intensely, in the All. There must be one principle constituting this unit of many forms of life and enclosing the several members within the unity, while at the same time, precisely as in each thing of detail the parts too have each a definite function, so in the All (the higher All) each several member must have its own task — but more markedly so since in this case the parts are not merely members but themselves Alls, members of the loftier Kind.
Thus each entity takes its origin from one Principle and, therefore, while executing its own function, works in with every other member of that All from which its distinct task has by no means cut it off : each performs its act, each receives something from the others, every one at its own moment bringing its touch of sweet or bitter. And there is nothing undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process : all is one scheme of differentiation, starting from the Firsts and working itself out in a con- tinuous progression of Kinds.
Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own ; alike in its direct course (its tendence towards the divine ?) and in its divagation (its activity towards the lower ?) it is the cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the First Principle ; thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise, would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as much by the order- liness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this order the stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-operators contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to what they patently do.
For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the Universe : once thus sunk and held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall itself and in the lower rank thus entailed upon us : riches and poverty are caused (not by the stars but) by the combinations of external fact.
And what of virtue and vice ?
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That question has been amply discussed elsewhere : in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul ; vice is due to the commerce of a Soul with the outer world.
This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit : the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity — our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain — and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape ; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world : our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.
What, after all this, remains to stand for the “ We ” ?
The “ We ” is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the imconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us ; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled— the bodily element domi- nant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body — for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appro-
priate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It- unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.
For every human Being is of twofold character ; there is that com- promise-total and there is the Authentic Man : and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole ; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body ; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul : and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.
To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no base- ness. In their efficacy upon the (material) All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it ; and they act only upon what is partial ; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star’s will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.
But (with every allowance to the lower forces) aU follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It — we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe — or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul (the divine first Soul) to the other, its Kin (the Soul of any particular being) . All that is graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The AU is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it ; “the rest,” we read, “ is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine.”
If all this be true, we must at once admit signification, though, neither singly nor collectively, can we ascribe to the stars any efficacy except in what concerns the (material) All and in what is of their own function.
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We must admit that the Soul before entering into birth presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse ; we must admit some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit : and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself ; it is co-operative, and com- pletes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part.
And we must remember that what comes from the supemals does not enter into the recipients as it left the source ; fire, for instance, will be duller ; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in ugly forms of the passion ; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced as to display the mean of manly courage, will come out as either ferocity or faint- heartedness ; and ambition ... in love . . . ; and the instinct towards good sets up the pursuit of semblant beauty ; intellectual power at its lowest produces the extreme of wickedness, for wickedness is a miscal- culating effort towards Intelligence (= towards the highest principle in the man).
Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, de- teriorates again within itself : things of any kind that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other.
AH that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity (in the subject concerned) and every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it ; for horse comes by horse, and man by man : the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the man has his origin in the Human- Principle. Outer things have their effect, sometimes to hurt and some- times to help ; like a father, they often contribute to good but sometimes
also to harm ; but they do not wrench the human being from the foun- dations of its nature ; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection ; the Ideal has been attenuated.
Of phenomena of this sphere some derive from the Kosmic Circuit and some not : we must take them singly and mark them off, assigning to each its origin.
The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions ; the entire force of the Soul is repre- sented in the All but, in the parts. Soul is present only in proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other entities, whose approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes helpful to the purpose of its nature ; but to the All taken in its length and breadth each and every separate existent is an adjusted part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing by its own native tendency to the entire life-history of the Universe.
The soulless parts of the All are merely instruments ; all their action is effected, so to speak, under a compulsion from outside themselves.
The ensouled fall into two classes. The one kind has a motion of its own, but haphazard like that of horses between the shafts but before their driver sets the course ; they are set right by the whip. In the Living-Being possessed of Reason, the nature-principle includes the driver ; where the driver is intelligent, it takes in the main a straight path to a set end. But both classes are members of the All and co-operate towards the general purpose.
The greater and most valuable among them have an important operation over a wide range : their contribution towards the life of the whole consists in acting, not in being acted upon ; others, but feebly
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equipped for action, are almost wholly passive ; there is an intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a principle of pro- ductivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet serve also by their passivity.
Thus the All stands as one all-complete Life, whose members, to the measure in which each contains within itself the Highest, effect all that is high and noble : and the entire scheme must be subordinate to its Dirigeant as an army to its general, “ following upon Zeus ” — it has been said — " as he proceeds towards the Intelligible Kind.”
Secondary in the All are those of its parts which possess a less exalted nature just as in us the members rank lower than the Soul ; and so all through, there is a general analogy between the things of the All and our own members — none of quite equal rank.
All living things, then — all in the heavens and all elsewhere — fall under the general Reason- Principle of the AU — they have been made parts with a view to the whole ; not one of these parts, however exalted, has power to effect any alteration of these Reason-Principles or of things shaped by them and to them ; some modification one part may work upon another, whether for better or for worse ; but there is no power that can wrest anything outside of its distinct nature.
The part effecting such a modification for the worse may act in several ways.