The Soul, outside all the limits of space and quantity, is able to embrace within its unvarying force the entire body of the All, and is ever at the furthest and the nearest point which the All includes (n). The Universe spreads as broad and wide as the presence of the Soul, and it stretches as far as the outflow of life from the Soul proceeds.
Notes
” Never a time.” Plotinus makes the world eternal on the ground that there could never be a time at which the Eternal Principles were unproductive.
” Darkness ” : — Cf. I. 8, 4, and I. 8, 5, pages 96-7 of this volume.
“ Presides over it ” : — This refers to the prior Soul. In other places Plotinus utterly denies a fall of the Soul : —
II. 9, 4. “ Is it to be thought that creation comes about because the Soul has
lost its wings ? Such a catastrophe cannot be conceived of the Divine All-Soul. We hear of its Fall : but, why and how, and when ? If it fell from all eternity, then it is eternally a fallen thing ; if we fix a time, why not earlier or later ? We hold that the Kosmos was produced by no such fall : the creation, rather, came about by the Soul’s not falling. If the Soul fell that could be only by its forgetting the things of the Supreme ; but if it forget that Sphere, how could it create this ? From what model does it work but from what it sees There ? If then it creates from the vision of the Divine Realities, it can never have fallen.”
“ Adding Beauty ” ; — “ All things that exist in the Universe have Soul and vital force and are images of the eternal life in the Divine and Intellectual Kosmos. The Universe is consummate in beauty and only the witless could revile it ; —
II. 9, 4. “ Nor can we admit that this universe is ill-constructed because of
the many flaws that may be found in it : such a complaint would rank it high indeed — as if it were the Intellectual Universe itself and not merely an image of that Divine Sphere.”
The very evil in the universe contributes towards the good ; the Providence of God nowhere shines more brightly than in His power to turn evil to His pur- poses ; —
III. 2, 5. ” Vice itself is not without its usefulness to the All ; it exhibits the
beauty and the rightness of virtue ; it calls up the intelligence to oppose the evil course ; it manifests the value and grace there is in goodness by displaying the cost of sin. No doubt evil has not essentially anything to do with these purposes, but once it is there it serves in working out great ends ; and only a mighty power could thus turn the ignoble to noble uses and employ to the purposes of form what has risen in formless lawlessness.”
” The Furthest and Nearest Point ” : — For the world is a living-being pene- trated with life, and all its members are working together towards one end : —
IV. 4, 32 : ” We must look upon this Universe with all the lives within it as one living-being having for all its parts one soul which reaches to every member, to every object existing in the sense-known scheme. . . . This world, by virtue of its unity, is linked in fellow-feeling ; it is like one animal and its furthest extremi- ties are near and share their experiences.”
IV. 4, 36. “ The universe is very varied ; all the Reason-Principles (Divine
Thought-Forms) meet in it, infinitely diverse powers. . . . It is a being awake and
Prayer and Magic
alive at every point. . . . Each thing has its own peculiar life in the All, though we, because our senses do not discern the activity going on inside wood and stone, deny the life. . . . Their living is in secret, but they live : all that lives to our per- ception is composed of things that live imperceptibly and bestow upon the visibly living the powers which are manifested in the life. Man could not rise to his lofty height if his activity were determined by utterly soulless powers ; nor, again, could the All be of so exalted a life unless everything in it had a life of its own ; choice perhaps does not belong to these invisible lives, but their activity has no need of choice ; they are of earlier origin than choice (i.e. they act by an “ instinct ” nearer to the Divine intuition) and therefore have far-reaching efficiency.”
To this general idea are hinged Plotinus’ theory of the sacredness of temples and statues and upon the efficacy of Magic : —
IV. 3, II. ” The olden sages, in seeking to procure the presence of the Gods by erecting temples and statues, seem to me to have possessed deep insight into the nature of the universe : They felt the All-Soul to be a Principle ever at our call ; it is but fitly preparing a place in which some phase of it may be received, and a thing is always fit to receive the operation of the Soul when it is brought to the condition of a mirror, apt to catch the image.”
IV. 4, 26. ‘‘ Our prayers are heard in the sense that they fit into the linked
scheme of the All ; they are effective by virtue of the same universal harmony. This is the secret of Magic also.”
IV. 4, 40. ” Enchantment is possible because of the fellow-feeling and ac-
cordant nature of like things and also through the unlikeness that, equally, exists ; in sum through the variety in the forces which co-operate to the constitution of one living-being. Even without human intervention there is much magical opera- tion : the true magic is the Love reigning in the Universe — and the Hate, as weU.”
. . . (Prayer and Magic, Plotinus explains, are efficient through the one cause : — ” the sympathy which every part of the Universe has for every other : twitch at any one point a rope hanging free, and it swings through all its length ; touch one chord of a lyre and every other chord resounds . . . much more must the universe respond to any single action since it embraces all things, even contraries, reconciled into a perfect harmony.)”
The Soul in Man
IV. 3, 15. “ The Souls, in proceeding from the Intellectual Sphere, pass first to
the heavens and there take a body : by means of this celestial body, as they acquire more and more of spatial extension they descend to bodies of a more earthly nature ; some of the souls will have entered into a first and only body, others will have passed down from body to body ; these last have not the strength to lift them- selves aloft again ; they are heavily burdened and numbed into forgetfulness ; they carry a great weight that bears them down (n).”
IV. 3, 17. " That this is the order of descent is a matter of simple sense. The
heavenly region is the most exalted of sensible space and touches the borders of the Intellectual Sphere ; the sky-things are, therefore, the first to receive Soul, fitter as they are for participation in the Divine. The earthy is of later origin, is further removed from the bodiless kind and is of a nature to receive only a lesser and later soul. All the Souls, then, illuminate the heavens, shedding there the first and most powerful effulgence of their splendour (n) the lower world receives only the later rays. Those Souls that plunge deepest in the descent irradiate the lowest bodies but they themselves take no gain from that service.”
VI. 4, 14. ” But we, what are we ? Before our birth to the world we were
in the Divine, men of another rank than now, of the order of the Gods, souls un- mingled with Matter, Intellectual-Principle inbound into the entirety of Authentic- Existence ; we were members of the Divine Mind, not then under limit, not cast out but wholly of the All.
“ Even now we are not cast out ; but upon that Primal-Man which we were, another man has been intruded ... we are become a double person . . . and our first and loftier nature lies torpid.”
Notes
” The Descent of the Souls ” : — Sometimes the Descent is explained by the consideration that the Soul has need of Matter, and Matter need of Soul : cf. I. 8, ii, page 106 of this work. Sometimes it appears that a law of eternal necessity leads the Souls to follow their own temper and will, and enter a body, choosing one suited to the distinctive character of each. After this arise the forgetfulness and self-will mentioned in the first Extract as causing the fall.
“ First Effulgence etc. ” : — Compare Extract X. page 148 of this work. The firmanent is, to Plotinus, a God ; so, too, the sun and stars. Gods of the second
The Soul and Death
order ; for, besides the Supreme God, The One, Plotinus admits three orders of Gods : I. The Intellectual-Puissances, constituting the Divine Mind : cf. notes on Extract VII. page 144 of this volume ; 2. The heavenly bodies ; 3. The Daimones or “ Blessed Spirits,” midway between earth and moon and between the Gods and men.
Plotinus impugns the theory of Astrology but concedes that the stars signify what is to be ; this doctrine he bases on the intimate connection of all things great and small in the Universe : —
II. 3, 7. ” We may think of the stars as letters being ceaselessly traced upon
the sky, or traced once for all but being constantly rearranged in such a way that while they do their own work in the universe they also signify to us. The unity of an organic body enables us to reason from part to other part ; from the eyes or some other organ one can judge of a man’s character, perils, resources. ... So the Universe is full of signs, and the wise man is the man that reads the reality from the symbols.”
“ What are We ? ” ; — Compare —
IV. 3, 12. " The human Souls, which can see their own image in the world as
in a Dionysos’ mirror, have not abandoned their place in the Divine ; for all their descent, they are not cut off from their Principle, from Divine Mind. The Intellec- tual-Principle does not descend with them but while they walk the earth their Summit is above the heavens.”
The Soul atfer Death I. I, 10. Page 38 of this volume.
Notes
The Soul liberated by death goes whither it has tended and as it has deserved — up to the heavens and among the stars, or in the Divine Mind itself, or into other human bodies, or yet deeper into Matter as into animals or plants. Cf. I. 8, 13, page 105 of this volume.
Plotinus does not allow that the authentic, the separable Soul, is in the body ; the body is in the Soul : see I. i, 7, page 35 of this work ; and
IV. 3, 20. ” The body is visible ; the Soul is not : v/e observe that the body
is possessed of Soul since it moves and feels . . . hence we are led to say that there is a Soul in it. If the Soul were an object of sight or of any sense, we should
perceive that it is wrapped about the entire living being, equally covering it from extremity to extremity ; we should judge that the Soul is in no way within the body but that the secondary is within its principal, the content within the container, the passing within the perdurable.”
IV. 3, 22. ” The Soul is in the body only as light is in the air (permeating
but not enclosed).”
The Essential Constituent of man is that prior Soul which ever remains a member of the Intellectual Realm from which it sprang : cf. I. i, 7, page 36 of this volrnne.
VI. 7, 5. " The diviner Soul never leaves the Divine Mind : while it clings
There, it allow'S the lower Soul, as it were, to hang down from it while it holds itself bound by its own Reason-Principle to the Reason-Principle of the Divine sphere to which it belongs.”