MacKenna-Plotinus: soul (Enneads IV)

  

1. 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. Enneads   IV,1,1

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. Enneads IV,1,1

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. Enneads IV,1,1

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. Enneads IV,1,1

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. Enneads IV,1,1

1. 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. Enneads IV,2,1

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. Enneads IV,2,1

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. Enneads IV,2,1

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. Enneads IV,2,1

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. Enneads IV,2,1

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. Enneads IV,2,2

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. Enneads IV,2,2

In the first place, it affirms without investigation a “leading” phase of the SOUL. Enneads IV,2,2

What can justify this assigning of parts to the SOUL, the 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. Enneads IV,2,2

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. Enneads IV,2,2

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. Enneads IV,2,2

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. Enneads IV,2,2

In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the “leading-principle” is their mere unity a lower reproduction of the SOUL’s efficiency. Enneads IV,2,2

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. Enneads IV,2,2

1. The SOUL: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the SOUL is the principle, and whence the SOUL itself springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who bade us know ourselves. Enneads IV,3,1

Now even in the universal Intellect [Divine Mind] there was duality, so that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which SOUL comes to occupy body. For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be offshoots from the SOUL of the universe [parts and an identity modally parted]. Enneads IV,3,1

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. Enneads IV,3,1

They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says “As our body is a portion of the body of the All, so our SOUL is a portion of the SOUL of the All.” It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that taking character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it we must derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within ourselves every part absorbs from our SOUL so, analogically, we, standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the SOUL of the All as parts of it. They will urge also that the dictum “The collective SOUL cares for all the unensouled,” carries the same implication and could be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin stands outside the SOUL of the universe, the only SOUL there can be there to concern itself with the unensouled. Enneads IV,3,1

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

Now in such a sense as this, part cannot be affirmed of the SOUL. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,2

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 would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there would be no reason for making any such distinction. Enneads IV,3,2

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. Enneads IV,3,3

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. Enneads IV,3,3

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. Enneads IV,3,3

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. Enneads IV,3,3

4. 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. Enneads IV,3,4

We might be led to think that all SOUL must always inhabit body; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the SOUL of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human SOUL does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human SOUL, while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human SOUL can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they are one and the same? There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the SOUL described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing. Enneads IV,3,4

A possible solution may be offered: The unit SOUL holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls the All-Soul, with the others issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one SOUL by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. Enneads IV,3,4

The one the lowest SOUL in the to the All-Soul would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest SOUL might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe while the other SOUL in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound. Enneads IV,3,4

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. Enneads IV,3,5

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. Enneads IV,3,5

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. Enneads IV,3,5

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. Enneads IV,3,6

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. Enneads IV,3,6

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. Enneads IV,3,6

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. Enneads IV,3,7

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. Enneads IV,3,7

As for saying of the Phaedrus  . “All that is SOUL cares for all that is soulless,” this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be controlled fashioned, set in place or brought into being by anything but the SOUL. And we cannot think that there is one SOUL whose nature includes this power and another without it. “The perfect SOUL, that of the All,” we read, “going its lofty journey, operates upon the 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 as “the SOUL when its wing is broken.” Enneads IV,3,7

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 vitalizing] proven to be distinct by that power of opposition. Enneads IV,3,7

As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in motherhood the entrant SOUL is distinct, is not the mother’s. Enneads IV,3,7

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. Enneads IV,3,8

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.” Enneads IV,3,8

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 fulfillment and perfectionment attainable by souls cannot but be different. Enneads IV,3,8

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. Enneads IV,3,8

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. Enneads IV,3,8

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 vegetal life, even in a part cut off from the main; in any possible segment it is as it is at its source. For the body of the All is a unit, and SOUL is everywhere present to it as to one thing. Enneads IV,3,8

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. Enneads IV,3,8

9. But we must examine how SOUL comes to inhabit the body the manner and the process a question certainly of no minor interest. Enneads IV,3,9

The entry of SOUL into body takes place under two forms. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

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. Enneads IV,3,9

We ascend from air, light, sun or, moon and light and sun in detail, to these things as constituting a total though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the [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. Enneads IV,3,10

Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate [the material world] itself receives its share of the general light, something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of SOUL whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever touches SOUL is moulded to the nature of SOUL’s own Real-Being. Enneads IV,3,10

We are not to think that the SOUL acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than SOUL; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies toys, things of no great worth and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The SOUL, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world [under the SOUL but above the material] the entire shape [as well as the idea] comes from SOUL, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the SOUL has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose. Enneads IV,3,10

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. Enneads IV,3,10

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. Enneads IV,3,10

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. Enneads IV,3,10

11. 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. Enneads IV,3,11

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. Enneads IV,3,11

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 overworld; 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. Enneads IV,3,11

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. Enneads IV,3,11

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. Enneads IV,3,12

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. Enneads IV,3,12

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. Enneads IV,3,12

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 fulfillment 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. Enneads IV,3,13

If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect, self-sufficing, 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. Enneads IV,3,17

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. Enneads IV,3,18

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. Enneads IV,3,18

19. 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. Enneads IV,3,19

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. Enneads IV,3,19

“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. Enneads IV,3,19

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. Enneads IV,3,19

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. Enneads IV,3,19

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

This simply shows that neither the SOUL entire nor any part of it 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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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 a separate existence. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

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. Enneads IV,3,20

21. What does all this come to? What answer do we give to him 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. Enneads IV,3,21

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. Enneads IV,3,21

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. Enneads IV,3,21

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. Enneads IV,3,21

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. Enneads IV,3,22

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. Enneads IV,3,22

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. Enneads IV,3,22

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. Enneads IV,3,23

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. Enneads IV,3,23

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 quasi-corporeal forms but] of that SOUL apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle. Enneads IV,3,23

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. Enneads IV,3,23

24. Now comes the question of the SOUL leaving the body; where does it go? 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. Enneads IV,3,24

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. Enneads IV,3,24

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. Enneads IV,3,24

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. Enneads IV,3,25

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. Enneads IV,3,25

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. Enneads IV,3,26

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. Enneads IV,3,26

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. Enneads IV,3,26

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]. Enneads IV,3,26

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. Enneads IV,3,26

If the SOUL is to have any significance to be a definite principle with a function of its own we are forced to recognize 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. Enneads IV,3,26

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and dearing 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. Enneads IV,3,26

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 for gets 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 [soulphases] 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. Enneads IV,3,27

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. Enneads IV,3,27

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. Enneads IV,3,27

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. Enneads IV,3,29

This explains, also, another fact: the SOUL is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking 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-perceptions. Enneads IV,3,30

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. Enneads IV,3,31

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. Enneads IV,3,31

32. 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. Enneads IV,3,32

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. Enneads IV,3,32

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, self-conducted. 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. Enneads IV,3,32

1. 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. Enneads IV,4,1

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. Enneads IV,4,1

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. Enneads IV,4,1

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. Enneads IV,4,1

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. Enneads IV,4,1

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. Enneads IV,4,2

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. Enneads IV,4,2

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. Enneads IV,4,2

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 bearing-in-mind must be either intuition [i e, knowledge with identity] or representation by image: and the imaging in the case of the is not a taking in of something 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. Enneads IV,4,3

4. 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. Enneads IV,4,4

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. Enneads IV,4,4

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 realized 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. Enneads IV,4,4

Memory, by this account, commences after the SOUL has left the higher spheres; it is first known in the celestial period. Enneads IV,4,5

A SOUL that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize 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. Enneads IV,4,5

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. Enneads IV,4,6

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? Enneads IV,4,7

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. Enneads IV,4,8

9. 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. Enneads IV,4,9

10. 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. Enneads IV,4,10

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. Enneads IV,4,10

The leading principle of the universe is a unity and one that is sovereign 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 dashing 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. Enneads IV,4,10

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. Enneads IV,4,11

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. Enneads IV,4,13

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]. Enneads IV,4,13

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. Enneads IV,4,13

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. Enneads IV,4,13

15. 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 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. Enneads IV,4,15

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. Enneads IV,4,15

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 its 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. Enneads IV,4,16

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. Enneads IV,4,16

The total scheme may be summarized 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; it is the motion of coiling about, with ceaseless return upon the same path in other words, it is circuit. Enneads IV,4,16

17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of 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 sovereign unity? That condition; and, further, the fact that our mental acts fall into a series according to the succession of our needs, being not self-determined 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. Enneads IV,4,17

When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the 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. Enneads IV,4,17

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. Enneads IV,4,18

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. Enneads IV,4,18

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. Enneads IV,4,18

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. Enneads IV,4,19

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. Enneads IV,4,19

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. Enneads IV,4,20

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. Enneads IV,4,20

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. Enneads IV,4,20

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. Enneads IV,4,22

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. Enneads IV,4,22

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. Enneads IV,4,22

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. Enneads IV,4,22

But how can perception and sensation [implied in ensoulment] be supposed to occur in the earth? How 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. Enneads IV,4,22

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 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. Enneads IV,4,22

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. Enneads IV,4,23

This apprehension must belong either to the SOUL isolated, self-acting, or to SOUL in conjunction with some other entity. Enneads IV,4,23

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. Enneads IV,4,23

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. Enneads IV,4,23

If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the SOUL entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of sense. Enneads IV,4,23

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. Enneads IV,4,23

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. Enneads IV,4,24

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. Enneads IV,4,24

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. Enneads IV,4,25

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. Enneads IV,4,25

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. Enneads IV,4,25

But why even of them? Because those gravest movements could not possibly remain unknown where there is an immanent SOUL. Enneads IV,4,26

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. Enneads IV,4,26

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. Enneads IV,4,27

But does the entire body of the earth similarly receive anything from the SOUL? Yes: for we must recognize 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. Enneads IV,4,27

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. Enneads IV,4,27

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. Enneads IV,4,28

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. Enneads IV,4,28

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. Enneads IV,4,28

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. Enneads IV,4,28

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 vestige-phase 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. Enneads IV,4,28

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. Enneads IV,4,29

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. Enneads IV,4,29

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. Enneads IV,4,29

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. Enneads IV,4,31

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. Enneads IV,4,31

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, jealously, 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, temple-strippers, 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. Enneads IV,4,31

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. Enneads IV,4,32

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. Enneads IV,4,35

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. Enneads IV,4,37

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. Enneads IV,4,40

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. Enneads IV,4,40

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 stiffed 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. Enneads IV,4,43

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 demonic 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. Enneads IV,4,45

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. Enneads IV,4,45

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence of body the SOUL is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. Sense-perception 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. Enneads IV,5,1

The knowledge, then, is realized 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]. Enneads IV,5,1

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. Enneads IV,5,4

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. Enneads IV,5,4

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. Enneads IV,5,6

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. Enneads IV,5,7

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. Enneads IV,5,7

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. Enneads IV,5,7

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 living whole, can be nothing to our minds.] Enneads IV,5,8

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. Enneads IV,5,8

1. 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. Enneads IV,6,1

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. Enneads IV,6,1

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. Enneads IV,6,2

Whether, in this self-vision, the SOUL is a duality and views itself as from the outside while seeing the Intellectual-Principal as a unity, and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity this question is investigated elsewhere. Enneads IV,6,2

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. Enneads IV,6,3

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. Enneads IV,6,3

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. Enneads IV,6,3

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. Enneads IV,6,3

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 perception 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. Enneads IV,6,3

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. Enneads IV,7,1

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. Enneads IV,7,1

The sovereign 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. Enneads IV,7,1

But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since such the SOUL is to be, can dissolve. Enneads IV,7,2

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. Enneads IV,7,2

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. Enneads IV,7,2

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. Enneads IV,7,2

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. Enneads IV,7,2

3. 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 self-sensitiveness, and SOUL is self-sensitive. And, again, constituents void of part could never produce body or bulk. Enneads IV,7,3

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. Enneads IV,7,3

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. Enneads IV,7,3

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. Enneads IV,7,3

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. Enneads IV,7,3

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. Enneads IV,7,4

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 recognize 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. Enneads IV,7,4

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. Enneads IV,7,4

There are other equally cogent proofs that the SOUL cannot be any form of body. Enneads IV,7,4

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. Enneads IV,7,4

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. Enneads IV,7,5

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. Enneads IV,7,5

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. Enneads IV,7,5

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 limits is no SOUL. Enneads IV,7,5

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. Enneads IV,7,5

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. Enneads IV,7,6

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. Enneads IV,7,6

If memory implies fresh sensations imposed upon former ones, the earlier not barring their way, the SOUL cannot be a material entity. Enneads IV,7,6

8. It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the SOUL were any form of body. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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; 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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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 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. Enneads IV,7,8

8. B. (10) 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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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 inblended 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. Enneads IV,7,8

Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But SOUL does this. It is therefore incorporeal. Enneads IV,7,8

8. C. (11) 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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

8. D. (12) 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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

8. E. (13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to SOUL. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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 Entelechy, 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. Enneads IV,7,8

Even the sense-perceiving SOUL, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, must 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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

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. Enneads IV,7,8

9. (14) 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. Enneads IV,7,9

10. (15) 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. Enneads IV,7,10

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. Enneads IV,7,10

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. Enneads IV,7,10

If this is the SOUL once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is 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. Enneads IV,7,10

Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but little as far as SOUL is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less than they only to the extent in which the SOUL is, in him, associated with body. Enneads IV,7,10

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 recognize their divinity and immortality. Enneads IV,7,10

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. Enneads IV,7,10

11. (16) 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]. Enneads IV,7,11

12. (17) 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. Enneads IV,7,12

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. Enneads IV,7,12

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. Enneads IV,7,12

No: the SOUL, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity. Enneads IV,7,12

13. (18) But how does the SOUL enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual? 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. Enneads IV,7,13

14. (19) 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. Enneads IV,7,14

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. Enneads IV,7,14

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. Enneads IV,8,1

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. Enneads IV,8,1

Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of the 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. Enneads IV,8,1

In the Phaedrus 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. Enneads IV,8,1

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; 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. Enneads IV,8,1

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. Enneads IV,8,2

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. Enneads IV,8,2

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. Enneads IV,8,2

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 kindly 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. Enneads IV,8,2

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. Enneads IV,8,2

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. Enneads IV,8,2

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 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. Enneads IV,8,2

3. The Human SOUL, next; Enneads IV,8,3

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.] Enneads IV,8,3

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 realized as individuals. We may think of it as a city which itself has SOUL and life, and includes, also, other forms of life; 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. Enneads IV,8,3

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 undistinguishable 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. Enneads IV,8,3

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. Enneads IV,8,4

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. Enneads IV,8,4

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 encavernment, of the SOUL. Enneads IV,8,4

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. Enneads IV,8,5

Still there is a twofold 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. Enneads IV,8,5

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. Enneads IV,8,5

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. Enneads IV,8,6

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 dearer perception of Good. Enneads IV,8,7

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. Enneads IV,8,7

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. Enneads IV,8,7

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. Enneads IV,8,8

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. Enneads IV,8,8

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. Enneads IV,8,8

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. Enneads IV,9,1

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. Enneads IV,9,1

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. Enneads IV,9,1

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 (one-souled) universe, so that the very universe itself would feel whatever I felt. Enneads IV,9,1

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. Enneads IV,9,1

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 centralizing unity. Enneads IV,9,2

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. Enneads IV,9,2

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. Enneads IV,9,2

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. Enneads IV,9,3

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. Enneads IV,9,3

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. Enneads IV,9,3

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. Enneads IV,9,3

Let us suppose, even, the first SOUL to be corporeal. Enneads IV,9,4

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 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. Enneads IV,9,4