial movement.

But how can perception and sensation (implied in ensoulment) be supposed to occur in the earth ?

How (we return) do they occur in the stars ? Feeling does not belong to fleshy matter : soul to have perception does not require body ; body, on the contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its

efficiency, judgement (the foundation of perception) belongs to the soul which overlooks the body, and, from what is experienced there, forms its decisions.

But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the earth, upon which the earth-soul is thus to form its decisions : certainly vegetal forms, in so far as they belong to earth have no sensation or perception : in what then, and through what, does such sensation take place, for (we will be told) sensation without organs is too rash a notion. Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul ? It could not be necessary to knowledge : surely the consciousness of wisdom suffices to beings which have nothing to gain from sensation ?

This argument is not to be accepted : it ignores the consideration that, apart from all question of practical utility, objects of sense provide occasion for a knowing which brings pleasure : thus we ourselves take delight in looking upon sun, stars, sky, landscape, for their own sake. But we will deal with this point later : for the present we ask whether the earth has perceptions and sensations, and if so through what vital members these would take place and by what method : this requires us to examine certain difficulties, and above all to decide whether earth could have sensation without organs, and whether this would be directed to some necessary purpose even when incidentally it might bring other results as well.

23- A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them.

This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated, selfacting, or to soul in conjunction with some other entity.

Isolated, self-acting, how is it possible ? Self-acting, it has knowledge of its own content, and this is not perception but intellection : if it is also to know things outside itself it can grasp them only in one of two ways : either it must assimilate itself to the external objects, or it must enter into relations with something that has been so assimilated.

Now as long as it remains self-centred it cannot assimilate : a single point cannot assimilate itself to an external line : even line cannot adapt itself to line in another order, line of the intellectual to line of the sensible, just as fire of the intellectual and man of the intellectual remain distinct from fire and man of the sensible. Even Nature, the soul-phase which brings man into being, does not come to identity with the man it shapes and informs : it has the faculty of dealing with the sensible, but it remains isolated, and, its task done, ignores all but the intellectual as it is itself ignored by the sensible and utterly without means of grasping it.

Suppose something visible lying at a distance : the soul sees it ; now, admitting to the full that at first only the pure idea of the thing is seized — a total without discerned part — yet in the end it becomes to the seeing soul an object whose complete detail of colour and form is known : this shows that there is something more here than the outlying thing and the soul ; for the soul is immune from experience ; there must be a third, something not thus exempt ; and it is this intermediate that accepts the impressions of shape and the like.

This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the material object so as to be an exact reproduction of its states, and it must be of the one elemental-stuff : it, thus, will exhibit the condition which the higher principle is to perceive ; and the condition must be such as to preserve something of the originating object, and yet not be identical with it : the essential vehicle of knowledge is an intermediary which, as it stands between the soul and the originating object, will, similarly, present a condition midway between the two spheres, of sense and the intellectual — linking the extremes, receiving from one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to assimilate itself to each. As an instrument by which something is to receive knowledge, it cannot be identical with either the knower or the known : but it must be apt to likeness with both — akin to the external object by its power of being affected, and to the internal, the knower, by the fact that the modification it takes becomes an idea.

If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to senseperception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of sense.

The organ must be either the body entire or some member set apart for a particular function ; thus touch for one, vision for another. The tools of craftsmanship will be seen to be intermediaries between the judging worker and the judged object, disclosing to the experimenter the particular character of the matter under investigation : thus a ruler, representing at once the straightness which is in the mind and the straightness of a plank, is used as an intermediary by which the operator proves his work.

Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere : Is it necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception is to take place should be in contact with the organ of perception, or can the process occur across space upon an object at a distance ? Thus, is the heat of a fire really at a distance from the flesh it warms, the intermediate space remaining unmodified ; is it possible to see colour over a sheer blank intervening between the colour and the eye, the organ of vision reaching to its object by its own power ?

For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the body.

24- The next question is whether perception is concerned only with need.

The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception ; sensations go with the body ; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the body to which the sensations are due ; it must be something brought about by association with the body.

Thus either sensation occurs in a soul compelled to follow upon bodily states — since every graver bodily experience reaches at last to soul — or sensation is a device by which a cause is dealt with before it becomes so great as actually to injure us or even before it has begun to make contact.

At this, sense-impressions would aim at utility. They may serve also

to knowledge, but that could be service only to some being not living in knowledge but stupefied as the result of a disaster, and the victim of a Lethe calling for constant reminding : they would be useless to any being free from either need or forgetfulness. This reflection enlarges the enquiry : it is no longer a question of earth alone, but of the whole star-system, all the heavens, the kosmos entire. For it would follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt from modification, senseperception would occur in every part having relation to any other part : in a whole, however — having relation only to itself, immune, universally self-directed and self-possessing — what perception could there be ?

Granted that the percipient must act through an organ and that this organ must be different from the object perceived, then the universe, as an All, can have (no sensation since it has) no organ distinct from object : it can have self-awareness, as we have ; but sense-perception, the constant attendant of another order, it cannot have.

Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the normal is the sense of something intruding from without : but besides this, we have the apprehension of one member by another ; why then should not the All, by means of what is stationary in it, perceive that region of itself which is in movement, that is to say the earth and the earth's content ?

Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other regions of the All ; what, then, need prevent the All from having, in some appropriate way, the perception of those changes ? In addition to that selfcontemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not have a seeing power like that of an eye able to announce to the All-Soul what has passed before it ? Even granted that it is entirely unaffected by its lower, why, still, should it not see like an eye, ensouled as it is, all lightsome ?

Still : “ eyes were not necessary to it,” we read. If this meant simply that nothing is left to be seen outside of the All, still there is the inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent it seeing what constitutes itself : if the meaning is that such self-vision could serve to no use, we may think that it has vision not as a main intention for vision's

sake but as a necessary concomitant of its characteristic nature : it is difficult to conceive why such a body should be incapable of seeing.

25- But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception of any kind : there must be a state of the soul inclining it towards the sphere of sense.

Now it is the soul’s character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere, and even though it were apt to sense-perception, this could not accompany that intention towards the highest ; to ourselves when absorbed in the Intellectual, vision and the other acts of sense are in abeyance for the time ; and, in general, any special attention blurs every other. The desire of apprehension from part to part — a subject examining itself — is merely curiosity even in beings of our own standing, and, unless for some definite purpose, is waste of energy : and the desire to apprehend something external — for the sake of a pleasant sight — is the sign of suffering or deficiency.

Smelling, tasting flavours (and such animal perceptions) may perhaps be described as mere accessories, distractions of the soul, while seeing and hearing would belong to the sun and the other heavenly bodies as incidentals to their being. This would not be unreasonable if seeing and hearing are means by which they apply themselves to their function.

But if they so apply themselves, they must have memory ; it is impossible that they should have no remembrance if they are to be benefactors, their service could not exist without memory.

26. Their knowledge of our prayers is due to what we may call an enlinking, a determined relation of things fitted into a system ; so, too, the fulfilment of the petitions ; in the art of magic all looks to this enlinkment : prayer and its answer, magic and its success, depend upon the sympathy of enchained forces.

This seems to oblige us to accord sense-perception to the earth.

But what perception ?

Why not, to begin with, that of contact-feeling, the apprehension of part by part, the apprehension of fire by the rest of the entire mass in a sensation transmitted upwards to the earth’s leading principle ? A corporeal mass (such as that of the earth) may be sluggish but is not utterly inert. Such perceptions, of course, would not be of trifles, but of the graver movement of things.

But why even of them ?

Because those gravest movements could not possibly remain unknown where there is an immanent soul.

And there is nothing against the idea that sensation in the earth exists for the sake of the human interests furthered by the earth. They would be served by means of the sympathy that has been mentioned ; petitioners would be heard and their prayers met, though in a way not ours. And the earth, both in its own interest and in that of beings distinct from itself, might have the experiences of the other senses also — for example, smell and taste where, perhaps, the scent of juices or sap might enter into its care for animal life, as in the constructing or restoring of their bodily part.

But we need not demand for earth the organs by which we, ourselves, act : not even all the animals have these ; some, without ears perceive sound.

For sight it would not need eyes — though if light is indispensable how can it see ?

That the earth contains the principle of growth must be admitted ; it is difficult not to allow in consequence that, since this vegetal principle is a member of spirit, the earth is primarily of the spiritual order ; and how can we doubt that in a spirit all is lucid ? This becomes all the more evident when we reflect that, besides being as a spirit lightsome, it is physically illuminated moving in the light of the kosmic revolution.

There is, thus, no longer any absurdity or impossibility in the notion that the soul in the earth has vision : we must, further, consider that

it is the soul of no mean body ; that in fact it is a god since certainly soul must be everywhere good.

27. If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things — or retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal principle in them — at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing : this phase of the soul is immanent in the body of the growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere lump of material.

But does the entire body of the earth similarly receive anything from the soul ?

Yes : for we must recognise that earthly material broken off from the main body differs from the same remaining continuously attached ; thus stones increase as long as they are embedded, and, from the moment they are separated, stop at the size attained.

We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries its vestige of this principle of growth, an under-phase of that entire principle which belongs not to this or that member but to the earth as a whole : next in order is the nature (the soul-phase), concerned with sensation, this not interfused (like the vegetal principle) but in contact from above : then the higher soul and the Intellectual-Principle, constituting together the being known as Hestia (Earth-Mind) and Demeter (Earth-Soul) — a nomenclature indicating the human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a divine name and nature.

28. Thus much established, we may return on our path : we have to discuss the seat of the passionate element in the human being.

Pleasures and pains — the conditions, that is, not the perception of them — and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life : are we entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion ? Are we to

consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined body or in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile necessarily taking condition within a body not dead ? Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in this case — the passionate element being one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient faculty ?

Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal, pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it — there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed — but in general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver and body — the seat, because the spring.

But in this other case, of passion, we have to settle what it is, what form of soul it represents : does it act by communicating a lower phase of itself to the regions round the heart, or is it set in motion by the higher soul-phase impinging upon the Conjoint (the animate-total), or is there, in such conditions no question of soul-phase, but simply passion itself producing the act or state of (for example) anger ?

Evidently the first point for enquiry is what passion is.

Now we all know that we feel anger not only over our own bodily suffering, but also over the conduct of others, as when some of our associates act against our right and due, and in general over any unseemly conduct. It is at once evident that anger implies some subject capable of sensation and of judgement : and this consideration suffices to show that the vegetal nature is not its source, that we must look for its origin elsewhere.

On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states ; people in whom the blood and the bile are intensely active are as quick to anger as those of cool blood and no bile are slow ; animals grow angry though they pay attention to no outside combinations except where they recognise physical danger ; all this forces us again to place the seat of anger in the strictly corporeal element, the principle by which the animal

organism is held together. Similarly, that anger or its first stirring depends upon the condition of the body follows from the consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than well, fasting than after food : it would seem that the bile and the blood, acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions.

Our conclusion (reconciling with these corporeal facts the psychic or mental element indicated) will identify, first, some suffering in the body answered by a movement in the blood or in the bile : sensation ensues and the soul, brought by means of the representative faculty to partake in the condition of the affected body, is directed towards the cause of the pain : the reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above — the phase not inbound with body — acts in its own mode when the breach of order has become manifest to it : it calls in the alliance of that ready passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil disclosed.

Thus anger has two phases ; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by which the body becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain : this principle it was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness and thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states — churlish and angry under stress of environment — so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition.

That this soul- vestige, which determines the movements of passion is of one essence (consubstantial) with the other is evident from the consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal pleasures, especially those that wholly repudiate the body, are the least prone to anger and to all experiences not rising from reason.

That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present in trees and yet passion be lacking in them cannot surprise us since they are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If the occasions of anger presented themselves where there is no power of sensation there

could be no more than a physical ebullition with something approaching to resentment (an unconscious reaction) ; where sensation exists there is at once something more ; the recognition of wrong and of the necessary defence carries with it the intentional act.

But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring faculty and a passionate faculty — the first identical with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the blood or bile or upon the entire living organism — such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the relation of earlier phase to derivative.

This difficulty is reasonably met by considering that both faculties are derivatives and making the division apply to them in so far as they are new productions from a common source ; for the division applies to movements of desire as such, not to the essence from which they rise.

That essence is not, of its own nature, desire ; it is, however, the force which by consolidating itself with the active manifestation proceeding from it makes the desire a completed thing. And that derivative which culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought of as a vestigephase lodged about the heart, since the heart is not the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the blood which is concerned in the movements of passion.

29. But — keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it — how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle ?

For a brief space there is ; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them : similarly hair and nails still grow on the dead ; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time after ; these are signs of a life force still indwelling.

Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of the higher and lower phases : when the sun withdraws there goes with it not merely the light emanating from it, guided by it, attached to it,

but also at once that light seen upon obliquely situated objects, a light secondary to the sun’s and cast upon things outside of its path (reflected light showing as colour ) ; the two are not identical and yet they disappear together.

But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration ?

The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk into body.

No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated ; that much is certain : but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into its source or is simply no longer in existence.

How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been ?

But what really was it ? We must remember that what we know as colour belongs to bodies by the fact that they throw off light, yet when corruptible bodies are transformed the colour disappears and we no more ask where the colour of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is.

Still : the shape is merely a configuration, like the he of the hands clenched or spread ; the colour is no such accidental but is more like, for example, sweetness : when a material substance breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception.

May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies that have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total, made up of all that is characteristic, disappears ?

It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law (of our own nature), so that what we call qualities do not actually exist in the substances.

But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon the composition of the body ; it would no longer be the Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for instance, the colours of a bird’s variegated plumage ; these principles would merely blend and

place them, or if they produced them would draw also on the full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, minly, of showing m the formed bodies something very different from what appears in the

heavens.

But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the bodies remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered, then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body, the light both that in immediate contact and any other attached to that— should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going as in the

coming.

But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the secondary phases follow their priors— the derivatives their sources— or whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from its predecessors and able to stand alone ; in a word, whether no part of the soul is sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously one soul and many, and, if so, by what mode ; this question, however, is treated elsewhere.

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living body : if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must : if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the case of the vestige of light ; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting upon the remote object.

30. We have declared acts of memory unnecessary to the stars, but we allow them perceptions, hearing as well as seeing ; for we said that prayers to them were heard — our supplications to the sun, and those, even, of certain other men to the stars. It has moreover been the belief that in answer to prayer they accomplish many human wishes, and this so light-heartedly that they become not merely helpers towards good but even accomplices in evil. Since this matter lies in our way it must be considered, for it carries with it grave difficulties that very much

trouble those who cannot think of divine beings as, thus, authors or auxiliaries in unseemliness even including the connections of loose carnality.

In view of all this it is especially necessary to study the question with which we began, that of memory in the heavenly bodies.

It is obvious that, if they act on our prayers and if this action is not immediate, but with delay and after long periods of time, they remember the prayers men address to them. This is something that our former argument did not concede ; though it appeared plausible that, for their better service of mankind, they might have been endowed with such a memory as we ascribed to Demeter and Hestia — or to the latter alone if only the earth is to be thought of as beneficent to man.

We have, then, to attempt to show : firstly, how acts implying memory in the heavenly bodies are to be reconciled with our system as distinguished from those others which allow them memory as a matter of course ; secondly, what vindication of those gods of the heavenly spheres is possible in the matter of seemingly anomalous acts — a question which philosophy cannot ignore — then too, since the charge goes so far, we must ask whether credence is to be given to those who hold that the entire heavenly system can be put under spell by man’s skill and audacity : our discussion will also deal with the spirit-beings and how they may be thought to minister to these ends — unless indeed the part played by the Celestials prove to be settled by the decision upon the first questions.

Our problem embraces all act and all experience throughout the entire kosmos — whether due to nature, in the current phrase, or effected by art. The natural proceeds, we must hold, from the All towards its members and from the members to the All, or from member to other member : the artificial either remains, as it began, within the limit of the art — attaining finality in the artificial product alone — or is the expression of an art which calls to its aid natural forces and agencies, and so sets up act and experience within the sphere of the natural.

When I speak of the act and experience of the All I mean the total effect of the entire kosmic circuit upon itself and upon its members . for by its motion it sets up certain states both within itself and upon its parts, upon the bodies that move within it, and upon all that it communicates to those other parts of it, the things of our earth.

The action of part upon part is manifest ; there are the relations and operations of the sun, both towards the other spheres and towards the things of earth ; and again relations among elements of the sun itself, of other heavenly bodies, of earthly things and of things in the other stars, demand investigation.

As for the arts : Such as look to house building and the like are exhausted when that object is achieved ; there are again those medicine, farming, and other serviceable pursuits — which deal helpfully with natural products, seeking to bring them to natural efficiency , and there is a class — rhetoric, music and every other method of swaying mind or soul, with their power of modifying for better or for worse and we have to ascertain what these arts come to and what kind of power lies in them.

On all these points, in so far as they bear on our present purpose, we must do what we can to work out some approximate explanation.

It is abundantly evident that the Circuit is a cause ; it modifies, firstly, itself and its own content, and undoubtedly also it tells on the terrestrial, not merely in accordance with bodily conditions but also by the states of the soul it sets up ; and each of its members has an operation upon the terrestrial and in general upon all the lower.

Whether there is a return action of the lower upon the higher need not trouble us now : for the moment we are to seek, as far as discussion can exhibit it, the method by which action takes place ; and we do not challenge the opinions universally or very generally entertained.

We take the question back to the initial act of causation. It cannot be admitted that either heat or cold and the like — what are known as the primal qualities of the elements — or any admixture of these qualities, should be the first causes we are seeking ; equally inacceptable, that while the sun’s action is all by heat, there is another member of the

Circuit operating wholly by cold — incongruous in the heavens and in a fiery body — nor can we think of some other star operating by liquid fire.

Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences — determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a reigning heat or cold — does that give us a reasonable explanation of envy, jealousy, acts of violence ? Or, if it does, what, at any rate, are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle blood, treasure trove ?

An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from any corporeal quality that could enter the body and soul of a living thing from the elements : and it is equally impossible that the will of the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars, templestrippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending themselves to disgusting actions : that is not merely unlike gods ; it is unlike mediocre men ; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained.

32. If we can trace neither to material agencies (blind elements) nor to any deliberate intention the influences from without which reach to us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general, what cause satisfactory to reason remains ?

The secret is : firstly, that this All is one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul, which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each ; secondly, that every separate thing is an integral part of this All by belonging to the total material fabric — unrestrictedly a part by bodily membership, while, in so far as it has also

some participation in the All-Soul, it possesses in that degree spiritual membership as well, perfect where participation is in the All-Soul alone, partial where there is also a union with a lower soul.

But, with all this gradation, each several thing is affected by all else in virtue of the common participation in the All, and to the degree of its own participation.

This One-All, therefore, is a sympathetic total and stands as one living being ; the far is near ; it happens as in one animal with its separate parts : talon, horn, finger, and any other member are not continuous and yet are effectively near ; intermediate parts feel nothing, but at a distant point the local experience is known. Correspondent things not side by side but separated by others placed between, the sharing of experience by dint of like condition — this is enough to ensure that the action of any distant member be transmitted to its distant fellow. Where all is a living thing summing to a unity there is nothing so remote in point of place as not to be near by virtue of a nature which makes of the one living being a sympathetic organism.

Where there is similarity between a thing affected and the thing affecting it, the affection is not alien ; where the affecting cause is dissimilar the affection is alien and unpleasant.

Such hurtful action of member upon member within one living being need not seem surprising : within ourselves, in our own activities, one constituent can be harmed by another ; bile and animal spirit seem to press and goad other members of the human total : in the vegetal realm one part hurts another by sucking the moisture from it. And in the All there is something analogous to bile and animal spirit, as to other such constituents. For visibly it is not merely one living organism ; it is also a manifold. In virtue of the unity the individual is preserved by the All : in virtue of the multiplicity of things having various contacts, difference often brings about mutual hurt ; one thing, seeking its own need, is detrimental to another ; what is at once related and different is seized as food ; each thing, following its own natural path, wrenches from something else what is serviceable to itself, and destroys or checks in its own interest whatever is becoming a menace to it : each, occupied with

its peculiar function, assists no doubt anything able to profit by that, but harms or destroys what is too weak to withstand the onslaught of its action, like fire withering things round it or greater animals in their march thrusting aside or trampling under foot the smaller.

The rise of all these forms of being and their modification, whether to their loss or gain, all goes to the fulfilment of the natural unhindered life of that one living being : for it was not possible for the single thing to be as if it stood alone ; the final purpose could not serve to that only end, intent upon the partial : the concern must be for the whole to which each item is member : things are different both from each other and in their own stages, therefore cannot be complete in one unchanging form of life ; nor could anything remain utterly without modification if the All is to be durable ; for the permanence of an All demands varying forms.

33- The Circuit does not go by chance but under the Reason-Principle of the living whole ; therefore there must be a harmony between cause and caused ; there must be some order ranging things to each other's purpose, or in due relation to each other : every several configuration within the Circuit must be accompanied by a change in the position and condition of things subordinate to it, which thus by their varied rhythmic movement make up one total dance-play.

In our dance-plays there are outside elements contributing to the total effect — fluting, singing, and other linked accessories — and each of these changes in each new movement : there is no need to dwell on these ; their significance is obvious. But besides this there is the fact that the limbs of the dancer cannot possibly keep the same positions in every figure ; they adapt themselves to the plan, bending as it dictates, one lowered, another raised, one active, another resting as the set pattern changes. The dancer's mind is on his own purpose ; his limbs are submissive to the dance-movement which they accomplish to the end, so that the connoisseur can explain that this or that figure is the motive for the lifting, bending, concealment, effacing, of the various members of the body ; and in all this the executant does not choose the particular

motions for their own sake ; the whole play of the entire person dictates the necessary position to each limb and member as it serves to the plan.

Now this is the mode in which the heavenly beings (the diviner members of the All) must be held to be causes wherever they have any action, and, when they do not act, to indicate.

Or, a better statement : the entire kosmos puts its entire life into act, moving its major members with its own action and unceasingly setting them in new positions ; by the relations thus established, of these members to each other and to the whole, and by the different figures they make together, the minor members in turn are brought under the system as in the movements of some one living being, so that they vary according to the relations, positions, configurations : the beings thus co-ordinated are not the causes ; the cause is the co-ordinating All ; at the same time it is not to be thought of as seeking to do one thing and actually doing another, for there is nothing external to it since it is the cause by actually being all : on the one side the configurations, on the other the inevitable effects of those configurations upon a living being moving as a unit and, again, upon a living being (an All) thus by its nature conjoined and concomitant and, of necessity, at once subject and object to its own activities.

34- For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the body of the All should be yielded to its action, we ought to make sure that we submit only within limits, realising that the entire man is not thus bound to it : intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters but in part retain their personality, and are thus less absolutely at beck and call, as not being slaves, not utterly chattels.

The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be produced as they are, since the moving bodies are not of equal speed.

Now the movement is guided by a Reason-Principle ; the relations of the living whole are altered in consequence ; here in our own realm all that happens reacts in sympathy to the events of that higher sphere : it becomes, therefore, advisable to ask whether we are to think of this

realm as following upon the higher by agreement, or to attribute to the configurations the powers underlying the events, and whether such powers would be vested in the configurations simply or in the relations of the particular items.

It will be said that one position of one given thing has by no means an identical effect — whether of indication or of causation — in its relation to another and still less to any group of others, since each several being seems to have a natural tendency (or receptivity) of its own.

The truth is that the configuration of any given group means merely the relationship of the several parts, and, changing the members, the relationship remains the same.

But, this being so, the power will belong, not to the positions but to the beings holding those positions ?

To both taken together. For as things change their relations, and as any one thing changes place, there is a change of power.

But what power ? That of causation or of indication ?

To this double thing— the particular configuration of particular beings — -there accrues often the two-fold power, that of causation and that of indication, but sometimes only that of indication. Thus we are obliged to attribute powers both to the configuration and to the beings entering into them. In mime dancers each of the hands has its own power, and so with all the limbs ; the relative positions have much power ; and, for a third power, there is that of the accessories and concomitants ; underlying the action of the performers’ limbs, there are such items as the clutched fingers and the muscles and veins following suit.

35- But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter requires a more definite handling. How can there be a difference of power between one triangular configuration and another ?

How can there be the exercise of power from man to man ; under what law, and within what limits ?

The difficulty is that we are unable to attribute causation either to the bodies of the heavenly beings or to their wills : their bodies are

excluded because the product transcends the causative power of body , their will because it would be unseemly to suppose divine beings to produce unseemliness.

Let us keep in mind what we have laid down : —

The being we are considering is a living unity, and therefore necessarily self-sympathetic : it is under a law of reason and therefore the unfolding process of its life must be self-accordant : that life has no haphazard, but knows only harmony and ordinance : all the groupings follow reason : all single beings within it, all the members of this living whole in their choral dance are under a rule of Number.

Holding this in mind we are forced to certain conclusions : in the expressive act of the All are comprised equally the configurations of its members and these members themselves, minor as well as major entering into the configurations. This is the mode of life of the All ; and its powers work together to this end under the Nature in which the producing agency within the Reason-Principles has brought them into being. The groupings (within the All) are themselves in the nature of Reason-Principles since they are the out-spacing of a living-being, its reasondetermined rhythms and conditions, and the entities thus spaced-out and grouped to pattern are its various members : then again there are the powers of the living being — distinct these, too — which may be considered as parts of it, always excluding deliberate will which is external to it, not contributory to the nature of the living All.

The will of any organic thing is one ; but the distinct powers which go to constitute it are far from being one : yet all the several wills look to the object aimed at by the one will of the whole : for the desire which the one member entertains for another is a desire within the All : a part seeks to acquire something outside itself, but that external is another part of which it feels the need : the anger of a moment of annoyance is directed to something alien, growth draws on something outside, all birth and becoming has to do with the external ; but all this external is inevitably something included among fellow members of the system : through these its limbs and members, the All is bringing this activity into being while in itself it seeks — or better, contemplates — The Good.

Right will, then, the will which stands above accidental experience, seeks The Good and thus acts to the same end with it. When men serve another, many of their acts are done under order, but the good servant is the one whose purpose is in union with his master’s.

In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we can but believe that though the heavenly body is intent upon the Supreme yet — to keep to the sun — its warming of terrestrial things, and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of Nature. Each of the heavenly bodies, similarly, gives forth a power, involuntary, by its mere radiation : all things become one entity, grouped by this diffusion of power, and so bring about wide changes of condition ; thus the very groupings have power since their diversity produces diverse conditions ; that the grouped beings themselves have also their efficiency is clear since they produce differently according to the different membership of the groups.

That configuration has power in itself is within our own observation here. Why else do certain groupments, in contradistinction to others, terrify at sight though there has been no previous experience of evil from them ? If some men are alarmed by a particular groupment and others by quite a different one, the reason can be only that the configurations themselves have efficacy, each upon a certain type — an efficacy which cannot fail to reach anything naturally disposed to be impressed by it, so that in one groupment things attract observation which in another pass without effect.

If we are told that beauty is the motive of attraction, does not this mean simply that the power of appeal to this or that mind depends upon pattern, configuration ? How can we allow power to colour and none to configuration ? It is surely untenable that an entity should have existence and yet have no power to effect : existence carries with it either acting or answering to action, some beings having action alone, others both.

At the same time there are powers apart from pattern : and, in things of our realm, there are many powers dependent not upon heat

and cold but upon forces due to differing properties, forces which have been shaped to ideal-quality by the action of Reason-Principles and communicate in the power of Nature : thus the natural properties of stones and the efficacy of plants produce many astonishing results.

36- The Universe is immensely varied, the container of all the Reason-Principles and of infinite and diverse efficacies. In man, we are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied powers, and so with each separate part of hand and of foot ; and there is no member or organ without its own definite function, some separate power of its own — a diversity of which we can have no notion unless our studies take that direction. What is true of man must be true of the universe, and much more, since all this order is but a representation of the higher : it must contain an untellably wonderful variety of powers, with which, of course, the bodies moving through the heavens will be most richly endowed.

We cannot think of the universe as a soulless habitation, however vast and varied, a thing of materials easily told off, kind by kind — wood and stone and whatever else there be, all blending into a kosmos : it must be alert throughout, every member living by its own life, nothing that can have existence failing to exist within it.

And here we have the solution of the problem, “ How an ensouled living form can include the soulless ” : for this account allows grades of living within the whole, grades to some of which we deny life only because they are not perceptibly self -moved : in the truth, all of these have a hidden life ; and the thing whose life is patent to sense is made up of things which do not live to sense, but, none the less, confer upon their resultant total wonderful powers towards living. Man would never have reached to his actual height if the powers by which he acts were the completely soulless elements of his being ; similarly the All could not have its huge life unless its every member had a life of its own ; this however does not necessarily imply a deliberate intention ; the All has no need of intention to bring about its acts : it is older than intention, and therefore its powers have many servitors.

37- We mast not rob the universe of any factor in its being. If any of our theorists of to-day seek to explain the action of fire — or of any other such form, thought of as an agent — they will find themselves in difficulties unless they recognise the act to be the object’s function in the All, and give a like explanation of other natural forces in common use.

We do not habitually examine or in any way question the normal : we set to doubting and working out identifications when we are confronted by any display of power outside everyday experience : we wonder at a novelty and we wonder at the customary when anyone brings forward some single object and explains to our ignorance the efficacy vested in it.

Some such power, not necessarily accompanied by reason, every single item possesses ; for each has been brought into being and into shape within a universe ; each in its kind has partaken of soul through the medium of the ensouled All, as being embraced by that definitely constituted thing : each then is a member of an animate being which can include nothing that is less than a full member (and therefore a sharer in the total of power) — though one thing is of mightier efficacy than another, and, especially members of the heavenly system than the objects of earth, since they draw upon a purer nature — and these powers are widely productive. But productivity does not comport intention in what appears to be the source of the thing accomplished: there is efficacy, too, where there is no will: even attention is not necessary to the communication of power; the very transmission of soul may proceed without either.

A living being, we know, may spring from another without any intention, and as without loss so without consciousness in the begetter : in fact any intention the animal exercised could be a cause of propagation only on condition of being identical with the animal (i.e. the theory would make intention a propagative animal, not a mental act ?)

And, if intention is unnecessary to the propagation of life, much more so is attention.

38- Whatever springs automatically from the All out of that distinctive life of its own, and, in addition to that self-moving activity, whatever is due to some specific agency — for example, to prayers, simple or taking the form of magic incantations — this entire range of production is to be referred, not to each such single cause, but to the nature of the thing produced (i.e. to a certain natural tendency in the product to exist with its own quality).

All that forwards life or some other useful purpose is to be ascribed to the transmission characteristic of the All ; it is something flowing from the major of an integral to its minor. Where we think we see the transmission of some force unfavourable to the production of living beings, the flaw must be found in the inability of the subject to take in what would serve it : for what happens does not happen upon a void ; there is always specific form and quality ; anything that could be affected must have an underlying nature definite and characterised. The inevitable blendings, further, have their constructive effect, every element adding something contributory to the life. Then again some influence may come into play at the time when the forces of a beneficent nature are not acting : the co-ordination of the entire system of things does not always allow to each several entity everything that it needs : and further we ourselves add a great deal to what is transmitted to us.

None the less all entwines into a unity : and there is something wonderful in the agreement holding among these various things of varied source, even of sources frankly opposite ; the secret lies in a variety within a unity. When by the standard of the better kind among things of process anything falls short — the reluctance of its material substratum having prevented its perfect shaping under idea — it may be thought of as being deficient in that noble element whose absence brings to shame : the thing is a blend, something due to the high beings, an alloy from the underlying nature, something added by the self.

Because all is ever being knit, all brought to culmination in unity, therefore all events are indicated ; but this does not make virtue a matter of compulsion ; its spontaneity is equally inwoven into the

ordered system by the general law that the things of this sphere are pendant from the higher, that the content of our universe lies in the hands of the diviner beings in whom our world is participant.

39- We cannot, then, refer all that exists to Reason-Principles inherent in the seed of things (Spermatic Reasons) ; the universe is to be traced further back, to the more primal forces, to the principles by which that seed itself takes shape. Such spermatic principles cannot be the containers of things which arise independently of them, such as what enters from Matter (the reasonless) into membership of the All, or what is due to the mere interaction of existences.

No : the Reason-Principle of the universe would be better envisaged as a wisdom uttering order and law to a state, in full knowledge of what the citizens will do and why, and in perfect adaptation of law to custom ; thus the code is made to thread its way in and out through all their conditions and actions with the honour or infamy earned by their conduct ; and all coalesces by a kind of automatism.

The signification which exists is not a first intention ; it arises incidentally by the fact that in a given collocation the members will tell something of each other : all is unity sprung of unity and therefore one thing is known by way of another other, a cause in the light of the caused, the sequent as rising from its precedent, the compound from the constituents which must make themselves known in the linked total.

If all this is sound, at once our doubts fall and we need no longer ask whether the transmission of any evil is due to the gods.

For, in sum : Firstly, intentions are not to be considered as the operative causes ; necessities inherent in the nature of things account for all that comes from the other realm ; it is a matter of the inevitable relation of parts, and, besides, all is the sequence to the living existence of a unity. Secondly, there is the large contribution made by the individual. Thirdly, each several communication, good in itself, takes another quality in the resultant combination. Fourthly, the life in the kosmos does not look to the individual but to the whole. Finally, there

is Matter, the under-lie, which being given one thing receives it as something else, and is unable to make the best of what it takes.

40. But magic spells ; how can their efficacy be explained ?

By the reigning sympathy and by the fact in Nature that there is an agreement of like forces and an opposition of unlike, and by the diversity of those multitudinous powers which converge in the one living universe.

There is much drawing and spell-binding dependent on no interfering machination ; the true magic is internal to the All, its attractions and, not less, its repulsions. Here is the primal mage and sorcerer — discovered by men who thenceforth turn those same ensorcellations and magic arts upon one another.

Love is given in Nature ; the qualities inducing love induce mutual approach : hence there has arisen an art of magic love-drawing whose practitioners, by the force of contact implant in others a new temperament, one favouring union as being informed with love ; they knit soul to soul as they might train two separate trees towards each other. The magician too draws on these patterns of power, and by ranging himself also into the pattern is able tranquilly to possess himself of these forces with whose nature and purpose he has become identified. Supposing the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations and invocations would no longer avail to draw up or to call down ; but as things are he operates from no outside standground, he pulls knowing the pull of everything towards any other thing in the living system.

The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns or tragic sounds — for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the performers. Similarly with regard to prayers ; there is no question of a will that grants ; the powers that answer to incantations do not act by will ; a

human being fascinated by a snake has neither perception nor sensation of what is happening ; he knows only after he has been caught, and his highest mind is never caught. In other words, some influence falls from the being addressed upon the petitioner — or upon someone else — but that being itself, sun or star, perceives nothing of it all.

41- The prayer is answered by the mere fact that part and other part are wrought to one tone like a musical string which, plucked at one end, vibrates at the other also. Often, too, the sounding of one string awakens what might pass for a perception in another, the result of their being in harmony and tuned to one musical scale ; now, if the vibration in a lyre affects another by virtue of the sympathy existing between them, then certainly in the All — even though it is constituted in contraries — there must be one melodic system ; for it contains its unisons as well, and its entire content, even to those contraries, is a kinship.

Thus, too, whatever is hurtful to man — the passionate spirit, for example, drawn by the medium of the gall into the principle seated in the liver — comes with no intention of hurt ; it is simply as one transferring fire to another might innocently bum him : no doubt, since he actually set the other on fire he is a cause, but only as the attacking fire itself is a cause, that is by the merely accidental fact that the person to whom the fire was being brought blundered in taking it.

42. It follows that, for the purposes which have induced this discussion, the stars have no need of memory or of any sense of petitions addressed to them ; they give no such voluntary attention to prayers as some have thought : it is sufficient that, in virtue simply of the nature of parts and of parts within a whole, something proceeds from them whether in answer to prayer or without prayer. We have the analogy of many powers — as in some one living organism — which, independently of plan or as the result of applied method, act without any collaboration of the will : one

member or function is helped or hurt by another in the mere play of

natural forces ; and the art of doctor or magic healer will compel some one centre to purvey something of its own power to another centre. Just so the All : it purveys spontaneously, but it purveys also under spell ; some entity (acting like the healer) is concerned for a member situated within itself and summons the All which, then, pours in its gift ; it gives to its own part by the natural law we have cited since the petitioner is no alien to it. Even though the suppliant be a sinner, the answering need not shock us ; sinners draw from the brooks ; and the giver does not know of the gift but simply gives — though we must remember that all is one woof and the giving is always consonant with the order of the universe. There is, therefore, no necessity by ineluctable law that one who has helped himself to what lies open to all should receive his deserts then and there.

In sum, we must hold that the All cannot be affected ; its leading principle remains for ever immune whatsoever happens to its members ; the affection is really present to them, but since nothing existent can be at strife with the total of existence, no such affection conflicts with its impassivity.

Thus the stars, in so far as they are parts, can be affected and yet are immune on various counts ; their will, like that of the All, is untouched, just as their bodies and their characteristic natures are beyond all reach of harm ; if they give by means of their souls, their souls lose nothing ; their bodies remain unchanged or, if there is ebb or inflow, it is of something going unfelt and coming unawares.

43- And the Proficient (the Sage), how does he stand with regard to magic and philtre-spells ?

In the soul he is immune from magic ; his reasoning part cannot be touched by it, he cannot be perverted. But there is in him the unreasoning element which comes from the (material) All, and in this he can be affected, or rather this can be affected in him. Philtre-Love, however, he will not know, for that would require the consent of the higher soul to the trouble stirred in the lower. And, just as the

unreasoning element responds to the call of incantation, so the adept himself will dissolve those horrible powers by counter-incantations. Death, disease, any experience within the material sphere, these may result, yes ; for anything that has membership in the All may be affected by another member, or by the universe of members ; but the essential man is beyond harm.

That the effects of magic should be not instantaneous but developed is only in accord with Nature’s way.

Even the Celestials, the Daimones, are not on their unreasoning side immune : there is nothing against ascribing acts of memory and experiences of sense to them, in supposing them to accept the traction of methods laid up in the natural order, and to give hearing to petitioners ; this is especially true of those of them that are closest to this sphere, and in the degree of their concern about it.

For everything that looks to another is under spell to that : what we look to, draws us magically. Only the self-intent go free of magic. Hence every action has magic as its source, and the entire life of the practical man is a bewitchment : we move to that only which has wrought a fascination upon us. This is indicated where we read ” for the burgher of great-hearted Erechtheus has a pleasant face (but you should see him naked ; then you would be cautious).” For what conceivably turns a man to the external ? He is drawn, drawn by the arts not of magicians but of the natural order which administers the deceiving draught and links this to that, not in local contact but in the fellowship of the philtre.

44- Contemplation alone stands untouched by magic ; no man selfgathered falls to a spell ; for he is one, and that unity is all he perceives, so that his reason is not beguiled but holds the due course, fashioning its own career and accomplishing its task.

In the other way of life, it is not the essential man that gives the impulse ; it is not the reason ; the unreasoning also acts as a principle, and this is the first condition of the misfortune. Caring for children, planning marriage — everything that works as bait, taking value by

dint of desire — these all tug obviously : so it is with our action, sometimes stirred, not reasonably, by a certain spirited temperament, sometimes as foolishly by greed ; political interests, the siege of office, all betray a forth-summoning lust of power ; action for security springs from fear ; action for gain, from desire ; action undertaken for the sake of sheer necessities — that is, for supplying the insufficiency of nature — indicates, manifestly, the cajoling force of nature to the safeguarding of life.

We may be told that no such magic underlies good action, since, at that, Contemplation itself, certainly a good action, implies a magic attraction.

The answer is that there is no magic when actions recognised as good are performed upon sheer necessity with the recollection that the veritable good is elsewhere ; this is simply knowledge of need ; it is not a bewitchment binding the life to this sphere or to any thing alien ; all is permissible under duress of human nature, and in the spirit of adaptation to the needs of existence in general — or even to the needs of the individual existence, since it certainly seems reasonable to fit oneself into life rather than to withdraw from it.

When, on the contrary, the agent falls in love with what is good in those actions, and, cheated by the mere track and trace of the Authentic Good makes them his own, then, in his pursuit of a lower good, he is the victim of magic. For all dalliance with what wears the mask of the authentic, all attraction towards that mere semblance, tells of a mind misled by the spell of forces pulling towards unreality.

The sorcery of Nature is at work in this ; to pursue the non-good as a good, drawn in unreasoning impulse by its specious appearance : it is to be led unknowing down paths unchosen ; and what can we call that but magic ?

Alone in immunity from magic is he who, though drawn by the alien parts of his total being, withholds his assent to their standards of worth, recognising the good only where his authentic self sees and knows it, neither drawn nor pursuing, but tranquilly possessing and so never charmed away.

45- From this discussion it becomes perfectly clear that the individual member of the All contributes to that All in the degree of its kind and condition ; thus it acts and is acted upon. In any particular animal each of the limbs and organs, in the measure of its kind and purpose, aids the entire being by service performed and counts in rank and utility : it gives what is in it its gift and takes from its fellows in the degree of receptive power belonging to its kind ; there is something like a common sensitiveness linking the parts, and in the orders in which each of the parts is also animate, each will have, in addition to its rank as part, the very particular functions of a living being.

We have learned, further, something of our human standing ; we know that we too accomplish within the All a work not confined to the activity and receptivity of body in relation to body ; we know that we bring to it that higher nature of ours, linked as we are by affinities within us towards the answering affinities outside us ; becoming by our soul and the conditions of our kind thus linked — or, better, being linked by Nature — with our next highest in the celestial or daemonic realm, and thence onwards with those above the Celestials, we cannot fail to manifest our quality. Still, we are not all able to offer the same gifts or to accept identically : if we do not possess good, we cannot bestow it ; nor can we ever purvey any good thing to one that has no power of receiving good. Anyone that adds his evil to the total of things is known for what he is and, in accordance with his kind, is pressed down into the evil which he has made his own, and hence, upon death, goes to whatever region fits his quality — and all this happens under the pull of natural forces.

For the good man, the giving and the taking and the changes of state go quite the other way ; the particular tendencies of the nature, we may put it, transpose the cords (so that we are moved by that only which, in Plato’s metaphor of the puppets, draws towards the best).

Thus this universe of ours is a wonder of power and wisdom, everything by a noiseless road coming to pass according to a law which none may elude — which the base man never conceives though it is leading

him, all unknowingly, to that place in the All where his lot must be cast — which the just man knows, and, knowing, sets out to the place he must, understanding, even as he begins the journey, where he is to be housed at the end, and having the good hope that he will be with gods.

In a living being of small scope the parts vary but slightly, and have but a faint individual consciousness, and, unless possibly in a few and for a short time, are not themselves alive. But in a living universe, of high expanse, where every entity has vast scope and many of the members have life, there must be wider movement and greater changes. We see the sun and the moon and the other stars shifting place and course in an ordered progression. It is therefore within reason that the souls, also, of the All should have their changes, not retaining unbrokenly the same quality, but ranged in some analogy with their action and experience — some taking rank as head and some as foot in a disposition consonant with the Universal Being which has its degrees in better and less good. A soul, which neither chooses the highest that is here, nor has lent itself to the lowest, is one which has abandoned another, a purer, place, taking this sphere in free election.

The punishments of wrong-doing are like the treatment of diseased parts of the body — here, medicines to knit sundered flesh ; there, amputations ; elsewhere, change of environment and condition — and the penalties are planned to bring health to the All by settling every member in the fitting place : and this health of the All requires that one man be made over anew and another, sick here, be taken hence to where he shall be weakly no longer.

Ennead IV, Treatise 5

i. We undertook to discuss the question whether sight is possible in the absence of any intervening medium, such as air or some other form of what is known as transparent body : this is the time and place.

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur

PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL 103

only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. Senseperception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap.

The knowledge, then, is realised by means of bodily organs : through these, which (in the embodied soul) are almost of one growth with it, being at least its continuations, it comes into something like unity with the alien, since this mutual approach brings about a certain degree of identity (which is the basis of knowledge).

Admitting, then, that some contact with an object is necessary for knowing it, the question of a medium falls to the ground in the case of things identified by any form of touch ; but in the case of sight — we leave hearing over for the present — we are still in doubt ; is there need of some bodily substance between the eye and the illumined object ?

No : such an intervening material may be a favouring circumstance, but essentially it adds nothing to seeing power.

Dense bodies, such as clay, actually prevent sight ; the less material the intervening substance is, the more clearly we see ; the intervening substance, then, is a hindrance, or, if not that, at least not a help.

It will be objected that vision implies that whatever intervenes between seen and seer must first (and progressively) experience the object and be, as it were, shaped to it ; we will be reminded that (vision is not a direct and single relation between agent and object, but is the perception of something radiated since) anyone facing to the object from the side opposite to ourselves sees it equally ; we will be asked to deduce that if all the space intervening between seen and seer did not carry the impression of the object we could not receive it.

But all the need is met when the impression reaches that which is adapted to receive it ; there is no need for the intervening space to be impressed. If it is, the impression will be of quite another order : the rod between the fisher’s hand and the torpedo fish is not affected in the same way as the hand that feels the shock. And yet there too, if rod

and line did not intervene, the hand would not be affected — though even that may be questioned, since after all the fisherman, we are told, is numbed if the torpedo merely lies in his net.

The whole matter seems to bring us back to that sympathy of which we have treated. If a certain thing is of a nature to be sympathetically affected by another in virtue of some similitude between them, then anything intervening, not sharing in that similitude, will not be affected, or at least not similarly. If this be so, anything naturally disposed to be affected will take the impression more vividly in the absence of intervening substance, even of some substance capable, itself, of being affected.

2. If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the fight leading progressively to the illumined object, then by the very hypothesis one intervening substance, the fight, is indispensable : but if the illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent operating certain changes, some such change might very well impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium ; this all the more, since as things are the intervening substance, which actually does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of contact with the eye (and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision).

Those who have made vision a forth-going act (and not an in-coming from the object) need not postulate an intervening substance — unless, indeed, to provide against the ray from the eye failing on its path — but this is a ray of fight and fight flies straight. Those who make vision depend upon resistance are obliged to postulate an intervening substance.

The champions of the image, with its transit through a void, are seeking the way of least resistance ; but since the entire absence of intervenient gives a still easier path they will not oppose that hypothesis.

So, too, those that explain vision by sympathy must recognise that an intervening substance will be a hindrance as tending to check or block or enfeeble that sympathy ; this theory, especially, requires the admission that any intervenient, and particularly one of kindred nature,

must blunt the perception by itself absorbing part of the activity. Apply fire to a body continuous through and through, and no doubt the core will be less affected than the surface : but where we are dealing with the sympathetic parts of one living being, there will scarcely be less sensation because of the intervening substance, or, if there should be, the degree of sensation will still be proportionate to the nature of the separate part, with the intervenient acting merely as a certain limitation ; this, though, will not be the case where the element introduced is of a kind to overleap the bridge.

But this is saying that the sympathetic quality of the universe depends upon its being one living thing, and that our amenability to experience depends upon our belonging integrally to that unity ; would it not follow that continuity is a condition of any perception of a remote object ?

The explanation is that continuity and its concomitant, the bridging substance, come into play because a living being must be a continuous thing, but that, none the less, the receiving of impression is not an essentially necessary result of continuity ; if it were, everything would receive such impression from everything else, and if thing is affected by thing in various separate orders, there can be no further question of any universal need of intervening substance.

Why it should be specially requisite in the act of seeing would have to be explained : in general, an object passing through the air does not affect it beyond dividing it ; when a stone falls, the air simply yields ; nor is it reasonable to explain the natural direction of movement by resistance ; to do so would bring us to the absurdity that resistance accounts for the upward movement of fire, which, on the contrary, overcomes the resistance of the air by its own essentially quick energy. If we are told that the resistance is brought more swiftly into play by the very swiftness of the ascending body, that would be a mere accidental circumstance, not a cause of the upward motion : in trees the upthrust from the root depends on no such external propulsion ; we, too, in our movements cleave the air and are in no wise forwarded by its resistance ; it simply flows in from behind to fill the void we make.

If the severance of the air by such bodies leaves it unaffected, why must there be any severance before the images of sight can reach us ?

And, further, once we reject the theory that these images reach us by way of some outstreaming from the objects seen, there is no reason to think of the air being affected and passing on to us, in a progression of impression, what has been impressed upon itself.

If our perception is to depend upon previous impressions made upon the air, then we have no direct knowledge of the object of vision, but know it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are aware of warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the warmed intervening air. That is a matter of contact ; but sight is not produced by contact : the application of an object to the eye would not produce sight ; what is required is the illumination of the intervening medium ; for the air in itself is a dark substance. If it were not for this dark substance there would probably be no reason for the existence of light : the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires that it be overcome by light. Perhaps also the reason why an object brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a double obscuration, its own and that of the air.

3- For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars and their very shapes.

No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness and come to us in linked progression ; if the fire thus rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night, when the very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their light, we can see the fire of the beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers.

Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to believe that in these examples the fire (as light) traverses the air, then, in so far as anything is visible, it must be that dimmed reproduction in the air,

not the fire itself. But if an object can be seen on the other side of some intervening darkness, much more would it be visible with nothing intervening.

We may hold one thing certain : the impossibility of vision without an intervening substance does not depend upon that absence in itself : the sole reason is that, with that absence, there would be an end to the sympathy reigning in the living whole and relating the parts to each other in an existent unity.

Perception of every kind seems to depend on the fact that our universe is a whole sympathetic to itself : that it is so, appears from the universal participation in power from member to member, and especially in remote power.

No doubt it would be worth enquiry — though we pass it for the present — what would take place if there were another kosmos, another living whole having no contact with this one, and the far ridges of our heavens had sight : would our sphere see that other as from a mutually present distance, or could there be no dealing at all from this to that ?

To return ; there is a further consideration showing that sight is not brought about by this alleged modification of the intervenient.

Any modification of the air substance would necessarily be corporeal : there must be such an impression as is made upon sealing wax. But this would require that each part of the object of vision be impressed on some corresponding portion of the intervenient : the intervenient, however, in actual contact with the eye would be just that portion whose dimensions the pupil is capable of receiving. But as a matter of fact the entire object appears before the pupil ; and it is seen entire by all within that air space for a great extent, in front, sideways, close at hand, from the back, as long as the line of vision is not blocked. This shows that any given portion of the air contains the object of vision, in face view so to speak, and, at once, we are confronted by no merely corporeal phenomena ; the facts are explicable only as depending upon the greater laws, the spiritual, of a living being one and self -sensitive.

4- But there is the question of the linked light that must relate the visual organ to its object.

Now, firstly : since the intervening air is not necessary — unless in the purely accidental sense that air may be necessary to light — the light that acts as intermediate in vision will be unmodified : vision depends upon no modification whatever. This one intermediate, light, would seem to be necessary, but, unless light is corporeal, no intervening body is requisite : and we must remember that intervenient and borrowed light is essential not to seeing in general but to distant vision ; the question whether light absolutely requires the presence of air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us : —

If in the act of vision that linked light becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding — which is what vision really is — then the intervening light is not a necessity : the process of seeing will be like that of touch ; the visual faculty of the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light ; all that intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which the vision ranges.

This brings up the question whether the sight is made active over its field by the sheer presence of a distance spread before it, or by the presence of a body of some kind within that distance.

If by the presence of such a body, then there will be vision though there be no intervenient ; if the intervenient is the sole attractive agent, then we are forced to think of the visible object as being a Kind utterly without energy, performing no act. But so inactive a body cannot be : touch tells us that, for it does not merely announce that something is by and is touched : it is acted upon by the object so that it reports distinguishing qualities in it, qualities so effective that even at a distance touch itself would register them but for the accidental that it demands proximity.

We catch the heat of a fire just as soon as the intervening air does ; no need to wait for it to be warmed : the denser body, in fact, takes in

more warmth than the air has to give ; in other words, the air transmits the heat but is not the source of our warmth.

When on the one side, that of the object, there is the power in any degree of an outgoing act, and on the other, that of the sight, the capability of being acted upon, surely the object needs no medium through which to be effective upon what it is fully equipped to affect : this would be needing not a help but a hindrance.

Or, again, consider the Dawn : there is no need that the light first flood the air and then come to us ; the event is simultaneous to both : often, in fact, we see (in the distance) when the light is not as yet round our eyes at all but very far off, before, that is, the air has been acted upon : here we have vision without any modified intervenient, vision before the organ has received the light with which it is to be linked.

It is difficult to reconcile with this theory the fact of seeing stars or any fire by night.

If (as by the theory of an intervenient) the percipient mind or soul remains within itself and needs the light only as one might need a stick in the hand to touch something at a distance, then the perception will be a sort of tussle : the light must be conceived as something thrusting, something aimed at a mark, and similarly, the object, considered as an illuminated thing, must be conceived to be resistant ; for this is the normal process in the case of contact by the agency of an intervenient.

Besides, even on this explanation, the mind must have previously been in contact with the object in the entire absence of intervenient ; only if that has happened could contact through an intervenient bring knowledge, a knowledge by way of memory, and, even more emphatically, by way of reasoned comparison (ending in identification) : but this process of memory and comparison is excluded by the theory of first knowledge through the agency of a medium.

Finally, we may be told that the impinging light is modified by the thing to be seen and so becomes able to present something perceptible before the visual organ ; but this simply brings us back to the theory of an intervenient changed midway by the object, an explanation whose difficulties we have already indicated.

But some doubt arises when we consider the phenomena of hearing.

Perhaps we are to understand the process thus : the air is modified by the first movement ; layer by layer it is successively acted upon by the object causing the sound ; it finally impinges in that modified form upon the sense, the entire progression being governed by the fact that all the air from starting point to hearing point is similarly affected.

Perhaps, on the other hand, the intervenient is modified only by the accident of its midway position, so that, failing any intervenient, whatsoever sound two bodies in clash might make would impinge without medium upon our sense ?

Still air is necessary ; there could be no sound in the absence of the air set vibrating in the first movement, however different be the case with the intervenient from that onwards to the perception point.

The air would thus appear to be the dominant in the production of sound : two bodies would clash without even an incipient sound, but that the air, struck in their rapid meeting and hurled outward, passes on the movement successively till it reaches the ears and the sense of hearing.

But if the determinant is the air, and the impression is simply of air-movements, what accounts for the differences among voices and other sounds ? The sound of bronze against bronze is different from that of bronze against some other substance : and so on ; the air and its vibration remain the one thing, yet the difference in sounds is much more than a matter of greater or less intensity.

If we decide that sound is caused by a percussion upon the air, then obviously nothing turning upon the distinctive nature of air is in question : it sounds at a moment in which it is simply a solid body, until (by its distinctive character) it is sent pulsing outwards : thus air in itself is not essential to the production of sound ; all is done by clashing solids as they meet and that percussion, reaching the sense, is the sound. This is shown also by the sounds formed within living beings not in air but by the friction of parts ; for example, the grinding of teeth and the

crunching of bones against each other in the bending of the body, cases in which the air does not intervene.

But all this may now be left over ; we are brought to the same conclusion as in the case of sight ; the phenomena of hearing arise similarly in a certain co-sensitiveness inherent in a living whole.

6. We return, then, to the question whether there could be light if there were no air, the sun illuminating corporeal surfaces across an intermediate void which, as things are, takes the light accidentally by the mere fact of being in the path. Supposing air to be the cause of the rest of things being thus affected, the substantial existence of light is due to the air ; light becomes a modification of the air, and of course if the thing to be modified did not exist neither could the modification.

The fact is that primarily light is no appanage of air, and does not depend upon the existence of air : it belongs to every fiery and shining body, it constitutes even the gleaming surface of certain stones.

Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming, could it exist in the absence of its container ?

There is a distinction to be made : if it is a quality, some quality of some substance, then light, equally with other qualities, will need a body in which to lodge : if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising from something else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there be no neighbouring body but, if that is possible, a blank void which it will overleap and so appear on the further side : it is powerful, and may very well pass over unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall, nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes its light ; there is no reason why they should draw the light from its source and speed it onwards.

Light is not an accidental to something else, requiring therefore to be lodged in a base ; nor is it a modification, demanding a base in which the modification occurs : if this were so, it would vanish when the object or substance disappeared ; but it does not ; it strikes onward ; so, too (requiring neither air nor object) it would always have its movement.

But movement, where ?

Is space, pure and simple, all that is necessary ?

With unchecked motion of the light outward, the material sun will be losing its energy, for the light is its expression.

Perhaps ; and (from this untenable consequence) we may gather that the light never was an appanage of anything, but is the expressive Act proceeding from a base (the sun) but not seeking to enter into a base, though having some operation upon any base that may be present.

Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when anything — the human body, for instance — comes in its path to be affected by it ; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it to modify : surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of whatever luminary source there be (i.e. light, affecting things, may be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other). Certainly light is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that it is no longer the brilliant reality : as reasonable to talk of some substance being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter.

If we are told that light is a mode of the air, we answer that this would necessarily imply that the air itself is changed to produce the new mode ; in other words, its characteristic darkness must change into non-darkness ; but we know that the air maintains its character, in no wise affected : the modification of a thing is an experience within that thing itself : light therefore is not a modification of the air, but a selfexistent in whose path the air happens to be present.

On this point we need dwell no longer ; but there remains still a question.

7- Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring : Whether light finally perishes or simply returns to its source.

If it be a thing requiring to be caught and kept, domiciled within a recipient, we might think of it finally passing out of existence : if it be an Act not flowing out and away — but in circuit, with more of it

within than is in outward progress from the luminary of which it is the Act — then it will not cease to exist as long as that centre is in being. And as the luminary moves, the light will reach new points — not in virtue of any change of course in or out or around, but simply because the act of the luminary exists and where there is no impediment is effective. Even if the distance of the sun from us were far greater than it is, the light would be continuous all that further way, as long as nothing checked or blocked it in the interval.

We distinguish two forms of activity ; one is gathered within the luminary and is comparable to the life of the shining body ; this is the vaster and is, as it were, the foundation or wellspring of all the act ; the other lies next to the surface, the outer image of the inner content, a secondary activity though inseparable from the former. For every existent has an Act which is in its likeness : as long as the one exists, so does the other ; yet while the original is stationary the activity reaches forth, in some things over a wide range, in others less far. There are weak and faint activities, and there are some, even, that do not appear ; but there are also things whose activities are great and far-going ; in the case of these the activity must be thought of as being lodged, both in the active and powerful source and in the point at which it settles. This may be observed in the case of an animal’s eyes where the pupils gleam : they have a light which shows outside the orbs. Again there are living things which have an inner fire that in darkness shines out when they expand themselves and ceases to ray outward when they contract : the fire has not perished ; it is a mere matter of it being rayed out or not.

But has the light gone inward ?

No : it is simply no longer on the outside because the fire (of which it is the activity) is no longer outward going but has withdrawn towards the centre.

But surely the light has gone inward too ?

No : only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only of the non-luminous body ; the fire can no longer act towards the outer.

The light, then, raying from bodies is an outgoing activity of a luminous body ; the light within luminous bodies— understand, such as are primarily luminous— is the essential being embraced under the idea of that body. When such a body is brought into association with Matter, its activity produces colour : when there is no such association it does not give colour— it gives merely an incipient on which colour might be formed — for it belongs to another being (primal light) with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or from its (inner) activity.

And light is incorporeal even when it is the light of a body ; there is therefore no question, strictly speaking, of its withdrawal or of its being present — these terms do not apply to its modes — and its essential existence is to be an activity. As an example : the image upon a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the reflected object upon the potential recipient : there is no outgoing from the object (or ingoing into the reflecting body) ; it is simply that, as long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form of colour shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not there, the reflecting surface no longer holds what it held when the conditions were favourable.

So it is with the soul considered as the activity of another and prior soul : as long as that prior retains its place, its next, which is its activity, abides.

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity — as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body to be — is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held in material things ?

No ; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of the active element (the light being alloyed with Matter) ; whereas the life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul closely present to it.

But when the body perishes — by the fact that nothing without part in soul can continue in being — when the body is perishing, no longer supported by that primal life-giving soul, or by the presence of any secondary phase of it, it is clear that the life-principle can no longer remain ; but does this mean that the life perishes ?

No : not even it ; for it, too, is an image of that first out-shining ; it is merely no longer where it was.

8. Imagine that beyond the heavenly system there existed some solid mass, and that from this sphere there was directed to it a vision utterly unimpeded and unrestricted : it is a question whether that solid form could be perceived by what has no sympathetic relation with it, since we have held that sympathetic relation comes about in virtue of the nature inherent in some one living being.

Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that percipients and things perceived are all members of one living being, no acts of perception could take place : that far body could be known only if it were a member of this living universe of ours — which condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if, without being thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting light and colour and the qualities by which we perceive things, and belonging to the same ideal category as the organ of vision ?

If our supposition (of perception by sympathy) is true, there would still be no perception — though we may be told that the hypothesis is clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can fail in grasping an illuminated object lying before it, and that the other senses in the presence of their particular objects remain unresponsive.

(The following passage, to nearly the end, is offered tentatively as a possible help to the interpretation of an obscure and corrupt place.)

[But why does such a failing appear impossible to us ? We answer, because here and now in all the act and experience of our senses, we are within a unity, and members of it. What the conditions would be otherwise, remains to be considered : if living sympathy suffices the theory is established ; if not, there are other considerations to support it.

That every living being is self -sensitive allows of no doubt ; if the

universe is a living being, no more need be said ; and what is true of the total must be true of the members, as inbound in that one life.

But what if we are invited to accept the theory of knowledge by likeness (rejecting knowledge by the self-sensitiveness of a living unity ?)

Awareness must be determined by the nature and character of the living being in which it occurs ; perception, then, means that the likeness demanded by the hypothesis is within this self-identical living being (and not in the object)— for the organ by which the perception takes place is in the likeness of the living being (is merely the agent adequately expressing the nature of the living being) : thus perception is reduced to a mental awareness by means of organs akin to the object.

If, then, something that is a living whole perceives not its own content but things like to its content, it must perceive them under the conditions of that living whole ; this means that, in so far as it has perception, the objects appear not as its content but as related to its content.

And the objects are thus perceived as related because the mind itself has related them in order to make them amenable to its handling : in other words the causative soul or mind in that other sphere is utterly alien, and the things there, supposed to be related to the content of this

This absurdity shows that the hypothesis contains a contradiction which naturally leads to untenable results. In fact, under one and the same heading, it presents mind and no mind, it makes things kin and no kin, it confuses similar and dissimilar : containing these irreconcilable elements, it amounts to no hypothesis at all. At one and the same moment it postulates and denies a soul, it tells of an All that is partial, of a something which is at once distinct and not distinct, of a nothingness which is no nothingness, of a complete thing that is incomplete : the hypothesis therefore must be dismissed ; no deduction is possible where a thesis cancels its own propositions.

Ennead IV, Treatise 6

i. Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of as seal-impressions on soul or mind : accepting this statement, there is one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected.

Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue of the lingering of an impression which in fact was never made ; the two things stand or fall together ; either an impression is made upon the mind and lingers when there is remembrance, or, denying the impression, we cannot hold that memory is its lingering. Since we reject equally the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that the sensible object striking upon soul or mind makes a mark upon it, and that the retention of this mark is memory.

If we study what occurs in the case of the most vivid form of perception, we can transfer our results to the other cases, and so solve our problem.

In any perception we attain by sight, the object is grasped there where it lies in the direct line of vision ; it is there that we attack it ; there, then, the perception is formed ; the mind looks outward ; this is ample proof that it has taken and takes no inner imprint, and does not see in virtue of some mark made upon it like that of the ring on the wax ; it need not look outward at all if, even as it looked, it already held the image of the object, seeing by virtue of an impression made upon itself. It includes with the object the interval, for it tells at what distance the vision takes place : how could it see as outlying an impression within itself, separated by no interval from itself ? Then, the point of magnitude : how could the mind, on this hypothesis, define the external size of the object or perceive that it has any — the magnitude of the sky, for instance, whose stamped imprint would be too vast for it to contain ? And, most convincing of all, if to see is to accept imprints

of the objects of our vision, we can never see these objects themselves ; we see only vestiges they leave within us, shadows : the things themselves would be very different from our vision of them. And, for a conclusive consideration, we cannot see if the living object is in contact with the eye ; we must look from a certain distance ; this must be more applicable to the mind ; supposing the mind to be stamped with an imprint of the object, it could not grasp as an object of vision what is stamped upon itself. For vision demands a duality, of seen and seeing : the seeing agent must be distinct and act upon an impression outside it, not upon one occupying the same point with it : sight can deal only with an object not inset but outlying.

2. But if perception does not go by impression, what is the process ?

The mind affirms something not contained within it : this is precisely the characteristic of a power — not to accept impression but, within its allotted sphere, to act.

Besides, the very condition of the mind being able to exercise discrimination upon what it is to see and hear is not, of course, that these objects be equally impressions made upon it ; on the contrary, there must be no impressions, nothing to which the mind is passive ; there can be only acts of that in which the objects become known.

Our tendency is to think of any of the faculties as unable to know its appropriate object by its own uncompelled act ; to us it seems to submit to its environment rather than simply to perceive it, though in reality it is the master, not the victim.

As with sight, so with hearing. It is the air which takes the impression, a kind of articulated stroke which may be compared to letters traced upon it by the object causing the sound ; but it belongs to the faculty, and the soul-essence, to read the imprints thus appearing before it, as they reach the point at which they become matter of its knowledge.

In taste and smell also we distinguish between the impressions received and the sensations and judgements ; these last are mental acts,

and belong to an order apart from the experiences upon which they are exercised.

The knowing of the things belonging to the Intellectual is not in any such degree attended by impact or impression : they come forward, on the contrary, as from within, unlike the sense-objects known as from without : they have more emphatically the character of acts ; they are acts in the stricter sense, for their origin is in the soul, and every concept of this Intellectual order is the soul about its Act.

Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views itself as from the outside — while seeing the Intellectual-Principle as a unity, and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity — this question is investigated elsewhere.

3- With this prologue we come to our discussion of Memory.

That the soul, or mind, having taken no imprint, yet achieves perception of what it in no way contains need not surprise us ; or rather, surprising though it is, we cannot refuse to believe in this remarkable power.

The Soul is the Reason-Principle of the universe, ultimate among the Intellectual Beings — its own essential Nature is one of the Beings of the Intellectual Realm — but it is the primal Reason-Principle of the entire realm of sense.

Thus it has dealings with both orders — benefited and quickened by the one, but by the other beguiled, falling before resemblances, and so led downwards as under spell. Poised midway, it is aware of both spheres.

Of the Intellectual it is said to have intuition by memory upon approach, for it knows them by a certain natural identity with them ; its knowledge is not attained by besetting them, so to speak, but by in a definite degree possessing them ; they are its natural vision ; they are itself in a more radiant mode, and it rises from its duller pitch to that greater brilliance in a sort of awakening, a progress from its latency to its act.

To the sense-order it stands in a similar nearness and to such things it gives a radiance out of its own store and, as it were, elaborates them to visibility : the power is always ripe and, so to say, in travail towards them, so that, whenever it puts out its strength in the direction of what has once been present in it, it sees that object as present still ; and the more intent its effort the more durable is the presence. This is why, it is agreed, children have long memory ; the things presented to them are not constantly withdrawn but remain in sight ; in their case the attention is limited but not scattered : those whose faculty and mental activity are busied upon a multitude of subjects pass quickly over all, lingering on none.

Now, if memory were a matter of seal-impressions retained, the multiplicity of objects would have no weakening effect on the memory. Further, on the same hypothesis, we would have no need of thinking back to revive remembrance ; nor would we be subject to forgetting and recalling ; all would lie engraved within.

The very fact that we train ourselves to remember shows that what we get by the process is a strengthening of the mind : just so, exercises for feet and hands enable us to do easily acts which are in no sense contained or laid up in those members, but to which they may be fitted by persevering effort.

How else can it be explained that we forget a thing heard once or twice but remember what is often repeated, and that we recall a long time afterwards what at first hearing we failed to hold ?

It is no answer to say that the parts present themselves sooner than the entire imprint — why should they too be forgotten ? — (there is no question of parts, for) the last hearing, or our effort to remember, brings the thing back to us in a flash.

All these considerations testify to an evocation of that faculty of the soul, or mind, in which remembrance is vested : the mind is strengthened, either generally or to this particular purpose.

Observe these facts : memory follows upon attention ; those who have memorised much, by dint of their training in the use of leading indications (suggestive words and the like), reach the point of being

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY I2I

easily able to retain without such aid : must we not conclude that the basis of memory is the soul-power brought to full strength ?

The lingering imprints of the other explanation would tell of weakness rather than power ; for to take imprint easily is to be yielding. An impression is something received passively ; the strongest memory, then, would go with the least active nature. But what happens is the very reverse : in no pursuit do technical exercises tend to make a man less the master of his acts and states. It is as with sense-perception ; the advantage is not to the weak, the weak eye for example, but to that which has the fullest power towards its exercise. In the old, it is significant, the senses are dulled and so is the memory.

Sensation and memory, then, are not passivity but power.

And, once it is admitted that sensations are not impressions, the memory of a sensation cannot consist in the retention of an impression that was never made.

Yes : but if it is an active power of the mind, a fitness towards its particular purpose, why does it not come at once — and not with delay — to the recollection of its unchanging objects ?

Simply because the power needs to be poised and prepared : in this it is only like all the others, which have to be readied for the task to which their power reaches, some operating very swiftly, others only after a certain self-concentration.

Quick memory does not in general go with quick wit : the two do not fall under the same mental faculty ; runner and boxer are not often united in one person ; the dominant idea differs from man to man.

Yet there could be nothing to prevent men of superior faculty from reading impressions on the mind ; why should one thus gifted be incapable of what would be no more than a passive taking and holding ?

That memory is a power of the Soul (not a capacity for taking imprint) is established at a stroke by the consideration that the soul is without magnitude.

And — one general reflection — it is not extraordinary that everything concerning soul should proceed in quite other ways than appears to people who either have never enquired, or have hastily adopted delusive

analogies from the phenomena of sense, and persist in thinking of per ception and remembrance in terms of characters inscribed on plates or tablets ; the impossibilities that beset this theory escape those that make the soul incorporeal equally with those to whom it is corporeal.

Ennead IV, Treatise 7

Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or whether something of us passes over to dissolution and destruction, while something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever this question will be answered here for those willing to investigate our nature.

We know that man is not a thing of one only element ; he has a soul and he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body : this is the first distinction ; it remains to investigate the nature and essential being of these two constituents.

Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for ever hold together ; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its constituents going its own way, one part working against another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling soul.

And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is still not a unity ; for it is divisible into shape and matter, the duality without which bodies at their very simplest cannot cohere.

The mere fact that, as material forms, they have bulk means that they can be lopped and crushed and so come to destruction.

If this body, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly immortal ; if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a thing put at our service for a certain time, it must be in its nature passing.

The sovran principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation be, the soul is the man.

2. But of what nature is this sovran principle ?

If material, then definitely it must fall apart ; for every material entity, at least, is something put together.

If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new substance must be investigated in the same way or by some more suitable method.

But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since such the soul is to be, can dissolve.

Now : of necessity life is inherent to soul : this material entity, then, which we call soul must have life ingrained within it ; but (being a composite as by hypothesis, material) it must be made up of two or more bodies ; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of those bodies or in one of them to the exclusion of the other or others ; if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere.

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. But what sort of an entity have we there ; what is this body which of its own nature possesses soul ?

Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless — whenever soul is in any of them, that life is borrowed — and there are no other forms of body than these four : even the school that believes there are has always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life.

None of these, then, having life, it would be extraordinary if life came about by bringing them together ; it is impossible, in fact, that the collocation of material entities should produce life, or mindless entities mind.

No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give such results : some regulating principle would be necessary, some Cause directing the admixture : that guiding principle would be— soul.

Body — not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex — could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for body owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and only from soul can a Reason-Principle come.

Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or selfsensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again, constituents void of part could never produce body or bulk.

Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity (disregarding the question of any constituent elements) : they will tell us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a self-springing life — since matter is without quality — but that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that constitutes soul : it must be one of the two items and that one, being (by hypothesis) outside of the Matter, cannot be body : to make it body would simply force us to repeat our former analysis.

If on the contrary they do not mean by this Forming-Idea a real being, but some condition or modification of the Matter, they must tell us how and whence this modification, with resultant life, can have found the way into the Matter : for very certainly Matter does not mould itself to pattern or bring itself to life.

It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode has this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal.

In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not : body passes ; dissolution is in its very nature ; all would disappear in a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to erect some one mode of body into soul ; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul-body would fall under the same fate : of course it could never really exist : the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape.

Nay more : Matter itself could not exist : the totality of things in

this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of “ soul,” remains air, fleeting breath (the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, “ spirit ” in the lower sense), whose very unity is not drawn from itself.

All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution ; how can the kosmos be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless haphazard drift ? This pneuma — orderless except under soul — how can it contain order, reason, intelligence ? But : given soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes of the universe : failing soul in the things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts.

4- Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or form of soul ; their “ pneuma ” (finer-body or spirit) is intelligent, and they speak of an “ intellectual fire ” ; this “ fire ” and “ spirit " they imagine to be necessary to the existence of the higher order which they conceive as demanding some base, though the real difficulty, under their theory, is to find a base for material things whose only possible base is, precisely, the powers of soul.

Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this “ pneuma,” what is the import of that repeated qualification of theirs “ in a certain state,” their refuge when they are compelled to recognise some acting principle apart from body ? If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this “ certain state ” is soul, what follows ? Either this “ certain state,” this shaping or configuration of things, is a real being or it is nothing.

If it is nothing, only the pneuma exists, the “ certain state ” being no more than a word ; this leads imperatively to the assertion that Matter alone exists, Soul and God mere words, the lowest alone is.

If on the contrary this “ configuration ” is really existent — something distinct from the underlie or Matter, something residing in Matter but itself immaterial as not constructed out of Matter, then it must be a Reason-Principle, incorporeal, a separate Nature.

There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any

form of body.

Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or white, and so on through all the qualities by which one is different from another ; and again if a body is warm it diffuses only warmth, if cold it can only chill, if light its presence tells against the total weight which if heavy it increases ; black, it darkens ; white, it lightens ; fire has not the property of chilling or a cold body that of warming.

Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one : its productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy and light. If it were material, its quality — and the colour it must have — would produce one invariable effect and not the variety actually observed.

5- Again, there is movement : all bodily movement is uniform ; failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement ? Predilections, reasons, they will say ; that is all very well, but these already contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to body which is one and simplex, and, besides, is not participant in reason — that is, not in the sense here meant, but only as it is influenced by some principle which confers upon it the qualities of, for instance, being warm or cold.

Then there is growth under a time-law, and within a definite limit : how can this belong strictly to body ? Body can indeed be brought to growth, but does not itself grow except in the sense that in the material mass a capacity for growing is included as an accessory to some principle whose action upon the body causes growth.

Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow ; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the added material must be either soul or soulless body : if soul, whence

and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined (to the soul which by hypothesis is body) ; if soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up before ?

Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of our material mass ?

And if this were so how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul ?

Assume soul to be a body : now in the nature of body, characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being ; soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is ; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a quality quite independent of quantity.

What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal ? Is every part of the soul, in any one body, soul entire, soul perfectly true to its essential being ? and may the same be said of every part of the part ? If so, the magnitude makes no contribution to the soul’s essential nature, as it must if soul (as corporeal) were a definite magnitude : it is, as body cannot be, an “ all-everywhere,” a complete identity present at each and every point, the part all that the whole is.

To deny that every part is soul is to make soul a compound from soulless elements. Further, if a definite magnitude, the double limit of larger or smaller, is to be imposed upon each separate soul, then anything outside those Emits is no soul.

Now, a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a twin birth or in the animal order to a litter ; there is a splitting and diverging of the seed, every diverging part being obviously a whole : surely no honest mind can fail to gather that a thing in which part is identical with whole has a nature which transcends quantity, and must of necessity be without

quantity : only so could it remain identical when quantity is filched from it, only by being indifferent to amount or extension, by being in essence' something apart. Thus the Soul and the Reason-Principles are without quantity.

6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral excellence, nothing of all that is noble.

There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity enables it to grasp an object as an entirety.

The several senses will each be the entrance point of many diverse perceptions \ in any one object there may be many characteristics , any one organ may be the channel of a group of objects, as for instance a face is known not by a special sense for separate features, nose, eyes, etc., but by one sense observing all in one act.

When sight and hearing gather their varying information, there must be some central unity to which both report. How could there be any statement of difference unless all sense-impressions appeared before a common identity able to take the sum of all ?

This there must be, as there is a centre to a circle ; the sense-impressions converging from every point of occurrence will be as lines striking from a circumference to what will be a true centre of perception as being a veritable unity.

If this centre were to break into separate points — so that the senseimpressions fell upon the two ends of a line — then, either it must reknit itself to unity and identity, perhaps at the mid-point of the line, or all remains unrelated, every end receiving the report of its particular field exactly as you and I have our distinct sense experiences.

Suppose the sense-object be such a unity as a face : all the points of observation must be brought together in one visual total, as is obvious since there could be no panorama of great expanses unless the detail were compressed to the capacity of the pupils.

Much more must this be true in the case of thoughts, partless entities

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 129

as they are, impinging upon the centre of consciousness which (to receive them) must itself be void of part.

Either this or — supposing the centre of consciousness to be a thing of quantity and extension the sensible object will coincide with it point by point of their co-expansion so that any given point in the faculty will perceive solely what coincides with it in the object : and thus nothing in us could perceive any thing as a whole.

This cannot be : the faculty entire must be a unity ; no such dividing is possible ; this is no matter in which we can think of equal sections coinciding ; the centre of consciousness has no such relation of equality with any sensible object. The only possible ratio of divisibility would be that of the number of diverse elements in the impinging sensation : are we then to suppose that each part of the soul, and every part of each part, will have perception ? Or will the part of the parts have none ? That is impossible : every part, then, has perception ; the (hypothetical) magnitude, of soul and each part of soul, is infinitely divisible ; there will therefore be in each part an infinite number of perceptions of the object, and therefore an infinitude of representations of it at our centre of consciousness.

If the sentient be a material entity (as we are invited to believe) sensation could only be of the order of seal-impressions struck by a ring on wax, in this case by sensible objects on the blood or on the intervenient air.

If, at this, the impression is like one made in liquids — as would be reasonable — it will be confused and wavering as upon water, and there can be no memory. If the impressions are permanent then either no fresh ones can be stamped upon the occupied ground — and there can be no change of sensations — or, others being made, the former will be obliterated ; and all record of the past is done away with.

If memory implies fresh sensations imposed upon former ones, the earlier not barring their way, the soul cannot be a material entity.

We come to the same result by examining the sense of pain. We say there is pain in the finger : the trouble is doubtless in the finger, but our opponents must admit that the sensation of the pain is in the centre of consciousness. The suffering member is one thing, the sense of suffering is another : how does this happen ?

By transmission, they will say : the psychic pneuma (= the semimaterial principle of life) stationed at the finger suffers first ; and stage by stage the trouble is passed on until at last it reaches the centre of

consciousness.

But on this theory, there must be a sensation in the spot first suffering pain, and another sensation at a second point of the line of transmission, another in the third and so on ; many sensations, in fact an unlimited series, to deal with one pain ; and at the last moment the centre of consciousness has the sensation of all these sensations and of its own sensation to boot. Or to be exact, these serial sensations will not be of the pain in the finger : the sensation next in succession to the suffering finger will be of pain at the joint, a third will tell of a pain still higher up : there will be a series of separate pains : The centre of consciousness will not feel the pain seated at the finger, but only that impinging upon itself : it will know this alone, ignore the rest and so have no notion that the finger is in pain.

Thus : Transmission would not give sensation of the actual condition at the affected spot : it is not in the nature of body that where one part suffers there should be knowledge in another part — for body is a magnitude, and the parts of every magnitude are distinct parts - ; therefore

we need, as the sentient, something of a nature to be identical to itself at any and every spot ; this property can belong only to some other form of being than body.

8. It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the soul were any form of body.

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of

the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and the intellective principle : sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude : how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts ? We will be told “ By some partless part.” But, at this, the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded — and it cannot be denied — that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the bodies (in which these forms appear) and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind ; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material : at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them.

When such non-magnitudes come before the soul, it receives them by means of its partless phase and they will take position there in partless wise.

Again : if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues — moral excellence (Sophrosyne) , justice, courage and so forth? All these could be only some kind of rarefied body (pneuma), or blood in some form ; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough

with the idea of rarefied body j but what can this rarefied body want with moral excellence ? On the contrary its interest would lie in being comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft around it : what could it care about a just distribution ?

Then consider the objects of the soul’s contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied ; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes ? These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable : the soul’s contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry : if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not bodies : and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature : it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux.

8, A. (sometimes appearing as 9.)

There are those who insist on the activities observed in bodies — warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing — and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. This ignores the double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers operating in them, and that these are not the powers we attribute to soul : intellection, perception, reasoning, desire, wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very different form of being.

In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this school leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their efficiency is clear from certain reflections : —

It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different things, that body is always a thing of quantity but not always a thing of quality : matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied that quality, being a different thing from quantity, is a different thing from body. Obviously quality could not be body when it has not quantity as (by the admission) all body must ; and, again, as we have said, body,

any thing of mass, on being reduced to fragments ceases to be what it was, but the quality it possessed remains intact in every particle — for instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck — this shows that sweetness and all other qualities are not body.

Further : if the powers in question were bodies, then necessarily the stronger powers would be large masses and those less efficient small masses : but if there are large masses with small powers while not a few of the smaller masses manifest great powers, then the efficiency must be vested in something other than magnitude ; efficacy, thus, belongs to non-magnitude. Again ; Matter, they tell us, remains unchanged as long as it is body, but produces variety upon accepting qualities ; is not this proof enough that the entrants (with whose arrival the changes happen) are Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order ?

They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer present, animals die : these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are many other things of which none could possibly be soul : and neither pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being ; but soul is.

If the soul is body and permeates the entire body-mass, still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing.

Now : if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the bodies ; it could but be latent ; it will have lost that by which it is soul, just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears : we have, thus, no soul.

Two bodies (i.e. by hypothesis, the soul and the human body) are blended, each entire through the entirety of the other ; where the one is, the other is also ; each occupies an equal extension and each the whole extension ; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture : the one body thus in blended can have left in the other nothing undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable portions alternating ; that would be described as collocation : no ; the incoming entity goes

through the other to the very minutest point — an impossibility, of course ; the less becoming equal to the greater ; still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout. Now if, thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided material anywhere, the division of the body concerned must have been a division into (geometrical) points . an impossibility. The division is an infinite series any material particle may be cut in two — and the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual.

Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.

We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition. This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has been tempered by cold : still that is the theory— the soul has an earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external accidents. Thus these teachers make the inferior precede the higher, and before that inferior they put something still lower, their “ Habitude.” It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and has sprung from the soul, for if it were first of all, the order of the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and always the later inferior, as the system actually stands.

If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle— as later, engendered and deriving intellection from without — soul and intellect and God may prove to have no existence : this would follow if a potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual, unless the corresponding actuality exists. And what could lead it onward if there were no separate being in previous actuality ? Even on the absurd supposition that the potentially existent brings itself to actuality, it must be looking to some Term, and that must be no potentiality but actual.

No doubt the eternally self-identical may have potentiality and be

self-led to self-realisation, but even in this case the being considered as actualised is of higher order than the being considered as merely capable of actualisation and moving towards a desired Term.

Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body, and it exists always in actuality : Intellectual-Principle and Soul precede Nature : thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of body.

These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a body.

Soul belongs, then, to another Nature : What is this ? Is it something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to it, for example a harmony or accord ?

The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre. When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the strings, and this is known as accord : in the same way our body is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing upon the bodily total.

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The soul is a prior (to body), the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body ; as an accord of body it could not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due blending (or accord) of the corporeal materials which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul (its own accord or note), so that there would be many souls to each person. Weightiest of all ; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them : neither musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune.

Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered becomes

orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul, soul itself owes its substantial existence to order — which is self-caused. Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that of Wholes could this be true. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or accord.

We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to soul.

It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body— not, then. Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural organic body having the potentiality of life.

Now ; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go with it. Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep cannot occur ; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul is an Emtelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to the desires ; the total (of body and Entelechy-Soul) must have one uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal contradiction. Sense-perception might occur ; but intellection would be impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy — if the word is to be used at all — in some other mode.

Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, msut hold these without aid from the body ; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions : the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing not only with

food and drink but with things quite apart from body; this also is no inseparable Entelechy.

There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every growth lies at the root ; in many plants the new springing takes place at the root or just above it : it is clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot : it was therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant's development the life-principle is situated in that small beginning : if, thus, it passes from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why should it not pass outside altogether ?

An Entelechy is not a thing of parts ; how then could it be present partwise in the partible body ?

An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another : how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being ? Yet that this transference does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis.

The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving as Form to anything : it is an Essence which does not come into being by finding a seat in body ; it exists before it becomes also the soul of some particular, for example, of a living being, whose body would by this doctrine be the author of its soul.

What, then, is the soul’s Being ? If it is neither body nor a state or experience of body, but is act and creation : if it holds much and gives much, and is an existence outside of body ; of what order and character must it be ? Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process ; it appears and it perishes ; in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as it has the capacity, by participating in what authentically is.

9- Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul.

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider of motion to all else : it moves by its own quality, and every living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life that, being essentially innate, can never fail.

Not all things can have a life merely at second hand ; this would give an infinite series : there must be some nature which, having life primally, shall be of necessity indestructible, immortal, as the source of life to all else that lives. This is the point at which all that is divine and blessed must be situated, living and having being of itself, possessing primal being and primal life, and in its own essence rejecting all change, neither coming to be nor passing away.

Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear : the very word, strictly used, means that the thing is perdurable. Similarly white, the colour, cannot be now white and now not white : if this “ white ” were a real being it would be eternal as well as being white : the colour is merely white but whatsoever possesses being, indwelling by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an entity this primal and eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or plank : it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it remains selfgathered : when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own.

That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material : besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it tangible. But there are other proofs.

Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses a life beneficent and wise, we take the next step and begin with working out the nature of our own soul.

Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as possible has no commerce with the bodily. Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native store.

If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is of the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal ? Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be found in the chattel mean and mortal : what possesses these must be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and of identical substance.

Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supemals ; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated with body.

This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It is because we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass that it becomes difficult to recognise their divinity and immortality.

To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look : or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe : he will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of the eternal : he will see all things in this Intellectual substance, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of the divine.

Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word “ Farewell : I am

to you an immortal God,” for he has ascended to the Supreme, and is all one strain to enter into likeness with it.

If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then, too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct : it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state ; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity.

Imagine living gold : it files away all that is earthy about it, all that kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing itself as gold ; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows that it has no need of any other glory than its own, triumphant if only it be allowed to remain purely to itself.

What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a value, one in which there is a life self-springing and therefore not to be destroyed ?

This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in the mode of the heat in fire — for if heat is characteristic of the fire proper, it certainly is adventitious to the Matter underlying the fire ; or fire, too, would be everlasting — it is not in any such mode that the soul has life : this is no case of a Matter underlying and a life brought into that Matter and making it into soul (as heat comes into matter and makes it fire).

Either life is Essential Reality, and therefore self-living — the very thing we have been seeking — and undeniably immortal : or it, too, is a compound and must be traced back through all the constituents until an immortal substance is reached, something deriving movement from itself, and therefore debarred from accepting death.

Even supposing life could be described as a condition imposed upon Matter, still the source from which this condition entered the Matter must necessarily be admitted to be immortal simply by being unable to take into itself the opposite of the life which it conveys.

Of course, life is no such mere condition, principle, effectively living.

A further consideration is that if every soul is to be held dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be : if it is pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is mortal, and another, that of the All, let us suppose, is immortal, we demand to know the reason of the difference alleged.

Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches the same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of the celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking to win to what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the primal source.

Again : the soul’s understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the visions stored up in it is effected within itself ; such perception is reminiscence ; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal.

Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment, must in the nature of things be broken apart by that very mode which brought it together : but the soul is one and simplex, living not in the sense of potential reception of life but by its own energy ; and this can be no cause of dissolution.

But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been divided (in the body) and so becoming fragmentary.

No : the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity.

May not it change and so come to destruction ?

No : the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying substance : and that could not happen to anything except a compound.

If it can be destroyed in no such ways it is necessarily indestructible.

But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual ?

but an independent

There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life ; and this, knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm. But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step outward ; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-Principle : pregnant by those Beings, and in pain to the birth, it is eager to make, to create. In this new zest it strains towards the realm of sense : thus, while this primal soul in union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its concern : yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is not wholly and exclusively held by body : it is still in possession of the unembodied ; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. As a whole it is partly in body, partly outside : it has plunged from among the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries : the process has been an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the universe with beauty and penetrant order — immortal mind, eternal in its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul.

As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life : so too with the soul in the vegetal order.

All have sprung from one source, all have life as their own, all are incorporeal, indivisible, all are real-beings.

If we are told that man’s soul being tripartite must as a compound entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at birth, all that increment which the others will long retain.

But even that inferior phase thus laid aside will not be destroyed as long as its source continues to exist, for nothing from the realm of real being shall pass away.

Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to those asking for demonstration : those whose need is conviction by evidence of the more material order are best met from the abundant records relevant to the subject : there are also the oracles of the Gods ordering the appeasing of wronged souls and the honouring of the dead as still sentient, a practice common to all mankind : and again, not a few souls, once among men, have continued to serve them after quitting the body and by revelations, practically helpful, make clear, as well, that the other souls, too, have not ceased to be.

Ennead IV, Treatise 8

1. Many times it has happened : Lifted out of the body into myself ; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered ; beholding a marvellous beauty ; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order ; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine ; stationing within It by having attained that activity ; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme : yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of ascent and descent, says that “ change reposes,” and that “ it is weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning again ” ; but he seems

to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves

as he sought for himself and found.

Empedocles— where he says that it is law for faulty souls to descend to this sphere, and that he. himself was here because he turned a deserter , wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord — reveals neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters ; but in his case, versification has some part in the obscurity.

We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him.

What do we learn from this philosopher ?

We will not find him so consistent throughout that it is easy to discover his mind.

Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the breaking of the fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual Realm.

In the Phaidros he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry to this realm : and there are Periods which send back the soul after it has risen ; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities driving other souls down to this order.

In all these explanations he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at body. But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a reason, then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God : in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete ;

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it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the realm of sense.

2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general — to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity.

We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has

planned well or ill . like our souls, which it may be, are such

that governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and deeper into it if they are to control it.

No doubt the individual body — though in all cases appropriately placed within the universe — is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty : but the body inhabited by the World-Soul — complete, competent, self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature — this needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself ; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest.

The soul’s care for the universe takes two forms : there is the supervising of the entire system, brought to order by deedless command in a

kingly presidence, and there is that over the individual, implying direct action, the hand to the task, one might say, in immediate contact : in the second kind of care the agent absorbs much of the nature of its object.

Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul’s method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with penetration by its lower power : at this, God can no longer be charged with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been deprived of its natural standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither failing ever nor ever beginning.

Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as the All to the material forms within it — for these starry bodies are declared to be members of the soul’s circuit — we are given to understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of transcendence and immunity that becomes them.

And so we might expect : commerce with the body is repudiated for two only reasons, as hindering the soul’s intellective act and as filling it with pleasure, desire, pain ; but neither of these misfortunes can befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into the body, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an order as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor fear.

There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to such a body nor is there any such preoccupied concern, bringing about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed vision ; it remains always intent upon the Supreme, and its governance of this universe is effected by a power not calling upon act.

3- The Human Soul, next : —

Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or cavern.

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Now this does not clash with the first theory (that of the impassivity of soul as in the All) ; for the descent of the human Soul has not been due to the same causes (as that of the All-Soul).

All that is Intellectual-Principle has its being — whole and all — in the place of Intellection, what we call the Intellectual Kosmos : but there exist, too, the intellective powers included in its being, and the separate intelligences for the Intellectual-Principle is not merely one ; it is one and many. In the same way there must be both many souls and one, the one being the source of the differing many just as from one genus there rise various species, better and worse, some of the more intellectual order, others less effectively so.

In the Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made : there is the Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living organism contains potentially all the other forms ; and there are the forms thus potentially included now realised as individuals. We may think of it as a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms of fife ; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living quality : or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the great fire and the minor fires ; yet all have the one common essence, that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from which the essence of the universal fire proceeds.

No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning phase, is intellection : but it must have another as well, or it would be undisting uishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To its quality of being intellective it adds the quality by which it attains its particular manner of being : remaining, therefore, an Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as everything must that exists among real beings.

It looks towards its higher and has intellection ; towards itself and conserves its peculiar being ; towards its lower and orders, administers, governs.

The total of things could not have remained stationary in the Intellectual Kosmos, once there was the possibility of continuous variety, of beings inferior but as necessarily existent as their superiors.

4- So it is with the individual souls ; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere ; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble ; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations : the souls indeed (as distinguished from the kosmos) are thus far in the one place with their overlord ; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred ; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All ; its differentiation has severed it ; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual ; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment ; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being ; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things : thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular ; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body : the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.

It has fallen : it is at the chain : debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense ; it is a captive ; this is the burial, the encavemment, of the Soul.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent : by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles and soars — when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both

spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances are less favourable.

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as “ parts,” and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience birth.

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations ; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by generation and creation : stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal.

5- It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions — the divine sowing to birth, as opposed to a voluntary descent aiming at the completion of the universe ; the judgement and the cave; necessity and free choice — in fact the necessity includes the choice — embodiment as an evil ; the Empedoclean teaching of a flight from God, a wandering away, a sin bringing its punishment ; the “ solace by flight ” of Heraclitus ; in a word a voluntary descent which is also involuntary.

All degeneration is no doubt involuntary, yet when it has been brought about by an inherent tendency, that submission to the inferior may be described as the penalty of an act.

On the other hand these experiences and actions are determined by an external law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a being which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve the needs of another : hence there is no inconsistency or untruth in saying that the soul is sent down by God ; final results are always to be referred to the starting point even across many intervening stages.

Still there is a two-fold flaw : the first lies in the motive of the Soul’s descent (its audacity, its Tolma), and the second in the evil it

does when actually here : the first is punished by what the soul has suffered by its descent : for the faults committed here, the lesser penalty is to enter into body after body — and soon to return — by judgement according to desert, the word judgement indicating a divine ordinance ; but any outrageous form of ill-doing incurs a proportionately greater punishment administered under the surveillance of chastising daimons.

Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier realms, has entered body : it is a god, a later phase of the divine : but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge : if it turns back quickly all is well ; it will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known that suppressed and inhibited total.

The act reveals the power, a power hidden, and we might almost say obliterated or non-existent, unless at some moment it became effective : in the world as it is, the richness of the outer stirs us all to the wonder of the inner whose greatness is displayed in acts so splendid.

6. Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscemibly buried, shapeless within that unbroken whole : none of the real beings (of the Intellectual Kosmos) would exist if that unity remained at halt within itself : the plurality of these beings, offspring of the unity, could not exist without their own nexts taking the outward path ; these are the beings holding the rank of souls.

In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls, their issue stifled : every Kind must produce its next ; it must unfold from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance to its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat ; but there is the lower phase, begotten

to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the Supreme.

To this power we cannot impute any halt, any limit of jealous grudging ; it must move for ever outward until the universe stands accomplished to the ultimate possibility. All, thus, is produced by an inexhaustible power giving its gift to the universe, no part of which it can endure to see without some share in its being.

There is, besides, no principle that can prevent anything from partaking, to the extent of its own individual receptivity, in the Nature of Good. If therefore Matter has always existed, that existence is enough to ensure its participation in the being which, according to each receptivity, communicates the supreme good universally : if on the contrary, Matter has come into being as a necessary sequence of the causes preceding it, that origin would similarly prevent it standing apart from the scheme as though it were out of reach of the principle to whose grace it owes its existence.

In sum : The loveliness that is in the sense-realm is an index of the nobleness of the Intellectual sphere, displaying its power and its goodness alike : and all things are for ever linked ; the one order Intellectual in its being, the other of sense ; one self -existent, the other eternally taking its being by participation in that first, and to the full of its power reproducing the Intellectual nature.

7- The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the Intellectual against the sensible : better for the soul to dwell in the Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not being, through and through, the highest ; it holds mid-rank among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature ; thus, while it communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in turn whenever — instead of employing in its government only its safeguarded phase — it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst of its chosen sphere ;

then it abandons its status as whole soul with whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the Supreme, and more clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost their direct antithesis. Where the faculty is incapable of knowing without contact, the experience of evil brings the clearer perception of Good.

The outgoing that takes place in the Intellectual- Principle is a descent to its own downward ultimate : it cannot be a movement to the transcendent ; operating necessarily outwards from itself, wherein it may not stay inclosed, the need and law of Nature bring it to its extreme term, to soul — to which it entrusts all the later stages of being while itself turns back on its course.

The soul’s operation is similar : its next lower act is this universe : its immediate higher is the contemplation of the Authentic Existences. To individual souls such divine operation takes place only at one of their phases and by a temporal process when from the lower in which they reside they turn towards the noblest ; but that soul, which we know as the All-Soul, has never entered the lower activity, but, immune from evil, has the property of knowing its lower by inspection, while it still cleaves continuously to the beings above itself ; thus its double task becomes possible ; it takes thence and, since as soul it cannot escape touching this sphere, it gives hither.

8. And — if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of a personal conviction clashing with the general view — even our human soul has not sunk entire ; something of it is continuously in the Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of sense, hold the mastery, or rather be mastered here and troubled, it keeps us blind to what the upper phase holds in contemplation.

The object of the Intellectual Act comes within our ken only when it reaches downward to the level of sensation : for not all that occurs at any part of the soul is immediately known to us ; a thing must, for

that knowledge, be present to the total soul ; thus desire locked up within the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours by the central faculty of perception, or by the individual choice or by both at once. Once more, every soul has something of the lower on the body side and something of the higher on the side of the Intellectual-Principle .

The Soul of the All, as an entirety, governs the universe through that part of it which leans to the body side, but since it does not exercise a will based on calculation as we do — but proceeds by purely intellectual act as in the execution of an artistic conception — its ministrance is that of a labourless overpoising, only its lowest phase being active upon the universe it embellishes.

The souls that have gone into division and become appropriated to some thing partial have also their transcendent phase, but are preoccupied by sensation, and in the mere fact of exercising perception they take in much that clashes with their nature and brings distress and trouble since the object of their concern is partial, deficient, exposed to many alien influences, filled with desires of its own and taking its pleasure, that pleasure which is its lure.

But there is always the other, that which finds no savour in passing pleasure, but holds its own even way.

Ennead IV, Treatise 9

1. That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the fact that it is present entire at every point of the body — the sign of veritable unity — not some part of it here and another part there. In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and so in the forms of vegetal life the vegetal soul is entire at each several point throughout the organism.

Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one, and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the

several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate items, but an omnipresent identity ?

If the soul in me is a unity, why need that in the universe be otherwise seeing that there is no longer any question of bulk or body ? And if that, too, is one soul and yours, and mine, belongs to it, then yours and mine must also be one : and if, again, the soul of the universe and mine depend from one soul, once more all must be one.

What then in itself is this one soul ?

First we must assure ourselves of the possibility of all souls being one as that of any given individual is.

It must, no doubt, seem strange that my soul and that of any and everybody else should be one thing only : it might mean my feelings being felt by someone else, my goodness another’s too, my desire, his desire, all our experience shared with each other and with the (onesouled) universe, so that the very universe itself would feel whatever I felt.

Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul and vegetal ?

Yet if we reject that unity, the universe itself ceases to be one thing and souls can no longer be included under any one principle.

2. Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another’s, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences ; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you : there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me ; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point : when in any one body a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralising unity.

In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal : only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one.

We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large : thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.

Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it : some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.

That one identical soul should be virtuous in me and vicious in someone else is not strange : it is only saying that an identical thing may be active here and inactive there.

We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity — only of the Supreme can that be affirmed — we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that Order which suffers no division.

In myself some experience occurring in a part of the body may take no effect upon the entire man but anything occurring in the higher reaches would tell upon the partial : in the same way any influx from the All upon the individual will have manifest effect since the points of sympathetic contact are numerous — but as to any operation from ourselves upon the All there can be no certainty.

Yet, looking at another set of facts, reflection tells us that we are in sympathetic relation to each other, suffering, overcome, at the sight of pain, naturally drawn to forming attachments ; and all this can be due only to some unity among us.

Again, if spells and other forms of magic are efficient even at a distance to attract us into sympathetic relations, the agency can be no other than the one soul.

A quiet word induces changes in a remote object, and makes itself

heard at vast distances— proof of the oneness of all things within the one soul.

But how reconcile this unity with the existence of a reasoning soul, an unreasoning, even a vegetal soul ?

(It is a question of powers) : the indivisible phase is classed as reasoning because it is not in division among bodies, but there is the later phase, divided among bodies, but still one thing and distinct only so as to secure sense-perception throughout ; this is to be classed as yet another power ; and there is the forming and making phase which again is a power. But a variety of powers does not conflict with unity ; seed contains many powers and yet it is one thing, and from that unity rises, again, a variety which is also a unity.

But why are not all the powers of this unity present everywhere ?

The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described, similarly, as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of growth is at work where there is no sensation — and yet all these powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside.

The nourishing faculty as dependent from the All belongs also to the All-Soul : why then does it not come equally from ours ?

Because what is nourished by the action of this power is a member of the All, which itself has sensation passively ; but the perception, which is an intellectual judgement, is individual and has no need to create what already exists, though it would have done so had the power not been previously included, of necessity, in the nature of the All.

4- These reflections should show that there is nothing strange in that reduction of all souls to one. But it is still necessary to enquire into the mode and conditions of the unity.

Is it the unity of origin in a unity ? And if so, is the one divided or does it remain entire and yet produce variety ? and how can an essential being, while remaining its one self, bring forth others ?

Invoking God to become our helper, let us assert, that the very

IV-9-5l ARE ALL SOULS ONE? i57

existence of many souls makes certain that there is first one from which the many rise.

Let us suppose, even, the first soul to be corporeal.

Then (by the nature of body) the many souls could result only from the splitting up of that entity, each an entirely different substance : if this body-soul be uniform in kind, each of the resultant souls must be of the one kind ; they will all carry the one Form undividedly and will differ only in their volumes. Now, if their being souls depended upon their volumes they would be distinct ; but if it is ideal-form that makes them souls, then all are, in virtue of this Idea, one.

But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity— much as a multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points : in the second mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or modification of body, we could not wonder that this quality (the condition or modification) — this one thing from one source — should be present in many objects. The same reasoning would apply if soul were an effect (or manifestation) of the Conjoint.

We, of course, hold it to be bodiless, an essential existence.

5- How then can a multitude of essential beings be really one ?

Obviously either the one essence will be entire in all, or the many will rise from a one which remains unaltered and yet includes the one-many in virtue of giving itself, without self-abandonment, to its own multiplication.

It is competent thus to give and remain, because while it penetrates all things it can never itself be sundered : this is an identity in variety.

There is no reason for dismissing this explanation : we may think of a science with its constituents standing as one total, the source of all those various elements : again, there is the seed, a whole, producing

those new parts in which it comes to its division ; each of the new growths is a whole while the whole remains undiminished : only the material element is under the mode of part, and all the multiplicity remains an entire identity still.

It may be objected that in the case of science the constituents are not each the whole.

But even in the science, while the constituent selected for handling to meet a particular need is present actually and takes the lead, still all the other constituents accompany it in a potential presence, so that the whole is in every part : only in this sense (of particular attention) is the whole science distinguished from the part : all, we may say, is here simultaneously effected : each part is at your disposal as you choose to take it ; the part invites the immediate interest, but its value consists in its approach to the whole.

The detail cannot be considered as something separate from the entire body of speculation : so treated it would have no technical or scientific value ; it would be childish divagation. The one detail, when it is matter of science, potentially includes all. Grasping one such constituent of his science, the expert deduces the rest by force of sequence.

(As a further illustration of unity in plurality) the geometrician, in his analysis, shows that the single proposition includes all the items that go to constitute it and all the propositions which can be developed from it.

It is our feebleness that leads to doubt in these matters ; the body obscures the truth, but There all stands out clear and separate.