The Six Enneads ..................................................................................................................................................1

1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences

Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from

both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct

And what applies to the affections applies also to whatsoever acts, physical or mental, spring from them.

We have, therefore, to examine discursivereason and the ordinary mental action upon objects of sense, and

enquire whether these have the one seat with the affections and experiences, or perhaps sometimes the one

And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to light.

Firstly, what is the seat of SensePerception? This is the obvious beginning since the affections and

experiences either are sensations of some kind or at least never occur apart from sensation.

2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul that is whether a distinction is

to be made between Soul and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the SoulKind in itself]. *

* All matter shown in brackets is added by the translator for clearness' sake and, therefore, is not canonical.

If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in man] is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that

it is a recipient and if only reason allows that all the affections and experiences really have their seat in the

But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an IdealForm

unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act

If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the Soul as an immortal if the immortal, the imperishable, must

be impassive, giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for what it receives

from the Existents prior to itself from which Existents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered.

Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there

place for courage: courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or

voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of

And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture? An essential is not mixed. Or of the intrusion of

anything alien? If it did, it would be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be equally far from

it. And Grief how or for what could it grieve? Whatever possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling,

unchangeable, within its own peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing, not even

Thus assuredly SensePerception, DiscursiveReasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the

Soul: for sensation is a receiving whether of an IdealForm or of an impassive body and reasoning and all

The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections whether these are to be assigned

to the Soul and as to PurePleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary state.

3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body whether it be set above it or actually within it since the

association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.

Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must

share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is

It may be objected that the Soul must however, have SensePerception since its use of its instrument must

acquaint it with the external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be argued,

the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to the soul: hence the Soul may feel

sorrow and pain and every other affection that belongs to the body; and from this again will spring desire, the

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to Soul? Body may communicate qualities or

conditions to another body: but body to Soul? Something happens to A; does that make it happen to B? As

long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct entities; if the Soul uses the body it is separate

Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are possible. There might be a complete

coalescence: Soul might be interwoven through the body: or it might be an IdealForm detached or an

IdealForm in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part of the Soul detached and another part in

contact, the disjoined part being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing

In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent,

and except in so far as the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the instrument, the

Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of

being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can

No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming

by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body. And

fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the body's doom to fail of its joys and to perish.

Then again we should have to examine how such a coalescence could be conceived: we might find it

impossible: perhaps all this is like announcing the coalescence of things utterly incongruous in kind, let us

Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof

and warp community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating

soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body as light goes always free of all it floods and

all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame.

Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul would not be subjected to the body's affections and experiences:

Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as IdealForm in Matter. Now if the first possibility the Soul is an

essence, a selfexistent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be

Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axeform on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is

still the axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the iron thus modified: on

this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination

to the body: their natural seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life.

Compare the passage where we read* that "it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves"; equally absurd to

think of it as desiring, grieving. All this is rather in the province of something which we may call the

* "We read" translates "he says" of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name does not

5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body:

The Soul in turn apart from the nature of the Animate must be either impassive, merely causing

SensePerception in its yokefellow, or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences

with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for example in the Animate may be something

Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this

It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a

SensitiveFaculty which in turn merges into Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation

Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the

man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire Animate. But

this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to

the Couplement? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the

judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet not

be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than

Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Facultyofdesire and anger in the IrascibleFaculty

and, collectively, that all tendency is seated in the AppetitiveFaculty? Such a statement of the facts does not

help towards making the affections common to the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul

alone or in the body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must

be a heating of the blood and the bile, a welldefined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse

towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the

Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all the affections to the Couplement.

In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be

desire in the DesiringFaculty as well. How can this be? Are we to suppose that, when the man originates the

desire, the DesiringFaculty moves to the order? How could the Man have come to desire at all unless

through a prior activity in the DesiringFaculty? Then it is the DesiringFaculty that takes the lead? Yet how,

6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are contained by a recipient, every

action or state expressive of them must be the action or state of that recipient, they themselves remaining

But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the recipient of the CausingPrinciple [i.e., the Soul] which

brings life to the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and expressive

But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the Soul but to the Couplement; or at least the life of the

Couplement would not be the life of the Soul; SensePerception would belong not to the SensitiveFaculty

But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in Soul, how the soul lack sensation? The

Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in the SensitiveFaculty, the Soul left

7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence.

This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it

forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested SensePerception and all the other

By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler

The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by

the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already

Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other [of that in the Soul] which is nearer to

And by means of these IdealForms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have

DiscursiveReasoning, SenseKnowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We:

before this there was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands the WE [the authentic HumanPrinciple] loftily

There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or LivingBeing

mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin

to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the

associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use and act of reason

8. And towards the IntellectualPrinciple what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul

which is one of the emanations from the IntellectualPrinciple, but The IntellectualPrinciple itself

This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own

immediate possession: or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible

one, everywhere and always Its entire self and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the

FirstSoul [i.e. in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul].

Hence we possess the IdealForms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the

In that the Divinity is contained in the IntellectualPrinciple and AuthenticExistence; and We come third in

order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul we read and

that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one

undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has

given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact

that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without

any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.

The first of these images is SensePerception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the

successive images are to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until

the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring offspring efficient

in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which [has no direct action within matter but]

9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does

or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement.

But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are

vested in it: for all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil.

When we have done evil it is because we have been worsted by our baser side for a man is many by desire

or rage or some evil image: the misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality fancy, has not

stayed for the judgement of the ReasoningPrinciple: we have acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in

matters of the sensesphere we sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception, that of the

The IntellectualPrinciple has held aloof from the act and so is guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on

whether we ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the IntellectualRealm either in the

IntellectualPrinciple or within ourselves; for it is possible at once to possess and not to use.

Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands by itself: the one group has the

character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its manifestation

belongs peculiarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as passing judgement upon SenseImpressions, is at the

point of the vision of IdealForms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i.e, with

consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For Understanding, the

true, is the Act of the Intellections: in many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of

Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to itself and within itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we

experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as have said, the states and experiences of

10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states

then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul.

But it has been observed that the Couplement, too especially before our emancipation is a member of this

total We, and in fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct notions;

sometimes it includes the brutepart, sometimes it transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the

true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the

IntellectualActivity, virtues whose seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here may

be kept apart. [This Soul constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul

Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical

discipline belong to the Couplement: to the Couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its repugnances,

This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the interior man.

11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher

principles of our being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their action is

directed towards the Supreme; they work upon us only when they stand at the midpoint.

But does not the include that phase of our being which stands above the midpoint?

It does, but on condition that we lay hold of it: our entire nature is not ours at all times but only as we direct

the midpoint upwards or downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature from potentiality or native

If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned, then the AnimatingPrinciple in its

separable phase does not enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they are aware only of

the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of that only by being aware of the body organised and

If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the AllSoul.

12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is

above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world,

When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and EssentialSoul one and the same: it is the simple

By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which knows

all the states and passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, allinclusive: it falls under the conditions of

the entire living experience: this compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty.

It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those others saw the seagod Glaukos." "And,"

reading on, "if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it,

must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then,

must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth; or

rather birth is the comingintobeing of that other [lower] phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has

been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul

Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it not certainly sin?

If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to

be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the light could

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets

the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing

that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.

The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate existence; he puts the shade of

Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in the two

It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble

serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the

Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above,

But how "by the Soul"? Does this mean that the Soul reasons by possession [by contact with the matters of

No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists without movement; or any movement that can be ascribed to it

must be utterly distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's own life.

And Intellection in us is twofold: since the Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we

have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the IntellectualPrinciple upon

us for this IntellectualPrinciple is part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising.

1. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to escape from Evil,

"In attaining Likeness to God," we read. And this is explained as "becoming just and holy, living by

But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To what Divine

Being, then, would our Likeness be? To the Being must we not think? in Which, above all, such excellence

seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed

with a wisdom most wonderful. What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should become

But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this DivineBeing all the virtues find place

MoralBalance [Sophrosyne], for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is alien;

where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the desire of possession.

If, indeed, that aspiration towards the Intelligible which is in our nature exists also in this RulingPower, then

need not look elsewhere for the source of order and of the virtues in ourselves.

We cannot expect to find There what are called the Civic Virtues, the Prudence which belongs to the

reasoning faculty; the Fortitude which conducts the emotional and passionate nature; the Sophrosyne which

consists in a certain pact, in a concord between the passionate faculty and the reason; or Rectitude which is

the due application of all the other virtues as each in turn should command or obey.

Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by these virtues of the social order but by those greater qualities

known by the same general name? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us no help at all?

It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness by these while admitting it by the greater: tradition at least

recognizes certain men of the civic excellence as divine, and we must believe that these too had in some sort

attained Likeness: on both levels there is virtue for us, though not the same virtue.

Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is possible, though by a varying use of different virtues and though the

civic virtues do not suffice, there is no reason why we should not, by virtues peculiar to our state, attain

When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be something to warm the source of the

Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not

by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would

make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an essential constituent of the Principle from which the

Against the illustration drawn from the fire, it may be urged that the analogy would make that Principle

The objection would be valid if what the soul takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact

virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the house

conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness: the material house has distribution and order while

the pure idea is not constituted by any such elements; distribution, order, symmetry are not parts of an idea.

So with us: it is from the Supreme that we derive order and distribution and harmony, which are virtues in

this sphere: the Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution, have nothing to do with

virtue; and, none the less, it is by our possession of virtue that we become like to Them.

Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of

virtue in the Supreme. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must persuade as well as

2. First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish

what is this thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme possesses it, is in the

There is the likeness demanding an identical nature in the objects which, further, must draw their likeness

from a common principle: and there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not concerned

about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case, likeness is understood in a distinct sense: we no

longer look for identity of nature, but, on the contrary, for divergence since the likeness has come about by

What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively and in the particular? The clearer method will be to begin with

the particular, for so the common element by which all the forms hold the general name will readily appear.

The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched above, are a principle or order and beauty in us as long as we

remain passing our life here: they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our entire

sensibility, and dispelling false judgement and this by sheer efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the

bounds, by the fact that the measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless.

And, further, these Civic Virtues measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to

the Soul which is as Matter to their forming are like to the measure reigning in the overworld, and they

carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and

wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in IdealForm produces some corresponding degree of

Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer than the body,

therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the

3. We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues: discussing

this we shall penetrate more deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to define the nature of the

To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct orders of virtue, and the civic does not suffice for Likeness:

"Likeness to God," he says, "is a flight from this world's ways and things": in dealing with the qualities of

good citizenship he does not use the simple term Virtue but adds the distinguishing word civic: and elsewhere

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness?

As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body's states and to think

the body's thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's moods and

devoted itself to its own Act the state of Intellection and Wisdom never allowed the passions of the body

to affect it the virtue of Sophrosyne knew no fear at the parting from the body the virtue of Fortitude

and if reason and the IntellectualPrinciple ruled in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the

Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the

No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in

the Divine: of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all.

Rather there is primal Intellection and there is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of other scope.

As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to

say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soulthought, so the soulthought images a thought above itself

Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to the IntellectualPrinciple or to the

4. We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the

forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere

process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is

To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but Goodness is something more.

If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness suffices; but even so, not the act of

cleansing but the cleansed thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what this

It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with

Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to

The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the IntellectualPrinciple, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting

strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new

After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to be made? No: by the purification the true

The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the alignment brings about within.

That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and

What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to

dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the light.

Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with the

verities they represent. And, further, if the IntellectualPrinciple is said to be a possession of the Soul, this is

only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned

towards It: otherwise, everpresent though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not

5. So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear.

The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion anger, desire

and the like, with grief and its kin and in what degree the disengagement from the body is possible.

It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it

will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may combat, but, failing

the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the

suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep

the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at that. The Soul has nothing to

dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as it

is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary for

restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there must

be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion

takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all

attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may

be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage

would profit by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never

There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand

in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own

6. In all this there is no sin there is only matter of discipline but our concern is not merely to be sinless but

As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold, God and DemiGod, or rather God in

association with a nature of a lower power: when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled, a

For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the

essential man is There: entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature

and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible

it shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its overlord.

It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the IntellectualPrinciple, and

And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the IntellectualPrinciple and as in

the Soul; and there is the IntellectualPrinciple as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul: this

That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the

Supreme is not selfexistent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the

source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme

But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of faculty, does it not always imply the existence of diverse parts?

No: There is a Rectitude of Diversity appropriate to what has parts, but there is another, not less Rectitude

than the former though it resides in a Unity. And the authentic AbsoluteRectitude is the Act of a Unity upon

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the IntellectualPrinciple:

its Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the IntellectualPrinciple; its Fortitude is its being

impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which

the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less

7. The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the overworld, that is among

In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom; selfconcentration is Sophrosyne; Its

proper Act is Its Dutifulness; Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself is the equivalent of

In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the IntellectualPrinciple is Wisdom and Prudence, soulvirtues

not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar

And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must

And to possess the greater is potentially to possess the minor, though the minor need not carry the greater

Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage; but whether his possession of the minor

virtues be actual as well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to qualities higher

Take, for example, ContemplativeWisdom. If other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given

And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope and province? Where, for example,

Sophrosyne would allow certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off

altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once ContemplativeWisdom comes into action?

The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with

this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in

turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work

for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man such as Civic Virtue

commends but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.

For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to

produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme

1. What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there where we must go?

The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have established elsewhere, by many

considerations, that our journey is to the Good, to the PrimalPrinciple; and, indeed, the very reasoning

Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most things, those who at their first birth have entered

into the lifegerm from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover, the metaphysician

taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside

But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or is there a distinct method for each class of temperament?

For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.

The first degree is the conversion from the lower life; the second held by those that have already made their

way to the sphere of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must still advance within the

realm lasts until they reach the extreme hold of the place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the

But this highest degree must bide its time: let us first try to speak of the initial process of conversion.

We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the musician first and indicate his

The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat

slow to stir of his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are sensitive to noise so

he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies and rhythms

This natural tendency must be made the startingpoint to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm

and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the AuthenticExistent

which is the source of all these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must

be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was

no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of

beauty but the AllBeauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to

lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show

2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain and then either come to a stand or pass

beyond has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound

by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered

delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty

everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms,

springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course

of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him a first training this in the

loveliness of the immaterial he must learn to recognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these

severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From

the virtues he is to be led to the IntellectualPrinciple, to the AuthenticExistent; thence onward, he treads

3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not like those others, in need of

disengagement, stirring of himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a guide. He must

be shown, then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by his very temperament, all but selfdirected.

Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract

thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue

perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.

4. But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it?

It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature

and relation of things what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all have, to what Kind

each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and whether its Being is RealBeing, and how many

Dialectic treats also of the Good and the notGood, and of the particulars that fall under each, and of what is

the Eternal and what the not Eternal and of these, it must be understood, not by seemingknowledge

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos

and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul

in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the IdealForms, of the

AuthenticExistence and of the FirstKinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of

Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual

Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts.

Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it

has arrived at Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another science all that coil of premisses and conclusions

called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the art of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it

considers necessary to clear the ground but it makes itself the judge, here as in everything else; where it

sees use, it uses; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of learning or practice may

The IntellectualPrinciple furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What

else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect

Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the purest [perfection] of Intellection and ContemplativeWisdom." And,

being the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with AuthenticExistence, The Highest

there is: as ContemplativeWisdom [or trueknowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what

It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic

does not consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at

least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of

Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside

itself, something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it,

it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions

collections of words but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their

propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what

is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether

propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of senseperception and it

leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises.

6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic is its precious part: in its study of the laws of the universe,

Philosophy draws on Dialectic much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic, though, of course, the alliance

And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic: by Dialectic it comes to contemplation, though it originates of

itself the moral state or rather the discipline from which the moral state develops.

Our reasoning faculties employ the data of Dialectic almost as their proper possession for they are mainly

And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of

Wisdom [i.e., the virtue peculiarly induced by Dialectic] is a certain superreasoning much closer to the

Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the choice of time for action and inaction, the

adoption of this course, the rejection of that other: Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of presenting all

And is it possible to be a Sage, Master in Dialectic, without these lower virtues?

It would not happen: the lower will spring either before or together with the higher. And it is likely that

everyone normally possesses the natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps in, the perfected virtue

develops. After the natural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the perfecting of the moral nature. Once the natural

virtues exist, both orders, the natural and the higher, ripen side by side to their final excellence: or as the one

But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in vision and in strength and to both orders of virtue the essential

1. Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and therefore within

There is certainly no reason to deny wellbeing to any of them as long as their lot allows them to flourish

Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant conditions of life, or in the accomplishment of some

appropriate task, by either account it may fall to them as to us. For certainly they may at once be pleasantly

placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature: take for an instance such living beings as

have the gift of music; finding themselves welloff in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so

And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on this head, too, we

must allow it to animals from the moment of their attaining this Ultimate: the nature in them comes to a halt,

It may be a distasteful notion, this bringingdown of happiness so low as to the animal world making it

over, as then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they too

But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to deny that good of life to animals only because they do not appear to

man to be of great account. And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord to the

other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true people might be found to declare prosperity possible

to the very plants: they have life, and life may bring good or evil; the plants may thrive or wither, bear or be

No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of life to any order

of living things; if the Term be innerpeace, equally impossible; impossible, too, if the good of life be to live

2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to

By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of wellbeing must be Good in itself quite

apart from the perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without knowledge:

there is good in the appropriate state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality

This Good exists, then; is present: that in which it is present has wellbeing without more ado: what need

Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good of any state consists not in the condition itself but in the

But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient life. And so it will

be possessed by all that feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two constituents are needed to make

up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given state felt: but how can it be maintained that the

They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of Good and that such a condition constitutes

wellbeing on the discernment of that present good; but then they invite the question whether the wellbeing

comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or whether there must further be the double

recognition that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.

If wellbeing demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher

faculty; and wellbeing is vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent to discern that

Then the cause of the wellbeing is no longer pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to

pleasure's value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of

Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is.

How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order?

No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise

quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier wellbeing than they are aware of, and setting their

Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but

But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the

"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal

needs of nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"

If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after

their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason becomes a servant;

there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is

If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not as supplying these human needs, you must

tell us what other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect thing it is.

For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such planning and providing: its perfection will be

something quite different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself one of those first needs of

nature; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be nobler

than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so highly.

Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where

they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it

3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, and

those will be effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by nature

receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness were inherent

in the bare beingalive, the common ground in which the cause of happiness could always take root would be

Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that

they are not really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning faculty, round which they

centre happiness, is a property [not the subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the

ReasoningLife since it is in this double term that they find the basis of the happiness: so that they are

making it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life not, of course, a species formally opposite but, in

Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which shade down from primal to secondary and

so on, all massed under the common term life of plant and life of animal each phase brighter or dimmer

than its next: and so it evidently must be with the GoodofLife. And if thing is ever the image of thing, so

If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is

lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives fully.

And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of

existents the Supreme Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest

plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought from without, a

life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.

For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life? If anyone should answer, "The nature of

Good" [The Good, as a Divine Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are not

It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual

Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not

pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things

proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the

4. If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must

But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The

It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason

But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature?

No: there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which

But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent

We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion of their total being in those, namely,

that have it potentially there is, too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is this perfection

realized, who has passed over into actual identification with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man,

not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but

What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none of the less worthy things; and the Best he carries always

Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies

outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a

subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not

needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his

household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too.

And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man,

but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.

5. But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity?

What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or

happiness be present under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will

certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those neverfailing "Miseries of Priam."

"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be

his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as

simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodilyprinciple in the total of the being: he will, no doubt,

take all bravely... until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through

the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that,

thus, knows the misery of illfortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss

selfcontained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek

happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the

other, answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing

but to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that selfcontained unity essential to

6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly

denied to anyone confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away

from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of

which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable

and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our

quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls

The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards freedom from this sphere: the reason which

disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order; it merely

resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much

away from evil as towards the Soul's own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there is rest and

There can be no such thing as "willing" the acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be taken in its strict

It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have

willed; to have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste; but the things we seek

tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance, health and freedom from pain; which of these has any

Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to happiness, which when lacking is desired because

of the presence of an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.

Such things can never make part of our final object: our Term must be such that though these pleasanter

conditions be absent and their contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.

7. Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled by the man established in happiness?

These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle towards the Sage's felicity: but they do

serve towards the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being or

complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that

he that holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something

which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side.

In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen,

there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or

falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession.

No: a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession

What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here,

If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter kingdom and the rule over

cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork how can

he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought

any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that

sets great store by wood and stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose

But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a

But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters dragged away to captivity?

What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong? Could he have quitted the world in the calm

conviction that nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that it is possible

for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of

what may occur? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; so, too, when the evil has come

He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings these things to pass and man must bow the head.

Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage; and those that suffer have their freedom in

their hands: if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real grievance, or they

stay against reason, when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of

his neighbours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil: his state cannot hang upon the fortunes good

8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well as he can; if they overpass his endurance

And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled

like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.

But what if he be put beyond himself? What if pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but

kills? Well, when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done: he retains his freedom of action.

Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man; neither ordinary

experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow

And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they

come: this is not concern for others' welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our imperfection: we

must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble over what perhaps may be.

Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over misfortune to our household must learn that this is

not so with all, and that, precisely, it is virtue's use to raise the general level of nature towards the better and

finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.

We cannot be indolent: this is an arena for the powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of

fortune, and knowing that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing dreadful,

It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his

If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not equally

remain happy? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep; no one counts up that time and so denies

If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the

Sage: but we do suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the state of

"Well, a Sage let him remain," they say, "still, having no sensation and not expressing his virtue in act, how

But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy: a man may not be aware of his personal

attraction, but he remains handsome none the less: if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be any the less

It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential to wisdom and that happiness is only

Now, this argument might have weight if prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in from outside: but this

is not so: wisdom is, in its essential nature, an AuthenticExistence, or rather is The AuthenticExistent and

this Existent does not perish in one asleep or, to take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of his

mind: the Act of this Existent is continuous within him; and is a sleepless activity: the Sage, therefore, even

This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one part of him: we have here a parallel to

what happens in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the sensitive

faculty to the rest of the man: if our physical life really constituted the "We," its Act would be our Act: but, in

the fact, this physical life is not the "We"; the "We" is the activity of the IntellectualPrinciple so that when

10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with

things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the

sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be an immediate activity of the

IntellectualPrinciple and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception? For,

if Intellection and AuthenticExistence are identical, this "Earlierthanperception" must be a thing having

Let us explain the conditions under which we become conscious of this IntellectiveAct.

When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life

of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and

shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the

mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists; so in the case of

the Soul; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and

IntellectualPrinciples these images appear. Then, side by side with the primal knowledge of the activity of

the Rational and the IntellectualPrinciples, we have also as it were a senseperception of their operation.

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body,

Reason and the IntellectualPrinciple act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination.

In sum we may safely gather that while the IntellectiveAct may be attended by the Imaging Principle, it is

And even in our conscious life we can point to many noble activities, of mind and of hand alike, which at the

time in no way compel our consciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is most intent: in

a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave action or of the fact that all that is done conforms to

So that it would even seem that consciousness tends to blunt the activities upon which it is exercised, and that

in the degree in which these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more vitality, and that,

consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has the truer fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but

11. We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer alive: we answer that these people show

If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to

enquire whether the man is in happiness: they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he has the

happy life; they must not take away man and then look for the happiness of a man: once they allow that the

Sage lives within, they must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the

object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any

good external, would be to deny SubstantialExistence to happiness; for the Sage would like to see all men

prosperous and no evil befalling anyone; but though it prove otherwise, he is still content.

If it be admitted that such a desire would be against reason, since evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape

12. The pleasure demanded for the life cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications

of the body there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness nor in any violent emotions what could

so move the Sage? it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise

from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the

Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life ever untroubled: his state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever

of all that is known as evil can set it awry given only that he is and remains a Sage.

If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is

13. The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining

always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and

things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searching and thinking, but the one greatest

principle is ever present to him, like a part of his being most of all present, should he be even a victim in the

muchtalkedof Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an

agreeable lodging; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture; in the Sage there is something

else as well, The SelfGathered which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can never be

14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is that man can be

It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the livingbody: happiness is the possession

of the good of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul and not of all the Soul at that: for it

certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the

A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperament, these surely do not make

felicity; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced

more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counterpressure in the other direction, towards

the noblest: the body must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the

Let the earthbound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the

entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could

not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will

lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by

inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not

wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to him of

themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains

nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to

know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it;

but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their

When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the negative take away?

15. But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while the

other meets only with the very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal happiness?

What though the one be favoured in body and in all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards

virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to? The man

commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself that he is more truly happy than the man

without them: the utmost profusion of such boons would not help even to make a fluteplayer.

We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes

lightly: he would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things

and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch

him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue;

As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps are

elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within him,

whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of

This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh: it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the

Sage: giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his very union with

16. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental,

dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether; they

offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy

to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of

happiness; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true

happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess

happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.

He can care for no other Term than That: all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not

in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differing

He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of

another order, not prevented from abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at nature's hour, he himself

Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the

Term's sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and bears

with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it,

or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest

unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was

1. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time, Happiness which is always taken as a present

The memory of former felicity may surely be ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing of words, but a

definite condition which must be actually present like the very fact and act of life.

2. It may be objected that our will towards living and towards expressive activity is constant, and that each

But in the first place, by this reckoning every tomorrow's wellbeing will be greater than today's, every

later instalment successively larger that an earlier; at once time supplants moral excellence as the measure of

Then again the Gods today must be happier than of old: and their bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be

perfect. Further, when the will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present: the quest is always

for something to be actually present until a standing felicity is definitely achieved. The will to life which is

will to Existence aims at something present, since Existence must be a stably present thing. Even when the

act of the will is directed towards the future, and the furthest future, its object is an actually present having

and being: there is no concern about what is passed or to come: the future state a man seeks is to be a now to

him; he does not care about the forever: he asks that an actual present be actually present.

3. Yes, but if the wellbeing has lasted a long time, if that present spectacle has been a longer time before the

If in the greater length of time the man has seen more deeply, time has certainly done something for him, but

if all the process has brought him no further vision, then one glance would give all he has had.

But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness unless indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered

Act [of the true man], in which case this pleasure is simply our "Happiness." And even pleasure, though it

exist continuously, has never anything but the present; its past is over and done with.

5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man has been happy from first to last, another

only at the last, and a third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are equal?

This is straying from the question: we were comparing the happy among themselves: now we are asked to

compare the nothappy at the time when they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of

happiness. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of happiness against men without it

6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness? Do not all

troubles longlasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type yield a greater sum of misery in the

longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment

In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase: for

example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought lower

and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there

would be no trouble but that of the present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness

except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state in the sense that, the evil in the

sufferer's condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of

illbeing then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time.

It may be pointed out also that this greater length of time is not a thing existent at any given moment; and

surely a "more" is not to be made out by adding to something actually present something that has passed

If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater happiness is the

reward of a higher virtue: this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years of its continuance; it is

7. But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the past to make the total, why do we not

reckon so in the case of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the present and call the

total greater? Why not suppose a quantity of happiness equivalent to a quantity of time? This would be no

more than taking it lap by lap to correspond with timelaps instead of choosing to consider it as an

There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be: we are merely counting what is past and

finished, as we might count the dead: but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as outweighing

present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any

time over and apart from the present is nonexistent: all progress of time means the extinction of all the time

Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary flight the

permanence of its exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands permanent in

eternity is annihilated saved only in so far as in some degree it still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed

If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it clearly has to do with the life of

AuthenticExistence for that life is the Best. Now the life of AuthenticExistence is measurable not by time

but by eternity; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the unchangeable, the

We must not muddle together Being and NonBeing, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the

eternal; we cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must be taken together, wheresoever and

howsoever we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the Life of

Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.

8. It may be urged that the actual presence of past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives the advantage

Memory either of formerly attained wisdom and virtue in which case we have a better man and the

argument from memory is given up or memory of past pleasures, as if the man that has arrived at felicity

must roam far and wide in search of gratifications and is not contented by the bliss actually within him.

And what is there pleasant in the memory of pleasure? What is it to recall yesterday's excellent dinner? Still

9. But is there not something to be said for the memory of the various forms of beauty?

That is the resource of a man whose life is without beauty in the present, so that, for lack of it now, he grasps

10. But, it may be said, length of time produces an abundance of good actions missed by the man whose

attainment of the happy state is recent if indeed we can think at all of a state of happiness where good

Now to make multiplicity, whether in time or in action, essential to Happiness is to put it together by

combining nonexistents, represented by the past, with some one thing that actually is. This consideration it

was that led us at the very beginning to place Happiness in the actually existent and on that basis to launch

our enquiry as to whether the higher degree was determined by the longer time. It might be thought that the

Happiness of longer date must surpass the shorter by virtue of the greater number of acts it included.

But, to begin with, men quite outside of the active life may attain the state of felicity, and not in a less but in a

Secondly, the good does not derive from the act itself but from the inner disposition which prompts the noble

conduct: the wise and good man in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by what he is.

A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the country, and the good of the act is for all alike, no matter

whose was the saving hand. The contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and events: it is

his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and whatever pleasure may accompany it.

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul's

expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is

1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations

of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves

above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character,

in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in

sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?

Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and

Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by

something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue.

The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body

What, then, is this something that shows itself in certain material forms? This is the natural beginning of our

What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them,

towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of this, we have at once a standpoint

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides,

a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all

Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will

have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an

aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout.

All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by

symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And

In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is

Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that

beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?

Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of thought; are we to call in symmetry here?

What symmetry is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit?

The symmetry of being accordant with each other? But there may be accordance or entire identity where

there is nothing but ugliness: the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most

perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will; the accordance is complete.

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how

does symmetry enter here? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the

symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the

Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the IntellectualPrinciple, essentially the solitary?

2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material

Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the

soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.

But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it,

Our interpretation is that the soul by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in

the hierarchy of Being when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an

immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.

But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world and the splendours in the Supreme? Such

a likeness in the particulars would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common between beauty

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is

ugly by that very isolation from the DivineThought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is

something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all

But where the IdealForm has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to

become a unity: it has rallied confusion into cooperation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence:

for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.

And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the

sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an

illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty

This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful by communicating in the thought that flows from the

3. And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty one incomparably sure in the appreciation

of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with

the IdealForm within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter?

On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his

inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner

idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity?

So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the IdealForm which has bound and controlled

shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape

excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it

within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the IdealPrinciple as something concordant and

congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a

The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the

darkness inherent in Matter by the pouringin of light, the unembodied, which is a RationalPrinciple and an

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of IdealPrinciple to the

other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the

unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is

never cold; it has colour primally; they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the splendour of its light,

the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of

beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary

but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being.

Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadowpictures, fugitives that have entered into

4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties than these. In the sensebound life we are no longer granted to

know them, but the soul, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the vision of these we

As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material world who have never seen them or known

their grace men born blind, let us suppose in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty of noble

conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared for such things, nor may those tell of the

splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of MoralWisdom beautiful beyond the

Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will

fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a

trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it,

every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love just as all

take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener

5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the

works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within,

what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of

all your Soul, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self?

But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul,

something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other

hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit;

righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and

tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of godlike Intellection.

All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called

They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being;

But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness: what is this

Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that against its beauty: to understand, at once, what

this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before us.

Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord;

beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of

the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment

What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane

outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a

clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold

death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is

An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected

with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its commerce with the

If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen

is the foul stuff besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is

to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.

So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by

a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold

is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful,

isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the desires that

come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that

embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again in that moment the ugliness that came

6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moraldiscipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting

Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the

NetherWorld, since the unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their joy in

What else is Sophrosyne, rightly socalled, but to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to break away

from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is

but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his

unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of

the IntellectualPrinciple withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above.

The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order

Hence the Soul heightened to the IntellectualPrinciple is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all

that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with

these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its

becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.

We may even say that Beauty is the AuthenticExistents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence:

and the Ugly is also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and

Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us the BeautyGood and the UglinessEvil.

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First

is the IntellectualPrinciple which is preeminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the

IntellectualPrinciple Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower orderactions and pursuits for

instance comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of

sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness

7. Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This,

knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good. To attain it

is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves

of all that we have put on in our descent: so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries,

there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in

nakedness until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the solitude of himself

shall behold that solitarydwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things

depend, for Which all look and live and act and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.

And one that shall know this vision with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of

desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this

Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very

Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love,

with sharp desire; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair.

This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can

never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think of one that

contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on

earth or in the heavens so perfect Its purity far above all such things in that they are nonessential,

Beholding this Being the Choragos of all Existence, the SelfIntent that ever gives forth and never takes

resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the

soul yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and

And for This, the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before the Souls; all our labour is for This, lest we

be left without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight, which to fail of

For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of

honours or of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose winning he should

renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if only, spurning the world of sense from

8. But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in

consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?

He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes,

turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of

grace that show in body, let him not pursue: he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten

away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water is

there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept

away to nothingness? So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated,

not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the IntellectiveBeing, where, blind even in the

"Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland": this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we

to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries

of Circe or Calypso not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us

only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you

must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be

Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained to the

habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts

but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a

statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other

purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten

all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease

chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall

When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are selfgathered in the purity of your

being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic

man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is

not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term,

but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity when you perceive

that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward

This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice,

impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing

even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted

to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become

sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting,

the Soul will come first to the IntellectualPrinciple and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and

will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the

offspring and essence of the IntellectualBeing. What is beyond the IntellectualPrinciple we affirm to be the

nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the IntellectualKosmos as one, the first is the

Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere;

and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the

Primal Beauty have the one dwellingplace and, thus, always, Beauty's seat is There.

1. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity the Good can be other than the natural Act expressing its

lifeforce, or in the case of an entity made up of parts the Act, appropriate, natural and complete, expressive

But the Soul itself is natively a "Best"; if, further, its act be directed towards the Best, the achievement is not

Now, given an Existent which as being itself the best of existences and even transcending the existences

directs its Act towards no other, but is the object to which the Act of all else is directed, it is clear that this

must be at once the Good and the means through which all else may participate in Good.

This Absolute Good other entities may possess in two ways by becoming like to It and by directing the Act

Now, if all aspiration and Act whatsoever are directed towards the Good, it follows that the EssentialGood

neither need nor can look outside itself or aspire to anything other than itself: it can but remain unmoved, as

being, in the constitution of things, the wellspring and firstcause of all Act: whatsoever in other entities is of

the nature of Good cannot be due to any Act of the EssentialGood upon them; it is for them on the contrary

to act towards their source and cause. The Good must, then, be the Good not by any Act, not even by virtue

Existing beyond and above Being, it must be beyond and above the IntellectualPrinciple and all Intellection.

For, again, that only can be named the Good to which all is bound and itself to none: for only thus is it

veritably the object of all aspiration. It must be unmoved, while all circles around it, as a circumference

around a centre from which all the radii proceed. Another example would be the sun, central to the light

which streams from it and is yet linked to it, or at least is always about it, irremoveably; try all you will to

separate the light from the sun, or the sun from its light, for ever the light is in the sun.

The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul towards the Good itself, through the IntellectualPrinciple.

Everything has something of the Good, by virtue of possessing a certain degree of unity and a certain degree

of Existence and by participation in IdealForm: to the extent of the Unity, Being, and Form which are

present, there is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and Existence in which there is participation are no more

With Soul it is different; the FirstSoul, that which follows upon the IntellectualPrinciple, possesses a life

nearer to the Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually possess the Good if it

orientate itself towards the IntellectualPrinciple, since this follows immediately upon the Good.

In sum, then, life is the Good to the living, and the IntellectualPrinciple to what is intellective; so that where

No: in the vile, life limps: it is like the eye to the dimsighted; it fails of its task.

But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be

Evil to What? There must be a subject for the evil: but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or,

If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death will be no evil but a good; Soul,

If it be taken into the AllSoul what evil can reach it There? And as the Gods are possessed of Good and

untouched by evil so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And if it should lose its

purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower

world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death; the misfortune is still life, a life of a definite

Life is a partnership of a Soul and body; death is the dissolution; in either life or death, then, the Soul will

Remember that the good of life, where it has any good at all, is not due to anything in the partnership but to

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of

1. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into beings, or rather into a certain order of beings, would be making

the best beginning if they established, first of all, what precisely Evil is, what constitutes its Nature. At once

we should know whence it comes, where it has its native seat and where it is present merely as an accident;

All knowing comes by likeness. The IntellectualPrinciple and the Soul, being IdealForms, would know

IdealForms and would have a natural tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to be an

If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and that as Evil is the contrary to Good the

one act would grasp Good and Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear perception and

understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the baser and are IdealForms while the less

No doubt there is a question in what precise way Good is contrary to Evil whether it is as FirstPrinciple to

2. For the moment let us define the nature of the Good as far as the immediate purpose demands.

The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their

need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and Term of all, giving

out from itself the IntellectualPrinciple and Existence and Soul and Life and all IntellectiveAct.

All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The Good is beyondbeautiful, beyond the Highest, holding

kingly state in the IntellectualKosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as

Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is nourished on the propositions of logic, is skilled in following

discussions, works by reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of Being

also by the steps of logical process, having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining empty, all Intelligence

The IntellectualPrinciple we are discussing is not of such a kind: It possesses all: It is all: It is present to all

by Its selfpresence: It has all by other means than having, for what It possesses is still Itself, nor does any

particular of all within It stand apart; for every such particular is the whole and in all respects all, while yet

not confused in the mass but still distinct, apart to the extent that any participant in the IntellectualPrinciple

participates not in the entire as one thing but in whatsoever lies within its own reach.

And the First Act is the Act of The Good stationary within Itself, and the First Existence is the selfcontained

Existence of The Good; but there is also an Act upon It, that of the IntellectualPrinciple which, as it were,

And the Soul, outside, circles around the IntellectualPrinciple, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths

Such is the untroubled, the blissful, life of divine beings, and Evil has no place in it; if this were all, there

would be no Evil but Good only, the first, the second and the third Good. All, thus far, is with the King of

All, unfailing Cause of Good and Beauty and controller of all; and what is Good in the second degree

3. If such be the Nature of Beings and of That which transcends all the realm of Being, Evil cannot have

There remains, only, if Evil exist at all, that it be situate in the realm of NonBeing, that it be some mode, as

it were, of the NonBeing, that it have its seat in something in touch with NonBeing or to a certain degree

By this NonBeing, of course, we are not to understand something that simply does not exist, but only

something of an utterly different order from AuthenticBeing: there is no question here of movement or

position with regard to Being; the NonBeing we are thinking of is, rather, an image of Being or perhaps

Now this [the required faint image of Being] might be the sensible universe with all the impressions it

engenders, or it might be something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense, or again, it

might be the source of the senseworld or something of the same order entering into it to complete it.

Some conception of it would be reached by thinking of measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the

unbounded against bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the everneedy against the

selfsufficing: think of the everundefined, the never at rest, the allaccepting but never sated, utter dearth;

and make all this character not mere accident in it but its equivalent for essentialbeing, so that, whatsoever

fragment of it be taken, that part is all lawless void, while whatever participates in it and resembles it

becomes evil, though not of course to the point of being, as itself is, EvilAbsolute.

In what substantialform [hypostasis] then is all this to be found not as accident but as the very substance

For if Evil can enter into other things, it must have in a certain sense a prior existence, even though it may not

be an essence. As there is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the quality, so, together with the derived evil

Does not Measure exist apart from unmeasured things? Precisely as there is Measure apart from anything

measured, so there is Unmeasure apart from the unmeasured. If Unmeasure could not exist independently, it

must exist either in an unmeasured object or in something measured; but the unmeasured could not need

There must, then, be some UndeterminationAbsolute, some Absolute Formlessness; all the qualities cited as

characterizing the Nature of Evil must be summed under an Absolute Evil; and every evil thing outside of

this must either contain this Absolute by saturation or have taken the character of evil and become a cause of

That Kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits, that which has no

trace of good by any title of its own, but [at best] takes order and grace from some Principle outside itself, a

mere image as regards AbsoluteBeing but the Authentic Essence of Evil in so far as Evil can have

Authentic Being. In such a Kind, Reason recognizes the Primal Evil, Evil Absolute.

4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrueform:

they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are

hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.

It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in which soulevil is implanted by nature, in

whose service the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which

bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature,

which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but

But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought under the causing principle indicated?

Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure,

it is shut out from the FormingIdea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a

Then if the ReasoningFaculty too has taken hurt, the Soul's seeing is baulked by the passions and by the

darkening that Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence but to

Process whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even

For, wholly without part in Good, the negation of Good, unmingled Lack, this MatterKind makes over to its

The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the IntellectualPrinciple, is steadfastly pure: it has turned

away from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws

near; it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the IntellectualPrinciple.

The Soul that breaks away from this source of its reality to the nonperfect and nonprimal is, as it were, a

secondary, an image, to the loyal Soul. By its fallingaway and to the extent of the fall it is stripped of

Determination, becomes wholly indeterminate, sees darkness. Looking to what repels vision, as we look

5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul's

evil has its source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause and at once the Principle

No: Evil is not in any and every lack; it is in absolute lack. What falls in some degree short of the Good is not

Evil; considered in its own kind it might even be perfect, but where there is utter dearth, there we have

Matter has not even existence whereby to have some part in Good: Being is attributed to it by an accident of

Mere lack brings merely NotGoodness: Evil demands the absolute lack though, of course, any very

considerable shortcoming makes the ultimate fall possible and is already, in itself, an evil.

In fine we are not to think of Evil as some particular bad thing injustice, for example, or any other ugly

trait but as a principle distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition of certain elements,

it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in the Soul; the forms this general wickedness is to take

will be determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that operate and by the nature of

But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil sickness, poverty and so forth how can

Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure;

ugliness is but matter not mastered by IdealForm; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods made

necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to be one long want.

If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we

came to be; the Evil which holds men down binds them against their will; and for those that have the

strength not found in all men, it is true there is a deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in

In a word since Matter belongs only to the sensible world, vice in men is not the Absolute Evil; not all men

are vicious; some overcome vice, some, the better sort, are never attacked by it; and those who master it win

6. If this be so, how do we explain the teaching that evils can never pass away but "exist of necessity," that

"while evil has no place in the divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this place for ever"?

Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil, ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the appointed path, no

injustice There or any flaw, no wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the settled plan, while

injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as "the Mortal Kind and this Place"?

Not quite so: for the precept to "flee hence" does not refer to earth and earthly life. The flight we read of

consists not in quitting earth but in living our earthlife "with justice and piety in the light of philosophy"; it

is vice we are to flee, so that clearly to the writer Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when the

disputant in that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the doctrine advanced, there would be an

end of Evil, he is answered, "That can never be: Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good."

Still we may reasonably ask how can vice in man be a contrary to The Good in the Supernal: for vice is the

contrary to virtue and virtue is not The Good but merely the good thing by which Matter is brought to order.

How can there any contrary to the Absolute Good, when the absolute has no quality?

Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence

of the other? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other sickness and

Perhaps, however, our author did not mean that this was universally true; he is speaking only of The Good.

But then, if The Good is an essence, and still more, if It is that which transcends all existence, how can It

That there is nothing contrary to essence is certain in the case of particular existences established by

But of what nature would this contrary be, the contrary to universal existence and in general to the Primals?

To essential existence would be opposed the nonexistence; to the nature of Good, some principle and source

of evil. Both these will be sources, the one of what is good, the other of what is evil; and all within the

domain of the one principle is opposed, as contrary, to the entire domain of the other, and this in a contrariety

For these last are opposed as members of one species or of one genus, and, within that common ground, they

In the case of the Primals or Universals there is such complete separation that what is the exact negation of

one group constitutes the very nature of the other; we have diametric contrariety if by contrariety we mean

Now to the content of the divine order, the fixed quality, the measuredness and so forth there is opposed the

content of the evil principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth: total is opposed to total. The

existence of the one genus is a falsity, primarily, essentially, a falseness: the other genus has

EssenceAuthentic: the opposition is of truth to lie; essence is opposed to essence.

Thus we see that it is not universally true that an Essence can have no contrary.

In the case of fire and water we would admit contrariety if it were not for their common element, the Matter,

about which are gathered the warmth and dryness of one and the dampness and cold of the other: if there

were only present what constitutes their distinct kinds, the common ground being absent, there would be, here

In sum, things utterly sundered, having nothing in common, standing at the remotest poles, are opposites in

nature: the contrariety does not depend upon quality or upon the existence of a distinct genus of beings, but

7. But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily comport the existence of a Principle of

Evil? Is it because the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this All is made

up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is

blended from the IntellectualPrinciple and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the

Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the IdealForm.

But, since the expression "this place" must be taken to mean the All, how explain the words "mortal nature"?

The answer is in the passage [in which the Father of Gods addresses the Divinities of the lower sphere],

"Since you possess only a derivative being, you are not immortals... but by my power you shall escape

The escape, we read, is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self from the body;

this is the escape from Matter. Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he remains

bound; and the phrase "to live among the gods" means to live among the IntelligibleExistents, for these are

Given that The Good is not the only existent thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from it or, if the

phrase be preferred, the continuous downgoing or awaygoing from it, there should be produced a Last,

As necessarily as there is Something after the First, so necessarily there is a Last: this Last is Matter, the thing

8. But there will still be some to deny that it is through this Matter that we ourselves become evil.

They will say that neither ignorance nor wicked desires arise in Matter. Even if they admit that the unhappy

condition within us is due to the pravity inherent in body, they will urge that still the blame lies not in the

Matter itself but with the Form present in it such Form as heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all other

conditions perceptible to sense, or again such states as being full or void not in the concrete signification but

in the presence or absence of just such forms. In a word, they will argue, all particularity in desires and even

in perverted judgements upon things, can be referred to such causes, so that Evil lies in this Form much more

Yet, even with all this, they can be compelled to admit that Matter is the Evil.

For, the quality [form] that has entered into Matter does not act as an entity apart from the Matter, any more

than axeshape will cut apart from iron. Further, Forms lodged in Matter are not the same as they would be if

they remained within themselves; they are ReasonPrinciples Materialized, they are corrupted in the Matter,

they have absorbed its nature: essential fire does not burn, nor do any of the essential entities effect, of

themselves alone, the operation which, once they have entered into Matter, is traced to their action.

Matter becomes mistress of what is manifested through it: it corrupts and destroys the incomer, it substitutes

its own opposite character and kind, not in the sense of opposing, for example, concrete cold to concrete

warmth, but by setting its own formlessness against the Form of heat, shapelessness to shape, excess and

defect to the duly ordered. Thus, in sum, what enters into Matter ceases to belong to itself, comes to belong to

Matter, just as, in the nourishment of living beings, what is taken in does not remain as it came, but is turned

into, say, dog's blood and all that goes to make a dog, becomes, in fact, any of the humours of any recipient.

No, if body is the cause of Evil, then there is no escape; the cause of Evil is Matter.

Still, it will be urged, the incoming Idea should have been able to conquer the Matter.

The difficulty is that Matter's master cannot remain pure itself except by avoidance of Matter.

Besides, the constitution determines both the desires and their violence so that there are bodies in which the

incoming idea cannot hold sway: there is a vicious constitution which chills and clogs the activity and

inhibits choice; a contrary bodily habit produces frivolity, lack of balance. The same fact is indicated by our

successive variations of mood: in times of stress, we are not the same either in desires or in ideas as when

we are at peace, and we differ again with every several object that brings us satisfaction.

To resume: the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the

state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal primarily, the darkness;

secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily

evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The Good, or participation

And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the IntellectualPrinciple and by means of the

A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its divergence from the line of Virtue.

But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we can have of it, or is there some other way of knowing it?

Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision, for it is utterly outside of bound and measure; this thing which

is nowhere can be seized only by abstraction; but any degree of evil falling short of The Absolute is knowable

We see partial wrong; from what is before us we divine that which is lacking to the entire form [or Kind] thus

indicated; we see that the completed Kind would be the Indeterminate; by this process we are able to identify

and affirm Evil. In the same way when we observe what we feel to be an ugly appearance in Matter left

there because the ReasonPrinciple has not become so completely the master as to cover over the

We utterly eliminate every kind of Form; and the object in which there is none whatever we call Matter: if we

are to see Matter we must so completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into our very selves.

In fact it is another IntellectualPrinciple, not the true, this which ventures a vision so uncongenial.

To see darkness the eye withdraws from the light; it is striving to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the

light which would make the darkness invisible; away from the light its power is rather that of notseeing than

of seeing and this notseeing is its nearest approach to seeing Darkness. So the IntellectualPrinciple, in

order to see its contrary [Matter], must leave its own light locked up within itself, and as it were go forth from

itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its native brightness and submit itself to the very contradition of its

It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the

qualities which it admits and which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no nature; and if

it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil though not in the sense of quality?

Quality qualifies something not itself: it is therefore an accidental; it resides in some other object. Matter does

not exist in some other object but is the substratum in which the accidental resides. Matter, then, is said to be

devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself possess this thing which is by nature an accidental. If, moreover,

Quality itself be devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqualified, be said to have it?

Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that Matter is without Quality and that it is evil: it is Evil not in the

sense of having Quality but, precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and in its very Evil it would almost be

"But," it may be said, "the Kind opposed to all Form is Privation or Negation, and this necessarily refers to

something other than itself, it is no SubstantialExistence: therefore if Evil is Privation or Negation it must be

This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of Evil in the Soul; the Evil, the Vice,

will be a Negation and not anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine which denies

Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek elsewhere; we may at once place Evil in the Soul,

recognising it as the mere absence of Good. But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to

become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the Soul, then the Soul produces vice within itself by the

operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, Soul though it be, devoid of life: the Soul,

No; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The

Good: it has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the IntellectualPrinciple and is not essentially evil:

neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly

Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good.

But if this were so, part of the Soul must possess The Good, part be without it; the Soul will have a mingled

nature and the Evil within it will not be unblended: we have not yet lighted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil.

Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the Soul like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight.

But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite

different. If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not EvilAbsolute. Virtue

is not the Absolute Good, but a cooperator with it; and if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the

Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good; neither, therefore, is Vice the

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than

Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going

upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach

Essential Evil: from Vice as the startingpoint we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible,

and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of

Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the Soul

abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere

vice is still human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as

Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and

drench itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts

its sight from the mud: and this is our "going down to Hades and slumbering there."

We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly

stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as

weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by

Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes.

For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for

work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy unless, indeed, in the

But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly

not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a

Now this weakness must be seated either in Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to Matter or in both.

It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for all these are pure and, as we read, winged and perfect and

unimpeded in their task: there remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither cleansed nor

clean; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm

If we form an acute and accurate notion of the cause of the fall we shall understand the weakness that comes

Matter exists; Soul exists; and they occupy, so to speak, one place. There is not one place for Matter and

another for SoulMatter, for instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air: the soul's "separate place" is simply its

not being in Matter; that is, its not being united with it; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of

Soul and Matter; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this is the Soul's apartness.

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter

appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground is holy, nothing there

without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and takes light: but the source of its illumination it cannot

attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. On the

contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter

which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no

This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter: thence its weakness: not all the faculties of its being retain

free play, for Matter hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon the Soul's territory and, as it were,

crushes the Soul back; and it turns to evil all that it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again.

The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the vice; it is Primal Evil. Even though the Soul itself submits to

Matter and engenders to it; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is still the

presence of Matter: the Soul would never have approached Matter but that the presence of Matter is the

12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this Principle must be demonstrated from the

To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away with the Good as well, and even to deny the

existence of anything desirable; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual act; for desire has Good for

its object, aversion looks to Evil; all intellectual act, all Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is itself one

There must then be The Good good unmixed and the Mingled Good and Bad, and the Rather Bad than

Good, this last ending with the Utterly Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil constitutes the

What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no

rage, no fear: fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments

of the dissolution; desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against

trouble threatened; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only

because the Soul is not devoid of parts or phases; the Soul takes up false notions through having gone outside

One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the

IntellectualPrinciple: this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice,

Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only: it appears,

necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and beneath

these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always

have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the

"You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth..." [taking something with it].

For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The

Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds itself

The separation takes place when nothing of Soul remains bound up with it: the harmony within the body, by

virtue of which the Soul was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest.

But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away,

not the body that has let the Soul slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion; there

That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at

the bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the Soul seems a

And if there be a period allotted to all by fate, to anticipate the hour could not be a happy act, unless, as we

If everyone is to hold in the other world a standing determined by the state in which he quitted this, there

1. We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed for ever and will for ever endure: but

simply to refer this perdurance to the Will of God, however true an explanation, is utterly inadequate.

The elements of this sphere change; the living beings of earth pass away; only the Idealform [the species]

The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing

the known forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of

idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no more than duration of form, why should celestial

objects, and the celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity?

Let us suppose this persistence to be the result of the allinclusiveness of the celestial and universal with its

consequence, the absence of any outlying matter into which change could take place or which could break in

This explanation would, no doubt, safeguard the integrity of the Whole, of the All; but our sun and the

individual being of the other heavenly bodies would not on these terms be secured in perpetuity: they are

parts; no one of them is in itself the whole, the all; it would still be probable that theirs is no more than that

This would apply even to the entire ordered universe itself. For it is very possible that this too, though not in

process of destruction from outside, might have only formal duration; its parts may be so wearing each other

down as to keep it in a continuous decay while, amid the ceaseless flux of the Kind constituting its base, an

outside power ceaselessly restores the form: in this way the living All may lie under the same conditions as

man and horse and the rest man and horse persisting but not the individual of the type.

With this, we would have no longer the distinction of one order, the heavenly system, stable for ever, and

another, the earthly, in process of decay: all would be alike except in the point of time; the celestial would

merely be longer lasting. If, then, we accepted this duration of type alone as a true account of the All equally

with its partial members, our difficulties would be eased or indeed we should have no further problem

once the Will of God were shown to be capable, under these conditions and by such communication, of

But if we are obliged to allow individual persistence to any definite entity within the Kosmos then, firstly, we

must show that the Divine Will is adequate to make it so; secondly, we have to face the question, What

accounts for some things having individual persistence and others only the persistence of type? and, thirdly,

we ask how the partial entities of the celestial system hold a real duration which would thus appear possible

2. Supposing we accept this view and hold that, while things below the moon's orb have merely

typepersistence, the celestial realm and all its several members possess individual eternity; it remains to

show how this strict permanence of the individual identity the actual item eternally unchangeable can

belong to what is certainly corporeal, seeing that bodily substance is characteristically a thing of flux.

The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no less than by the other philosophers who have dealt with physical

matters, and is applied not only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of the heavenly sphere.

"How," he asks, "can these corporeal and visible entities continue eternally unchanged in identity?"

evidently agreeing, in this matter also, with Herakleitos who maintained that even the sun is perpetually

coming anew into being. To Aristotle there would be no problem; it is only accepting his theories of a

But to those who reject Aristotle's Quintessence and hold the material mass of the heavens to consist of the

elements underlying the living things of this sphere, how is individual permanence possible? And the

Every living thing is a combination of soul and bodykind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be

everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by

Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the desired permanence at once; no need, then,

to call on a soul or on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued maintenance of a living being.

But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of

permanence: this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal either to the

coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of the union

envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary [in the heavens] even Matter must conduce to the

3. We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physical mass of the

And our answer is "Because the flux is not outgoing": where there is motion within but not outwards and the

total remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos never ages.

We have a parallel in our earth, constant from eternity to pattern and to mass; the air, too, never fails; and

there is always water: all the changes of these elements leave unchanged the Principle of the total living

thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a ceaseless shifting of particles and that with

outgoing loss and yet the individual persists for a long time: where there is no question of an outside region,

the bodyprinciple cannot clash with soul as against the identity and endless duration of the living thing.

Of these material elements for example fire, the keen and swift, cooperates by its upward tendency as earth

by its lingering below; for we must not imagine that the fire, once it finds itself at the point where its ascent

must stop, settles down as in its appropriate place, no longer seeking, like all the rest, to expand in both

directions. No: but higher is not possible; lower is repugnant to its Kind; all that remains for it is to be

tractable and, answering to a need of its nature, to be drawn by the Soul to the activity of life, and so to move

to in a glorious place, in the Soul. Anyone that dreads its falling may take heart; the circuit of the Soul

provides against any declination, embracing, sustaining; and since fire has of itself no downward tendency it

accepts that guiding without resistance. The partial elements constituting our persons do not suffice for their

own cohesion; once they are brought to human shape, they must borrow elsewhere if the organism is to be

maintained: but in the upper spheres since there can be no loss by flux no such replenishment is needed.

Suppose such loss, suppose fire extinguished there, then a new fire must be kindled; so also if such loss by

flux could occur in some of the superiors from which the celestial fire depends, that too must be replaced: but

with such transmutations, while there might be something continuously similar, there would be, no longer, a

4. But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental

merely to our present problem. We are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system exposed to any

such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration corresponding to nourishment; or do its members,

once set in their due places, suffer no loss of substance, permanent by Kind? Does it consist of fire only, or is

it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and carried in the circuit by the dominant

Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the

sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance

constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living

beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt

Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable,

Still, the great argument remains, the Soul, moving in its marvellous might second only to the very loftiest

Existents: how could anything once placed within this Soul break away from it into nonbeing? No one that

understands this principle, the support of all things, can fail to see that, sprung from God, it is a stronger stay

And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to sustain for a certain space of time, could not so sustain for ever?

This would be to assume that it holds things together by violence; that there is a "natural course" at variance

with what actually exists in the nature of the universe and in these exquisitely ordered beings; and that there

is some power able to storm the established system and destroy its ordered coherence, some kingdom or

Further: The Kosmos has had no beginning the impossibility has been shown elsewhere and this is warrant

for its continued existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The

elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold sound for ever, and so the All holds

sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of

As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul we have already shown the emptiness of that fancy: the

administration of the universe entails neither labour nor loss; and, even supposing the possibility of

annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better or the worse.

5. But how explain the permanence There, while the content of this sphere its elements and its living things

The reason is given by Plato: the celestial order is from God, the living things of earth from the gods sprung

In other words, the celestial soul and our souls with it springs directly next from the Creator, while the

animal life of this earth is produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul and may be said to

A soul, then, of the minor degree reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power

inasmuch as it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region the substances taken up

into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm

cannot be of strength to last for ever; the material constituents are not as firmly held and controlled as if they

The heavens, on the contrary, must have persistence as a whole, and this entails the persistence of the parts,

of the stars they contain: we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts in flux though, of course,

we must distinguish things subcelestial from the heavens themselves whose region does not in fact extend

Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that [inferior] soul, given forth [not directly from God

but] from the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way of that inferior soul

that we are associated with the body [which therefore will not be persistent]; for the higher soul which

constitutes the We is the principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also of our existence, then

only in the sense that, when the body is already constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the

6. We may now consider the question whether fire is the sole element existing in that celestial realm and

Timaeus pronounced the material frame of the All to consist primarily of earth and fire for visibility, earth for

solidity and deduced that the stars must be mainly composed of fire, but not solely since there is no doubt

And this is probably a true account. Plato accepts it as indicated by all the appearances. And, in fact, to all our

perception as we see them and derive from them the impression of illumination the stars appear to be

mostly, if not exclusively, fire: but on reasoning into the matter we judge that since solidity cannot exist apart

But what place could there be for the other elements? It is impossible to imagine water amid so vast a

conflagration; and if air were present it would be continually changing into fire.

Admitting [with Timaeus; as a logical truth] that two selfcontained entities, standing as extremes to each

other need for their coherence two intermediaries; we may still question whether this holds good with regard

to physical bodies. Certainly water and earth can be mixed without any such intermediate. It might seem valid

to object that the intermediates are already present in the earth and the water; but a possible answer would be,

"Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is necessary to the coherence of those extremes."

None the less we will take it that the coherence of extremes is produced by virtue of each possessing all the

intermediates. It is still not proven that fire is necessary to the visibility of earth and earth to the solidarity of

On this principle, nothing possesses an essentialnature of its very own; every several thing is a blend, and its

Thus we are told that earth cannot have concrete existence without the help of some moist element the

moisture in water being the necessary adhesive but admitting that we so find it, there is still a contradiction

in pretending that any one element has a being of its own and in the same breath denying its selfcoherence,

making its subsistence depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the specific element to nothing. How

can we talk of the existence of the definite Kind, earth earth essential if there exists no single particle of

earth which actually is earth without any need of water to secure its selfcohesion? What has such an

adhesive to act upon if there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it may bind particle after

particle in its business of producing the continuous mass? If there is any such given magnitude, large or

small, of pure earth, then earth can exist in its own nature, independently of water: if there is no such primary

particle of pure earth, then there is nothing whatever for the water to bind. As for air air unchanged,

retaining its distinctive quality how could it conduce to the subsistence of a dense material like earth?

Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of it as necessary not to the existence but to the visibility of

earth and the other elements; and certainly light is essential to all visibility we cannot say that we see

darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen, as silence means nothing being heard.

But all this does not assure us that the earth to be visible must contain fire: light is sufficient: snow, for

example, and other extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire though of course it might

As to the composition of water, we must leave it an open question whether there can be such a thing as water

Fire, again: is earth perhaps necessary there since fire is by its own nature devoid of continuity and not a

Supposing it does not possess the solidity of the three dimensions, it has that of its thrust; now, cannot this

belong to it by the mere right and fact of its being one of the corporeal entities in nature? Hardness is another

matter, a property confined to earthstuff. Remember that gold which is water becomes dense by the

accession not of earth but of denseness or consolidation: in the same way fire, with Soul present within it,

may consolidate itself upon the power of the Soul; and there are living beings of fire among the Celestials.

But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching that all the elements enter into the composition of every living

For this sphere, no; but to lift clay into the heavens is against nature, contrary to the laws of her ordaining: it

is difficult, too, to think of that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly bodies in its course nor could such

In the universe as a whole there must necessarily be such a degree of solidity, that is to say, of resistance, as

will ensure that the earth, set in the centre, be a sure footing and support to the living beings moving over it,

and inevitably communicate something of its own density to them: the earth will possess coherence by its

own unaided quality, but visibility by the presence of fire: it will contain water against the dryness which

would prevent the cohesion of its particles; it will hold air to lighten its bulky matters; it will be in contact

with the celestial fire not as being a member of the sidereal system but by the simple fact that the fire there

and our earth both belong to the ordered universe so that something of the earth is taken up by the fire as

something of the fire by the earth and something of everything by everything else.

This borrowing, however, does not mean that the one thing takingup from the other enters into a

composition, becoming an element in a total of both: it is simply a consequence of the kosmic fellowship; the

participant retains its own being and takes over not the thing itself but some property of the thing, not air but

air's yielding softness, not fire but fire's incandescence: mixing is another process, a complete surrender with

a resultant compound not, as in this case, earth remaining earth, the solidity and density we know with

"At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light": he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he

calls the allglowing and, again, the allgleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but

fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only

modestly warm: this light is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other "light" which,

though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and

radiance, the veritable "incandescent body." Plato's word earthy is commonly taken in too depreciatory a

sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the

Fire of this order, giving forth this purest light, belongs to the upper realm, and there its seat is fixed by

nature; but we must not, on that account, suppose the flame of earth to be associated with the beings of that

No: the flame of this world, once it has attained a certain height, is extinguished by the currents of air

opposed to it. Moreover, as it carries an earthy element on its upward path, it is weighed downwards and

cannot reach those loftier regions. It comes to a stand somewhere below the moon making the air at that

point subtler and its flame, if any flame can persist, is subdued and softened, and no longer retains its first

And it is that loftier light falling variously upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion that gives them

their characteristic differences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just such light constitutes also the still

higher heavenly bodies which, however, like clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and

unresisting transparency of their material substance and also by their very distance.

8. Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest

Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions no

power to force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different from body left to

itself; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference.

Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the heavens would be air or fire: air has no destructive quality; fire

would be powerless there since it could not enter into effective contact: in its very rush it would change

before its attack could be felt; and, apart from that, it is of the lesser order, no match for what it would be

Again, fire acts by imparting heat: now it cannot be the source of heat to what is already hot by nature; and

anything it is to destroy must as a first condition be heated by it, must be brought to a pitch of heat fatal to the

In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to ensure their permanence or to produce their

circular movement, for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line; on the

contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement

indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of

replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul

is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration

necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take

place in bodies here represent a slippingaway from the being [a phenomenon not incident to the celestial

sphere] and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful

enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into

being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at

And does this movement belong to the material part or to the Soul? Can we account for it on the ground that

the Soul has itself at once for centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving; or that, being

selfcentred it is not of unlimited extension [and consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent],

If the Soul had been the moving power [by any such semiphysical action] it would be so no longer; it would

have accomplished the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end of this

In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least cannot have spatial movement; how then, having itself a

But perhaps the circular movement [of the Kosmos as soul and body] is not spatial or is spatial not primarily

A movement towards itself, the movement of selfawareness, of selfintellection, of the living of its life, the

movement of its reaching to all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing anywhere but within its

The dominant in a living thing is what compasses it entirely and makes it a unity.

If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a

Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it will be not that of Soul untrammelled but that of a material

frame ensouled, an animated organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body tending

to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise

But supposing that the circular movement is to be attributed to the body, how is it to be explained, since all

body, including fire [which constitutes the heavens] has straightforward motion?

The answer is that forthright movement is maintained only pending arrival at the place for which the moving

thing is destined: where a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to come for its rest; its motion is

Then, since the fire of the sidereal system has attained its goal, why does it not stay at rest?

Evidently because the very nature of fire is to be mobile: if it did not take the curve, its straight line would

finally fling it outside the universe: the circular course, then, is imperative.

Not quite: rather its own act under providence; attaining to that realm, it must still take the circular course by

its indwelling nature; for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds no further space and is driven back so

that it recoils on the only course left to it: there is nothing beyond; it has reached the ultimate; it runs its

course in the regions it occupies, itself its own sphere, not destined to come to rest there, existing to move.

Further, the centre of a circle [and therefore of the Kosmos] is distinctively a point of rest: if the

circumference outside were not in motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And

movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case of a living thing whose nature binds it

within a body. Such motion alone can constitute its impulse towards its centre: it cannot coincide with the

centre, for then there would be no circle; since this may not be, it whirls about it; so only can it indulge its

If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving [wearing it

down at last]; the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for "Nature" is no other than the

custom the AllSoul has established. Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the

universe communicates that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that

If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kosmos, too, brought so far, would halt: but the Soul encompasses all,

Or, better; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the Kosmos towards itself: the continuous attraction communicates

a continuous movement not to some outside space but towards the Soul and in the one sphere with it, not in

the straight line [which would ultimately bring the moving body outside and below the Soul], but in the

curving course in which the moving body at every stage possesses the Soul that is attracting it and bestowing

If the soul were stationary, that is if [instead of presiding over a Kosmos] it dwelt wholly and solely in the

realm in which every member is at rest, motion would be unknown; but, since the Soul is not fixed in some

one station There, the Kosmos must travel to every point in quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle,

[Their case is very different]: the single thing here is not an all but a part and limited to a given segment of

space; that other realm is all, is space, so to speak, and is subject to no hindrance or control, for in itself it is

As a self, each is a personal whole, no doubt; but as member of the universe, each is a partial thing.

But if, wherever the circling body be, it possesses the Soul, what need of the circling?

Because everywhere it finds something else besides the Soul [which it desires to possess alone].

The circular movement would be explained, too, if the Soul's power may be taken as resident at its centre.

Here, however, we must distinguish between a centre in reference to the two different natures, body and Soul.

In body, centre is a point of place; in Soul it is a source, the source of some other nature. The word, which

without qualification would mean the midpoint of a spheric mass, may serve in the double reference; and, as

in a material mass so in the Soul, there must be a centre, that around which the object, Soul or material mass,

The Soul exists in revolution around God to whom it clings in love, holding itself to the utmost of its power

near to Him as the Being on which all depends; and since it cannot coincide with God it circles about Him.

Why then do not all souls [i.e., the lower, also, as those of men and animals] thus circle about the Godhead?

Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the body's impulses are to other ends and

because what in us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the

higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any

And it may very well be that even in us the Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus circle about the

divinity. For since God is omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular course: God is

Similarly Plato attributes to the stars not only the spheric movement belonging to the universe as a whole but

also to each a revolution around their common centre; each not by way of thought but by links of natural

There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe:

another phase possesses sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned with the objects

of sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the

lesser Soul and giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital.

The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in

whatsoever part of it has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by the higher

and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this upward tension communicates motion to the

material frame in which it is involved: for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without

being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion. Something of the same

kind happens in the case of our bodies: the unspatial movement of the Soul in happiness, for instance, or at

the idea of some pleasant event sets up a spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in its own region

some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases it; and so, by force of the union

established in the order of nature, it moves the body, in the body's region, that is in space.

As for that phase of the Soul in which sensation is vested, it, too, takes its good from the Supreme above

itself and moves, rejoicingly, in quest of it: and since the object of its desire is everywhere, it too ranges

The IntellectualPrinciple has no such progress in any region; its movement is a stationary act, for it turns

1. That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct of all that

happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject demands

more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one view rather than the other is of no small moment.

The belief is that the planets in their courses actually produce not merely such conditions as poverty, wealth,

health and sickness but even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and the very acts that

spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose the stars

to be annoyed with men and upon matters in which men, moulded to what they are by the stars themselves,

They will be distributing what pass for their good gifts, not out of kindness towards the recipients but as they

themselves are affected pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points of their course; so that they must be

More absurdly still, some of them are supposed to be malicious and others to be helpful, and yet the evil stars

will bestow favours and the benevolent act harshly: further, their action alters as they see each other or not, so

that, after all, they possess no definite nature but vary according to their angles of aspect; a star is kindly

when it sees one of its fellows but changes at sight of another: and there is even a distinction to be made in

the seeing as it occurs in this figure or in that. Lastly, all acting together, the fused influence is different again

from that of each single star, just as the blending of distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike any of them.

Since these opinions and others of the same order are prevalent, it will be well to examine them carefully one

In that case they can purvey only heat or cold if cold from the stars can be thought of that is to say, any

communication from them will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to communicate to us is

merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change can be caused in the bodies affected since

emanations merely corporeal cannot differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon earth

into one collective resultant: at most the differences would be such as depend upon local position, upon

nearness or farness with regard to the centre of influence. This reasoning, of course, is as valid of any cold

Now, what is there in such corporeal action to account for the various classes and kinds of men, learned and

illiterate, scholars as against orators, musicians as against people of other professions? Can a power merely

physical make rich or poor? Can it bring about such conditions as in no sense depend upon the interaction of

corporeal elements? Could it, for example, bring a man such and such a brother, father, son, or wife, give him

a stroke of good fortune at a particular moment, or make him generalissimo or king?

Next, suppose the stars to have life and mind and to be effective by deliberate purpose.

In that case, what have they suffered from us that they should, in free will, do us hurt, they who are

established in a divine place, themselves divine? There is nothing in their nature of what makes men base, nor

3. Possibly, however, they act not by choice but under stress of their several positions and collective figures?

But if position and figure determined their action each several one would necessarily cause identical effects

And that raises the question what effect for good or bad can be produced upon any one of them by its transit

in the parallel of this or that section of the Zodiac circle for they are not in the Zodiacal figure itself but

considerably beneath it especially since, whatever point they touch, they are always in the heavens.

It is absurd to think that the particular grouping under which a star passes can modify either its character or

its earthward influences. And can we imagine it altered by its own progression as it rises, stands at centre,

declines? Exultant when at centre; dejected or enfeebled in declension; some raging as they rise and growing

benignant as they set, while declension brings out the best in one among them; surely this cannot be?

We must not forget that invariably every star, considered in itself, is at centre with regard to some one given

group and in decline with regard to another and vice versa; and, very certainly, it is not at once happy and

sad, angry and kindly. There is no reasonable escape in representing some of them as glad in their setting,

others in their rising: they would still be grieving and glad at one and the same time.

No: we cannot think of them as grieving at all or as being cheerful upon occasions: they must be continuously

serene, happy in the good they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each lives its own free life; each finds its

Like the birds of augury, the living beings of the heavens, having no lot or part with us, may serve

incidentally to foreshow the future, but they have absolutely no main function in our regard.

4. It is again not in reason that a particular star should be gladdened by seeing this or that other while, in a

second couple, such an aspect is distressing: what enmities can affect such beings? what causes of enmity can

And why should there be any difference as a given star sees certain others from the corner of a triangle or in

Why, again, should it see its fellow from some one given position and yet, in the next Zodiacal figure, not see

And, the cardinal question; by what conceivable process could they affect what is attributed to them? How

explain either the action of any single star independently or, still more perplexing, the effect of their

We cannot think of them entering into compromises, each renouncing something of its efficiency and their

No one star would suppress the contribution of another, nor would star yield to star and shape its conduct

As for the fancy that while one is glad when it enters another's region, the second is vexed when in its turn it

occupies the place of the first, surely this is like starting with the supposition of two friends and then going on

5. When they tell us that a certain cold star is more benevolent to us in proportion as it is further away, they

clearly make its harmful influence depend upon the coldness of its nature; and yet it ought to be beneficent to

When the cold planet, we are told, is in opposition to the cold, both become meanacing: but the natural effect

And we are asked to believe that one of them is happy by day and grows kindly under the warmth, while

another, of a fiery nature, is most cheerful by night as if it were not always day to them, light to them, and

as if the first one could be darkened by night at that great distance above the earth's shadow.

Then there is the notion that the moon, in conjunction with a certain star, is softened at her full but is

malignant in the same conjunction when her light has waned; yet, if anything of this order could be admitted,

the very opposite would be the case. For when she is full to us she must be dark on the further hemisphere,

that is to that star which stands above her; and when dark to us she is full to that other star, upon which only

then, on the contrary, does she look with her light. To the moon itself, in fact, it can make no difference in

what aspect she stands, for she is always lit on the upper or on the under half: to the other star, the warmth

from the moon, of which they speak, might make a difference; but that warmth would reach it precisely when

the moon is without light to us; at its darkest to us it is full to that other, and therefore beneficent. The

darkness of the moon to us is of moment to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet above. That planet, it

is alleged, can give no help on account of its remoteness and therefore seems less well disposed; but the

moon at its full suffices to the lower realm so that the distance of the other is of no importance. When the

moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with the Fiery Star she is held to be favourable: the reason alleged is

that the force of Mars is allsufficient since it contains more fire than it needs.

The truth is that while the material emanations from the living beings of the heavenly system are of various

degrees of warmth planet differing from planet in this respect no cold comes from them: the nature of the

The star known as Jupiter includes a due measure of fire [and warmth], in this resembling the Morningstar

and therefore seeming to be in alliance with it. In aspect with what is known as the Fiery Star, Jupiter is

beneficent by virtue of the mixing of influences: in aspect with Saturn unfriendly by dint of distance.

Mercury, it would seem, is indifferent whatever stars it be in aspect with; for it adopts any and every

But all the stars are serviceable to the Universe, and therefore can stand to each other only as the service of

the Universe demands, in a harmony like that observed in the members of any one animal form. They exist

essentially for the purpose of the Universe, just as the gall exists for the purposes of the body as a whole not

less than for its own immediate function: it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but without allowing the

entire organism and its own especial region to run riot. Some such balance of function was indispensable in

the All bitter with sweet. There must be differentiation eyes and so forth but all the members will be in

sympathy with the entire animal frame to which they belong. Only so can there be a unity and a total

6. But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in certain aspects should cause adulteries as if they could thus,

through the agency of human incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires is not such a notion the height

of unreason? And who could accept the fancy that their happiness comes from their seeing each other in this

Again: countless myriads of living beings are born and continue to be: to minister continuously to every

separate one of these; to make them famous, rich, poor, lascivious; to shape the active tendencies of every

single one what kind of life is this for the stars, how could they possibly handle a task so huge?

They are to watch, we must suppose, the rising of each several constellation and upon that signal to act; such

a one, they see, has risen by so many degrees, representing so many of the periods of its upward path; they

reckon on their fingers at what moment they must take the action which, executed prematurely, would be out

of order: and in the sum, there is no One Being controlling the entire scheme; all is made over to the stars

singly, as if there were no Sovereign Unity, standing as source of all the forms of Being in subordinate

association with it, and delegating to the separate members, in their appropriate Kinds, the task of

This is a separatist theory, tenable only by minds ignorant of the nature of a Universe which has a ruling

7. But, if the stars announce the future as we hold of many other things also what explanation of the cause

have we to offer? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless the particular is

We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and

yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the quality of

signifying, just as the one principle underlying any living unit enables us to reason from member to member,

so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or

in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the

All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another, a process familiar to

But what is the comprehensive principle of coordination? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for

the divination, not only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in our

All things must be enchained; and the sympathy and correspondence obtaining in any one closely knit

organism must exist, first, and most 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 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,

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 continuous progression of Kinds.

8. Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own; alike in its direct course and in its divagation

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 orderliness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this order the stars, as

being no minor members of the heavenly system, are cooperators 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

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 by the combinations of external fact.

That question has been amply discussed elsewhere: in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul;

9. This brings us to the Spindledestiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle

represents the cooperation 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

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

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 unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence

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 dominant with a

trace of Soul running through it and a resultant lifecourse 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 appropriate, 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 fatebound, no longer

profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and

For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that compromisetotal 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

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. 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] all 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 All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in

10. 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

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 cooperative, and completes 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.

11. And we must remember that what comes from the supernals 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 faintheartedness; 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

Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, deteriorates again within itself: things of any kind

that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with

12. All that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity 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 HumanPrinciple. Outer things have their effect, sometimes

to hurt and sometimes 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 foundations 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

13. Of phenomena of this sphere some derive from the Kosmic Circuit and some not: we must take them

The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the

ReasonPrinciple and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every livingthing

forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force

of the Soul is represented 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 lifehistory of the Universe.

The soulless parts of the All are merely instruments; all their action is effected, so to speak, under a

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 LivingBeing

possessed of Reason, the natureprinciple 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 cooperate towards the general

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 equipped for

action, are almost wholly passive; there is an intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a

principle of productivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet

Thus the All stands as one allcomplete 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

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

All living things, then all in the heavens and all elsewhere fall under the general ReasonPrinciple of the

All 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 ReasonPrinciples 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

It may set up some weakness restricted to the material frame. Or it may carry the weakness through to the

sympathetic Soul which by the medium of the material frame, become a power to debasement, has been

delivered over, though never in its essence, to the inferior order of being. Or, in the case of a material frame

illorganized, it may check all such action [of the Soul] upon the material frame as demands a certain

collaboration in the part acted upon: thus a lyre may be so illstrung as to be incapable of the melodic

In the case of inherited fortune, the stars merely announce a rich man, exactly as they announce the high

Wealth may be due to personal activity: in this case if the body has contributed, part of the effect is due to

whatever has contributed towards the physical powers, first the parents and then, if place has had its

influence, sky and earth; if the body has borne no part of the burden, then the success, and all the splendid

accompaniments added by the Recompensers, must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If fortune has come by

gift from the good, then the source of the wealth is, again, virtue: if by gift from the evil, but to a meritorious

recipient, then the credit must be given to the action of the best in them: if the recipient is himself

unprincipled, the wealth must be attributed primarily to the very wickedness and to whatsoever is responsible

When the success is due to labour, tillage for example, it must be put down to the tiller, with all his

environment as contributory. In the case of treasuretrove, something from the All has entered into action;

and if this be so, it will be foreshown since all things make a chain, so that we can speak of things

universally. Money is lost: if by robbery, the blame lies with the robber and the native principle guiding him:

if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events. As for good fame, it is either deserved and then is due to the

services done and to the merit of those appraising them, or it is undeserved, and then must be attributed to the

injustice of those making the award. And the same principle holds is regards power for this also may be

rightly or unrightly placed it depends either upon the merit of the dispensers of place or upon the man

himself who has effected his purpose by the organization of supporters or in many other possible ways.

Marriages, similarly, are brought about either by choice or by chance interplay of circumstance. And births

are determined by marriages: the child is moulded true to type when all goes well; otherwise it is marred by

some inner detriment, something due to the mother personally or to an environment unfavourable to that

15. According to Plato, lots and choice play a part [in the determination of human conditions] before the

Spindle of Necessity is turned; that once done, only the Spindledestiny is valid; it fixes the chosen

conditions irretrievably since the elected guardianspirit becomes accessory to their accomplishment.

By the Lots we are to understand birth into the conditions actually existent in the All at the particular moment

of each entry into body, birth into such and such a physical frame, from such and such parents, in this or that

For Particulars and Universals alike it is established that to the first of those known as the Fates, to Clotho the

Spinner, must be due the unity and as it were interweaving of all that exists: Lachesis presides over the Lots:

Of men, some enter into life as fragments of the All, bound to that which is external to themselves: they are

victims of a sort of fascination, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves: but others mastering all this

straining, so to speak, by the head towards the Higher, to what is outside even the Soul preserve still the

For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a thing whose nature is just a sum of impressions from outside

No: much more than all else, the Soul, possessing the Idea which belongs to a Principle, must have as its

native wealth many powers serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an EssentialExistent and with this

While body and soul stand one combined thing, there is a joint nature, a definite entity having definite

functions and employments; but as soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept apart, its very

own: it ceases to take the body's concerns to itself: it has vision now: body and soul stand widely apart.

16. The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what

phase remains distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the

On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter must be examined later on from quite other

considerations than occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All as

One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in succession man followed by horse and

other animals domestic or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all that it watches these creations acting upon

each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these strands,

and their unfailing sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of

the primal livingbeings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures.

Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the

No doubt the ReasonPrinciple [conveyed by the Soul] covers all the action and experience of this realm:

nothing happens, even here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.

To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action; they exist and they know; or better, the Soul,

which contains the engendering ReasonPrinciple, knows the results of all it has brought to pass. For

whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably

ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all

All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place

among things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for instance, are not as they were

of old; by dint of interval and of the inevitable law, the ReasonPrinciples have ceded something to the

The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life,

and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to

an unending state of excellence like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights

If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable, we are obliged to think that the ReasonPrinciples

themselves foreknew or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.

But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the ReasonPrinciples, though the arts and their

guiding principle do not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the work of art.

And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.

Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that

everything be good. Contraries may cooperate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe:

all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and

moulded to their function by the ReasonPrinciple directly; the less good are potentially present in the

ReasonPrinciples, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul's power had reached its limit, and

failed to bring the ReasonPrinciples into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent

Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the better; so that out of the total of things

modified by Soul on the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the

And if so, by what process does the Soul create in accordance with these Thoughts?

It is upon Matter that this act of the Reason is exercised; and what acts physically is not an intellectual

operation or a vision, but a power modifying matter, not conscious of it but merely acting upon it: the

ReasonPrinciple, in other words, acts much like a force producing a figure or pattern upon water that of a

circle, suppose, where the formation of the ring is conditioned by something distinct from that force itself.

If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul [that which conveys the ReasonPrinciples] must act by

manipulating the other Soul, that which is united with Matter and has the generative function.

Calculation implies reference. Reference, then, to something outside or to something contained within itself?

If to its own content, there is no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act of creation; creation

is the operation of that phase of the Soul which contains IdealPrinciples; for that is its stronger puissance, its

It creates, then, on the model of the Ideas; for, what it has received from the IntellectualPrinciple it must

In sum, then, the IntellectualPrinciple gives from itself to the Soul of the All which follows immediately

upon it: this again gives forth from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it; and that secondary Soul

at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in some of its creations, striving in others against the

It has a creative power, derived; it is stored with ReasonPrinciples not the very originals: therefore it

creates, but not in full accordance with the Principles from which it has been endowed: something enters

from itself; and, plainly, this is inferior. The issue then is something living, yes; but imperfect, hindering its

own life, something very poor and reluctant and crude, formed in a Matter that is the fallen sediment of the

Higher Order, bitter and embittering. This is the Soul's contribution to the All.

18. Are the evils in the Universe necessary because it is of later origin than the Higher Sphere?

Perhaps rather because without evil the All would be incomplete. For most or even all forms of evil serve the

Universe much as the poisonous snake has its use though in most cases their function is unknown. Vice

itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it

If all this is so, then [the secret of creation is that] the Soul of the All abides in contemplation of the Highest

and Best, ceaselessly striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God: but, thus absorbing and filled

full, it overflows so to speak and the image it gives forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the

This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from

the Divine Intelligence. But the Creator above all is the IntellectualPrinciple, as giver, to the Soul that

Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described as an image continuously being imaged, the First and the Second

Principles immobile, the Third, too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in Matter, having motion.

For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine ThoughtForms will pour forth into that phase of the

Soul: as long as there is a sun, all that streams from it will be some form of Light.

1. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of such a Kind, what is known as Matter

is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of FormIdeas. Thus far all go the same way. But departure

begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.

To a certain school, bodyforms exclusively are the Real Beings; existence is limited to bodies; there is one

only Matter, the stuff underlying the primalconstituents of the Universe: existence is nothing but this

Matter: everything is some modification of this; the elements of the Universe are simply this Matter in a

The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes

a mode of Matter and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void of quality, but a

Another school makes it incorporeal: among these, not all hold the theory of one only Matter; some of them

while they maintain the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of bodily forms, admit

another, a prior, existing in the divinesphere, the base of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.

2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the existence of this other Kind and to examine its

Now if Matter must characteristically be undetermined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest

there can be nothing that lacks determination, nothing shapeless, there can be no Matter there. Further, if all

that order is simplex, there can be no need of Matter, whose function is to join with some other element to

form a compound: it will be found of necessity in things of derived existence and shifting nature the signs

And again, where could it have come from? whence did it take its being? If it is derived, it has a source: if it

is eternal, then the PrimalPrinciples are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meetingground.

Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the union constitutes a body; and, so, there is Body in the

3. Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a

Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and [through

them] to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the IntellectualPrinciple

and the Divine Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form.

Further, a compound in the Intellectual order is not to be confounded with a compound in the realm of

Matter; the Divine Reasons are compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that [lower]

Nature which works towards Idea. And there is not only a difference of function; there is a still more notable

difference of source. Then, too, the Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form: in the eternal,

Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this realm is

all things in turn, a new entity in every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly

pushes another out of being: Matter has no identity here. In the Intellectual it is all things at once: and

therefore has nothing to change into: it already and ever contains all. This means that not even in its own

Sphere is the Matter there at any moment shapeless: no doubt that is true of the Matter here as well; but shape

As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing of process, this will be clear when we are sure of its precise nature.

4. The present existence of the IdealForms has been demonstrated elsewhere: we take up our argument from

If, then, there is more than one of such forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some character common to

This peculiar characteristic, this distinguishing difference, is the individual shape. But if shape, then there is

Further, admitting that there is an Intelligible Realm beyond, of which this world is an image, then, since this

And how can you predicate an ordered system without thinking of form, and how think of form apart from

No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact, utterly without parts, but in some sense there is part there too. And

in so far as these parts are really separate from each other, any such division and difference can be no other

than a condition of Matter, of a something divided and differentiated: in so far as that realm, though without

parts, yet consists of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in a unity of which they are

variations, reside in a Matter; for this unity, since it is also a diversity, must be conceived of as varied and

multiform; it must have been shapeless before it took the form in which variation occurs. For if we abstract

from the IntellectualPrinciple the variety and the particular shapes, the ReasonPrinciples and the Thoughts,

what precedes these was something shapeless and undetermined, nothing of what is actually present there.

5. It may be objected that the IntellectualPrinciple possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that the

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without

shape has never existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two

Matter and Idea by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex,

the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the

ultimate of every partialthing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a

ReasonPrinciple. The Mind, too, as also a ReasonPrinciple, sees only in each particular object the

ReasonPrinciple lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a

thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and

dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is

The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that in the senseworld: so therefore does the

Matter as much as the formingIdea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter, though it is the

object of determination has, of its own nature, a life defined and intellectual; the Matter of this sphere while it

does accept determination is not living or intellective, but a dead thing decorated: any shape it takes is an

image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary the shape is a realexistent as is the Base.

Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be right as long as they keep to the Matter of the

Intelligible Realm: for the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher that accompanies

Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is

not in Time: they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like the Kosmos, always in

process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation within the

Intelligible which produces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there:

it is the first movement; and movement and differentiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as

one: this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination [= Matter], needing The First to its

determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good; unlit by

the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of

light can be authentic; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the true.

An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves is found in the

changing of the basicconstituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over

is not complete if it were we would have a Principle of Being wrecked in Nonbeing nor does an

engendered thing pass from utter nonbeing into Being: what happens is that a new form takes the place of

an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of the incoming

The same fact is clearly established by decay, a process implying a compound object; where there is decay

And the reasoning which shows the destructible to be a compound is borne out by practical examples of

reduction: a drinking vessel is reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid; analogy forces us to believe that the

The basicconstituents of things must be either their FormIdea or that Primal Matter [of the Intelligible] or a

FormIdea, pure and simple, they cannot be: for without Matter how could things stand in their mass and

They must, therefore, consist of Matter and FormIdea Form for quality and shape, Matter for the base,

7. Empedokles in identifying his "elements" with Matter is refuted by their decay.

Anaxagoras, in identifying his "primalcombination" with Matter to which he allots no mere aptness to any

and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all withdraws in this way the very

IntellectualPrinciple he had introduced; for this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea;

and it is coaeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible: for if the

combination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior; if both are Authentic Existents, then an

additional Principle, a third, is imperative [a ground of unification]. And if this Creator, Mind, must

preexist, why need Matter contain the FormingIdeas parcelwise for the Mind, with unending labour, to

assort and allot? Surely the undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive

If this "infinite" means "of endless extension" there is no infinite among beings; there is neither an

infinityinitself [Infinity Abstract] nor an infinity as an attribute to some body; for in the first case every

part of that infinity would be infinite and in the second an object in which the infinity was present as an

attribute could not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex, could not therefore be Matter.

There are no atoms; all body is divisible endlessly: besides neither the continuity nor the ductility of

corporeal things is explicable apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up of atoms;

and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but atoms: a creative power could produce nothing

from a material devoid of continuity. Any number of reasons might be brought, and have been brought,

8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without quality?

Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal; bodiliness would be quality.

It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the senseworld and not merely base to some while being to

Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of this sort is our object:

we are seeking the stuff which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all that we find in things of

sense not merely such attributes as colour, heat or cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness,

shape and therefore magnitude; though notice that to be present within magnitude and shape is very different

It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex, one distinct thing in its nature; only so can it be void of all

quality. The Principle which gives it form gives this as something alien: so with magnitude and all

reallyexistent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed a magnitude of its own, the Principle

giving it form would be at the mercy of that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within the limit

of the Matter's capacity: to imagine that Will keeping step with its material is fantastic.

The Matter must be of later origin than the formingpower, and therefore must be at its disposition

throughout, ready to become anything, ready therefore to any bulk; besides, if it possessed magnitude, it

No: all that ever appears upon it is brought in by the Idea: the Idea alone possesses: to it belongs the

magnitude and all else that goes with the ReasonPrinciple or follows upon it. Quantity is given with the

The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by an outside power is not more surprising than the imaging of Quality;

Quality is no doubt a ReasonPrinciple, but Quantity also being measure, number is equally so.

We have only to think of things whose identity does not depend on their quantity for certainly magnitude

In a word, every unembodied Kind must be classed as without quantity, and Matter is unembodied.

Besides quantitativeness itself [the AbsolutePrinciple] does not possess quantity, which belongs only to

things participating in it, a consideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an IdeaPrinciple. A white

object becomes white by the presence of whiteness; what makes an organism white or of any other variety of

colour is not itself a specific colour but, so to speak, a specific ReasonPrinciple: in the same way what gives

an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude but is Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute, or

Not at all: the Matter was not previously shrunken small: there was no littleness or bigness: the Idea gives

How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental

Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows the indeterminate. Around this indefinite a definite

All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act; in this case Reason conveys information in any

account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure:

therefore the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal,

This is Plato's meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning.

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the

No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base

capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to

sense all that corresponds to light comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is

thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical with

Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever?

No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience,

what may be described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken

shape and size it knows them as compounds [i.e., as possessing with these forms a formless base] for they

It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the

overlie [the Ideas] but only a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an IdealPrinciple.

With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one

side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it

And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to

throw over it the thingform; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality,

11. "But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of body?"

"A certain mass then; and if mass, then Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no

footing to any entrant. And suppose it sizeless; then, what end does it serve? It never helped Idea or quality;

now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to

"Or, taking a larger view, observe that actions, productive operations, periods of time, movements, none of

these have any such substratum and yet are real things; in the same way the most elementary body has no

need of Matter; things may be, all, what they are, each after its own kind, in their great variety, deriving the

coherence of their being from the blending of the various IdealForms. This Matter with its sizelessness

Now, to begin with: extension is not an imperative condition of being a recipient; it is necessary only where it

happens to be a property inherent to the recipient's peculiar mode of being. The Soul, for example, contains

all things but holds them all in an unextended unity; if magnitude were one of its attributes it would contain

things in extension. Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it takes in; but this is because itself

is a potential recipient of spatial extension: animals and plants, in the same way, as they increase in size, take

quality in parallel development with quantity, and they lose in the one as the other lessens.

No doubt in the case of things as we know them there is a certain mass lying ready beforehand to the shaping

power: but that is no reason for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called; for in such cases Matter is not the

absolute; it is that of some definite object; the Absolute Matter must take its magnitude, as every other

A thing then need not have magnitude in order to receive form: it may receive mass with everything else that

comes to it at the moment of becoming what it is to be: a phantasm of mass is enough, a primary aptness for

extension, a magnitude of no content whence the identification that has been made of Matter with The Void.

But I prefer to use the word phantasm as hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul spills itself when it

seeks to communicate with Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither encompassing it nor able to

penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which achievements would be an act of delimitation.

In other words, we have something which is to be described not as small or great but as the greatandsmall:

for it is at once a mass and a thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is the Matter on which Mass is

based and that, as it changes from great to small and small to great, it traverses magnitude. Its very

undeterminateness is a mass in the same sense that of being a recipient of Magnitude though of course only

In the order of things without Mass, all that is IdealPrinciple possesses delimitation, each entity for itself, so

that the conception of Mass has no place in them: Matter, not delimited, having in its own nature no stability,

swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go here, there and everywhere, becomes a thing of

multiplicity: driven into all shapes, becoming all things, it has that much of the character of mass.

12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude: the IdealForms of body are Ideas installed in Mass.

But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For

to suppose them entering into Magnitude and not into Matter is to represent them as being either without

Magnitude and without RealExistence [and therefore undistinguishable from the Matter] or not IdealForms

[apt to body] but ReasonPrinciples [utterly removed] whose sphere could only be Soul; at this, there would

be no such thing as body [i.e., instead of IdealForms shaping Matter and so producing body, there would be

The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since it has been brought to Magnitude, must be,

itself, distinct from Magnitude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that is composite: once each of the

constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no need of any other base. No doubt there must be

a container, as it were a place, to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even body precede place and space;

There is no force in the suggestion that, since production and act are immaterial, corporeal entities also must

Bodies are compound, actions not. Further, Matter does in some sense underlie action; it supplies the

substratum to the doer: it is permanently within him though it does not enter as a constituent into the act

where, indeed, it would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does not change into another as would be the

case if there were a specific Matter of actions but the doer directs himself from one act to another so that he

Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and, therefore, to body.

It is, thus, no name void of content; we know there is such a base, invisible and without bulk though it be.

If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities and mass: for quality, or mass, or any such

entity, taken by itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an obscure existence:

there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it lurk, discerned by none of the senses.

It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour: it is not heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour

for nostrils or palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither is it corporeal; and touch deals with

body, which is known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry all properties utterly lacking in Matter.

It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of the intellective mind but a reasoning that

finds no subject; and so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No bodiliness belongs to it;

bodiliness is itself a phase of ReasonPrinciple and so is something different from Matter, as Matter,

therefore, from it: bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be body manifest and

13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common?

Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum.

The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is neither base nor bulk?

Again, if the quality possesses determination, it is not Matter the undetermined; and anything without

determination is not a quality but is the substratum the very Matter we are seeking.

It may be suggested that perhaps this absence of quality means simply that, of its own nature, it has no

participation in any of the set and familiar properties, but takes quality by this very nonparticipation,

holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off from everything else, being as it were the

negation of those others. Deprivation, we will be told, comports quality: a blind man has the quality of his

lack of sight. If then it will be urged Matter exhibits such a negation, surely it has a quality, all the more

so, assuming any deprivation to be a quality, in that here the deprivation is all comprehensive.

But this notion reduces all existence to qualified things or qualities: Quantity itself becomes a Quality and so

does even Existence. Now this cannot be: if such things as Quantity and Existence are qualified, they are, by

that very fact, not qualities: Quality is an addition to them; we must not commit the absurdity of giving the

name Quality to something distinguishable from Quality, something therefore that is not Quality.

If this Alienism is differenceabsolute [the abstract entity] it possesses no Quality: absolute Quality cannot

If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by

itself [since it is certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so by virtue

An absence is neither a Quality nor a qualified entity; it is the negation of a Quality or of something else, as

noiselessness is the negation of noise and so on. A lack is negative; Quality demands something positive. The

distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of qualification and of form; surely then it is absurd to

pretend that it has Quality in not being qualified; that is like saying that sizelessness constitutes a certain size.

The distinctive character of Matter, then, is simply its manner of being not something definite inserted in it

but, rather a relation towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them.

Other things possess something besides this relation of Alienism: their form makes each an entity. Matter

may with propriety be described as merely alien; perhaps, even, we might describe it as "The Aliens," for the

singular suggests a certain definiteness while the plural would indicate the absence of any determination.

14. But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this Privation is lodged?

Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in

reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in reason from

the other: that which defines Matter must be kept quite apart from that defining the Privation and vice versa.

There are three possibilities: Matter is not in Privation and Privation is not in Matter; or each is in each; or

Now if they should stand quite apart, neither calling for the other, they are two distinct things: Matter is

something other than Privation even though Privation always goes with it: into the principle of the one, the

If their relation to each other is that of a snubnose to snubness, here also there is a double concept; we have

If they stand to each other as fire to heat heat in fire, but fire not included in the concept of heat if Matter is

Privation in the way in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a form under which Matter appears but there

remains a base distinct from the Privation and this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they are not one thing.

Perhaps the identity in substance with differentiation in reason will be defended on the ground that Privation

does not point to something present but precisely to an absence, to something absent, to the negation or lack

of Realbeing: the case would be like that of the affirmation of nonexistence, where there is no real

If a nonexistence in the sense that it is not a thing of Realbeing, but belongs to some other Kind of

existent, we have still two Principles, one referring directly to the substratum, the other merely exhibiting the

Or we might say that the one concept defines the relation of substratum to what is not substratum, while that

of Privation, in bringing out the indeterminateness of Matter, applies to the Matter in itself: but this still

Now if Matter possesses an identity though only the identity of being indeterminate, unfixed and without

15. The further question, therefore, is raised whether boundlessness and indetermination are things lodging in

something other than themselves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation [or Negation of quality] is also

Now all that is Number and ReasonPrinciple is outside of boundlessness: these bestow bound and

settlement and order in general upon all else: neither anything that has been brought under order nor any

OrderAbsolute is needed to bring them under order. The thing that has to be brought under order [e.g.,

Matter] is other than the Ordering Principle which is Limit and Definiteness and ReasonPrinciple.

Therefore, necessarily, the thing to be brought under order and to definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order like all that shares its nature by participation or by

possessing the same principle therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not merely the recipient

For, first, any attribute to any subject must be a ReasonPrinciple; and Indefiniteness is not a

Secondly, what must a thing be to take Indefiniteness as an attribute? Obviously it must, beforehand, be

Then again Indefiniteness entering as an attribute into the definite must cease to be indefinite: but

Indefiniteness has not entered as an attribute into Matter: that is, Matter is essentially Indefiniteness.

The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the Indefinite, [the undelimited]; it must be a thing generated by

the undefined nature, the illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One illimitableness, however, not

So that Matter here [as only an image of Indefiniteness] would be less indefinite?

On the contrary, more indefinite as an Imagething remote from true being. Indefiniteness is the greater in

the less ordered object; the less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate in the Intellectual Realm,

where there is truer being, might almost be called merely an Image of Indefiniteness: in this lower Sphere

where there is less Being, where there is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption of the ImageKind,

But this argument seems to make no difference between the indefinite object and Indefinitenessessential. Is

In any object in which Reason and Matter coexist we distinguish between Indeterminateness and the

Indeterminate subject: but where Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say right

out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not present; for it is a ReasonPrinciple and could not

lodge in the indeterminate object without at once annulling the indeterminateness.

Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its natural opposition to ReasonPrinciple. Reason

is Reason and nothing else; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is Indeterminateness

No: it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are

ReasonPrinciples. So understood, this nonexistent has a certain measure of existence; for it is identical

with Privation, which also is a thing standing in opposition to the things that exist in Reason.

But must not Privation cease to have existence, when what has been lacking is present at last?

By no means: the recipient of a state or character is not a state but the Privation of the state; and that into

which determination enters is neither a determined object nor determination itself, but simply the wholly or

Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined be annulled by the entry of Determination, especially where

No doubt to introduce quantitative determination into an undetermined object would annul the original state;

but in the particular case, the introduction of determination only confirms the original state, bringing it into

actuality, into full effect, as sowing brings out the natural quality of land or as a female organism

impregnated by the male is not defeminized but becomes more decidedly of its sex; the thing becomes more

But on this reasoning must not Matter owe its evil to having in some degree participated in good?

No: its evil is in its first lack: it was not a possessor (of some specific character).

To lack one thing and to possess another, in something like equal proportions, is to hold a middle state of

good and evil: but whatsoever possesses nothing and so is in destitution and especially what is essentially

For in Matter we have no mere absence of means or of strength; it is utter destitution of sense, of virtue, of

beauty, of pattern, of Ideal principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter disgracefulness, unredeemed

The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an Existent, for there is nothing previous to it except the

BeyondExistence; but what precedes the Matter of this sphere is Existence; by its alienism in regard to the

1. A distinction is made between things existing actually and things existing potentially; a certain Actuality,

also, is spoken of as a really existent entity. We must consider what content there is in these terms.

Can we distinguish between Actuality [an absolute, abstract Principle] and the state of beinginact? And if

there is such an Actuality, is this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct so that this actually existent thing

It is indubitable that Potentiality exists in the Realm of Sense: but does the Intellectual Realm similarly

include the potential or only the actual? and if the potential exists there, does it remain merely potential for

ever? And, if so, is this resistance to actualization due to its being precluded [as a member of the Divine or

We cannot think of potentiality as standing by itself; there can be no potentiality apart from something which

a given thing may be or become. Thus bronze is the potentiality of a statue: but if nothing could be made out

of the bronze, nothing wrought upon it, if it could never be anything as a future to what it has been, if it

rejected all change, it would be bronze and nothing else: its own character it holds already as a present thing,

and that would be the full of its capacity: it would be destitute of potentiality. Whatsoever has a potentiality

must first have a character of its own; and its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that

Sometimes after it has turned its potentiality into actuality it will remain what it was; sometimes it will sink

itself to the fullest extent in the new form and itself disappear: these two different modes are exemplified in

(1) bronze as potentially a statue and (2) water [= primalliquid] as potentially bronze or, again, air as

But if this be the significance of potentiality, may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be? Is

Not in the sense of an effectively productive force: such a power could not be called a potentiality. Of course

Potentiality may be a power, as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing which may be

brought into actualization but to Actuality itself [the Principle or Abstract in which potentiality and the power

of realizing potentiality may be thought of as identical]: but it is better, as more conducive to clarity, to use

"Potentiality" in regard to the process of Actualization and "Power" in regard to the Principle, Actuality.

Potentiality may be thought of as a Substratum to states and shapes and forms which are to be received,

which it welcomes by its nature and even strives for sometimes in gain but sometimes, also, to loss, to the

2. Then the question rises whether Matter potentially what it becomes by receiving shape is actually

something else or whether it has no actuality at all. In general terms: When a potentiality has taken a definite

form, does it retain its being? Is the potentiality, itself, in actualization? The alternative is that, when we

speak of the "Actual Statue" and of the "Potential Statue," the Actuality is not predicated of the same subject

as the "Potentiality." If we have really two different subjects, then the potential does not really become the

actual: all that happens is that an actual entity takes the place of a potential.

The actualized entity is not the Matter [the Potentiality, merely] but a combination, including the FormIdea

This is certainly the case when a quite different thing results from the actualizationstatue, for example, the

combination, is distinctly different from the bronze, the base; where the resultant is something quite new, the

Potentiality has clearly not, itself, become what is now actualized. But take the case where a person with a

capacity for education becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality, here, identical with actualization? Is not

But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge because he is so potentially? Is he, in virtue of his nonessential

It is not because of his accidental ignorance that he is a being of Knowledge: it is because, ignorant though he

be by accident, his mind, apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may become so. Thus, in the

case of the potentially instructed who have become so in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual; or, if

we prefer to put it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the other, there is the power in actual

If, then, the Potentiality is the Substratum while the thing in actualization the Statue for example a

There will be nothing unsound in describing this shape, this Form which has brought the entity from

potentiality to actuality, as the actualization; but of course as the actualization of the definite particular entity,

not as Actuality the abstract: we must not confuse it with the other actualization, strictly so called, that which

is contrasted with the power producing actualization. The potential is led out into realization by something

other than itself; power accomplishes, of itself, what is within its scope, but by virtue of Actuality [the

abstract]: the relation is that existing between a temperament and its expression in act, between courage and

3. We come now to the purpose of all this discussion; to make clear in what sense or to what degree

Actualization is predicable in the Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Actualization there, each and every

member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also has place there.

Now: if there is no Matter there to harbour potentiality: if nothing there has any future apart from its actual

mode: if nothing there generates, whether by changes or in the permanence of its identity; if nothing goes

outside of itself to give being to what is other than itself; then, potentiality has no place there: the Beings

Those, however, who assert Matter in the Intellectual Realm will be asked whether the existence of that

Matter does not imply the potential there too; for even if Matter there exists in another mode than here, every

Being there will have its Matter, its form and the union of the two [and therefore the potential, separable from

Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea, just as the Soul, an Idea, is Matter to another [a higher] Being.

No: for the Idea [to which it is Matter] is integral to the Soul and does not look to a future; the distinction

between the Soul and its Idea is purely mental: the Idea and the Matter it includes are conceived as a

conjunction but are essentially one Kind: remember that Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial.

But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul? Surely the Soul is potentially the livingbeing of this world before

it has become so? Is it not potentially musical, and everything else that it has not been and becomes? Does

Is it the Actualization of a statue, where the combination is realized because the FormIdea has mastered

No: it is that every constituent there is a FormIdea and, thus, is perfect in its Being.

There is in the Intellectual Principle no progression from some power capable of intellection to the Actuality

of intellection: such a progression would send us in search of a Prior Principle not progressing from Power to

Act; there all stands ever realized. Potentiality requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it to the

actualization which otherwise cannot be; but what possesses, of itself, identity unchangeable for ever is an

actualization: all the Firsts then are actualizations, simply because eternally and of themselves they possess

This applies equally to the Soul, not to that in Matter but to that in the Intellectual Sphere; and even that in

Matter, the Soul of Growth, is an actualization in its difference; it possesses actually [and not, like material

Then, everything, in the intellectual is in actualization and so all There is Actuality?

Why not? If that Nature is rightly said to be "Sleepless," and to be Life and the noblest mode of Life, the

noblest Activities must be there; all then is actualization there, everything is an Actuality, for everything is a

Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life, in the true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the

4. Now, in general anything that has a potentiality is actually something else, and this potentiality of the

But what we think of as Matter, what we assert to be the potentiality of all things, cannot be said to be

actually any one being among beings: if it were of itself any definite being, it could not be potentially all.

The answer is that while Matter can not be any of the things which are founded upon it, it may quite well be

But once more, if it is excluded from the entities founded upon it and all these are Beings, it must itself be a

It is, further, by definition, formless and therefore not an Idea: it cannot then be classed among things of the

Intellectual Realm, and so is, once more, a NonBeing. Falling, as regards both worlds, under NonBeing, it

It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic Existences; it has even failed to come up with the things to which a

spurious existence can be attributed for it is not even a phantasm of Reason as these are how is it possible

And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the order of the thing it is to become: its existence is no more than an

announcement of a future, as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into existence.

As Potentiality then, it is not any definite thing but the potentiality of everything: being nothing in itself

beyond what being Matter amounts to it is not in actualization. For if it were actually something, that

actualized something would not be Matter, or at least not Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited

Motion, for example, is different from Being, but plays about it, springing from it and living within it: Matter

is, so to speak, the outcast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeemably what it was from the beginning: in

Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at the very beginning from the universal circle of Beings, it was

thus necessarily an active Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to annex for itself

even a visible outline from all the forms under which it has sought to creep: it has always pursued something

other than itself; it was never more than a Potentiality towards its next: where all the circle of Being ends,

there only is it manifest; discerned underneath things produced after it, it is remoter [from RealBeing] even

Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of Being, it can be no actualization of either: all that is allowed to

it is to be a Potentiality, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape of its own.

Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the actuality of being a falsity; and the false in actualization is the

So that Matter, as the Actualization of NonBeing, is all the more decidedly NonBeing, is Authentic

Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is situated in NonBeing, it is in no degree the Actualization of any

If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an Actualization, for then it would not be the stray from Authentic

Being which it is, the thing having its Being in NonBeingness: for, note, in the case of things whose Being

is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what Being they have, and if we introduce actualization

into things whose Being and Essence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation of their nature since their

If Matter is to be kept as the unchanging substratum, we must keep it as Matter: that means does it not?

that we must define it as a Potentiality and nothing more or refute these considerations.

1. Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must we not envisage Being as the substance

stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others Movement, Rest,

The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement, and so on are separate constituents.

Now Movement has Being as an accident and therefore should have Reality as an accident; or is it something

In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one; ours is the sphere of images whose separation

produces grades of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present

undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and hand: their distinct existence begins in the life here,

And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be explained in the same way? Are they differing

Realities centred in one Reality or gathered round Being differences which constitute Realities distinct from

This is sound enough; but it does not apply to all the qualities of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are

differentiations of Reality such as the quality of twofootedness or fourfootedness but others are not such

differentiations of Reality and, because they are not so, must be called qualities and nothing more.

On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a differentiation of Reality and sometimes not

a differentiation when it is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other thing, where it is not a

constitutive element but an accidental. The distinction may be seen in the [constitutive] whiteness of a swan

Where whiteness belongs to the very ReasonForm of the thing it is a constitutive element and not a quality;

In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very

substance of the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing more,

[not constituting but simply] giving some particular character to the real thing; in this second case the

qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed fully

constituted before the incoming of the qualification which whether in soul or body merely introduces some

state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.

But what if [the superficial appearance such as] the visible whiteness in ceruse is constitutive? In the swan

the whiteness is not constitutive since a swan need not be white: it is constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is

No doubt we may be told that the Reality in fire is [not warmth but] fieriness and in ceruse an analogous

abstraction: yet the fact remains that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is constitutive and in the ceruse

Thus the same entities are represented at once as being not qualities but constituents of Reality and not

Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing changed its own nature according to whether it is present as a

The truth is that while the ReasonPrinciples producing these entities contain nothing but what is of the

nature of Reality, yet only in the Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess real existence: here they

And this is the startingpoint of an error we constantly make: in our enquiries into things we let realities

escape us and fasten on what is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the observation of

certain qualities present; fire is a Reality [not a combination of material phenomena]; the phenomena

observed here and leading us to name fire call us away from the authentic thing; a quality is erected into the

very matter of definition a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to things of the realm of sense

And this raises the question how Reality can ever spring from what are not Realities.

It has been shown that a thing coming into being cannot be identical with its origins: it must here be added

Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme of what we have called Reality from what is not Reality

The Reality there possessing Authentic Being in the strictest sense, with the least admixture is Reality by

existing among the differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is affirmed in the sense that

with the existence of the Supreme is included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of the

Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution; the produced thing is deficient by the very addition,

2. But we must enquire into Quality in itself: to know its nature is certainly the way to settle our general

The first point is to assure ourselves whether or not one and the same thing may be held to be sometimes a

mere qualification and sometimes a constituent of Reality not staying on the point that qualification could

Now in a Reality possessing a determined quality, the Reality and the fact of existence precede the qualified

What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality which precedes the qualified Reality?

Its mere body, perhaps? If so, body being the Reality, fire is a warmed body; and the total thing is not the

Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness all which certainly do seem to be qualities and its resistance,

there is left only its extension by three dimensions: in other words, its Matter is its Reality.

But that cannot be held: surely the form is much more likely than the Matter to be the Reality.

And the outcome of this ReasonPrinciple entering into the underlying Matter, what is that?

Certainly not what is seen and burns, for that is the something in which these qualities inhere.

We might define the burning as an Act springing from the ReasonPrinciple: then the warming and lighting

and other effects of fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its quality.

Such completions of a Reality cannot be called qualities since they are its Acts emanating from the

ReasonPrinciples and from the essential powers. A quality is something persistently outside Reality; it

cannot appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as quality; its function is to bring in the

something more after the Reality is established, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty, health, a

certain shape. On this last, however, it may be remarked that triangularity and quadrangularity are not in

themselves qualities, but there is quality when a thing is triangular by having been brought to that shape; the

quality is not the triangularity but the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts and avocations.

Thus: Quality is a condition superadded to a Reality whose existence does not depend upon it, whether this

something more be a later acquirement or an accompaniment from the first; it is something in whose absence

the Reality would still be complete. It will sometimes come and go, sometimes be inextricably attached, so

3. The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be classed not as a quality but as an activity the

act of a power which can make white; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the Intellectual Realm

should be known as activities; they are activities which to our minds take the appearance of quality from the

fact that, differing in character among themselves, each of them is a particularity which, so to speak,

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts?

The difference is that these ["QualityActivities"] in the Supreme do not indicate the very nature of the

Reality [as do the corresponding Activities here] nor do they indicate variations of substance or of [essential]

character; they merely indicate what we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still be

In other words this thing, considered in its aspect as possessing the characteristic property of Reality is by

that alone recognised as no mere Quality. But when our reason separates what is distinctive in these

["QualityActivities"] not in the sense of abolishing them but rather as taking them to itself and making

something new of them this new something is Quality: reason has, so to speak, appropriated a portion of

By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of the specific nature of fire, may very well be no quality in fire

but an IdeaForm belonging to it, one of its activities, while being merely a Quality in other things than fire:

as it is manifested in any warm object, it is not a mode of Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image,

something that has gone forth from its own Reality where it was an Act and in the warm object is a quality.

All, then, that is accident and not Act; all but what is Ideaform of the Reality; all that merely confers

pattern; all this is Quality: qualities are characteristics and modes other than those constituting the substratum

But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the foundation in which they exist primarily, these are Activities of

And; one and the same thing cannot be both Quality and nonquality: the thing void of RealExistence is

Quality; but the thing accompanying Reality is either Form or Activity: there is no longer selfidentity when,

from having its being in itself, anything comes to be in something else with a fall from its standing as Form

Finally, anything which is never Form but always accidental to something else is Quality unmixed and

1. Some enquiry must be made into what is known as the complete transfusion of material substances.

Is it possible that fluid be blended with fluid in such a way that each penetrate the other through and through?

or a difference of no importance if any such penetration occurs that one of them pass completely through

Those that admit only contact need not detain us. They are dealing with mixture, not with the coalescence

which makes the total a thing of like parts, each minutest particle being composed of all the combined

But there are those who, admitting coalescence, confine it to the qualities: to them the material substances of

two bodies are in contact merely, but in this contact of the matter they find footing for the qualities of each.

Their view is plausible because it rejects the notion of total admixture and because it recognizes that the

masses of the mixing bodies must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap, if, that is to say,

each substance must be divided within itself through and through for complete interpenetration with the

other. Their theory is confirmed by the cases in which two mixed substances occupy a greater space than

either singly, especially a space equal to the conjoined extent of each: for, as they point out, in an absolute

interpenetration the infusion of the one into the other would leave the occupied space exactly what it was

before and, where the space occupied is not increased by the juxtaposition, they explain that some expulsion

of air has made room for the incoming substance. They ask further, how a minor quantity of one substance

can be spread out so as to interpenetrate a major quantity of another. In fact they have a multitude of

Those, on the other hand, that accept "complete transfusion," might object that it does not require the

reduction of the mixed things to fragments, a certain cleavage being sufficient: thus, for instance, sweat does

not split up the body or even pierce holes in it. And if it is answered that this may well be a special decree of

Nature to allow of the sweat exuding, there is the case of those manufactured articles, slender but without

puncture, in which we can see a liquid wetting them through and through so that it runs down from the upper

to the under surface. How can this fact be explained, since both the liquid and the solid are bodily substances?

Interpenetration without disintegration is difficult to conceive, and if there is such mutual disintegration the

When they urge that often there is a mixing without augmentation their adversaries can counter at once with

When there is an increase in the space occupied, nothing refutes the explanation however unsatisfying that

this is a necessary consequence of two bodies bringing to a common stock their magnitude equally with their

other attributes: size is as permanent as any other property; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities

there results a new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new magnitude; the blending gives

us a magnitude representing each of the two. But at this point the others will answer, "If you mean that

substance lies side by side with substance and mass with mass, each carrying its quantum of magnitude, you

are at one with us: if there were complete transfusion, one substance sinking its original magnitude in the

other, we would have no longer the case of two lines joined end to end by their terminal points and thus

producing an increased extension; we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore, no increase."

But a lesser quantity permeates the entire extent of a larger; the smallest is sunk in the greatest; transfusion is

exhibited unmistakably. In certain cases it is possible to pretend that there is no total penetration but there are

manifest examples leaving no room for the pretence. In what they say of the spreading out of masses they

cannot be thought very plausible; the extension would have to be considerable indeed in the case of a very

small quantity [to be in true mixture with a very large mass]; for they do not suggest any such extension by

2. This, however, raises a problem deserving investigation in itself: what has happened when a definite

magnitude of water becomes air, and how do we explain the increase of volume? But for the present we must

be content with the matter thus far discussed out of all the varied controversy accumulated on either side.

It remains for us to make out on our own account the true explanation of the phenomenon of mixing, without

regard to the agreement or disagreement of that theory with any of the current opinions mentioned.

When water runs through wool or when papyruspulp gives up its moisture why is not the moist content

expressed to the very last drop or even, without question of outflow, how can we possibly think that in a

mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact and that only the qualities are fused?

The pulp is not merely in touch with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and through so that

every particle of its matter is drenched in that quality. Now if the matter is soaked all through with the

But then, where is the water? and [if only a quality has entered] why is there a change of volume? The pulp

has been expanded by the addition: that is to say it has received magnitude from the incoming substance but

if it has received the magnitude, magnitude has been added; and a magnitude added has not been absorbed;

therefore the combined matter must occupy two several places. And as the two mixing substances

communicate quality and receive matter in mutual give and take so they may give and take magnitude.

Indeed when a quality meets another quality it suffers some change; it is mixed, and by that admixture it is no

longer pure and therefore no longer itself but a blunter thing, whereas magnitude joining magnitude retains its

But let it be understood how we came to say that body passing through and through another body must

produce disintegration, while we make qualities pervade their substances without producing disintegration:

the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is bodiless: it may, then, be supposed that as Matter

pervades everything so the bodiless qualities associated with it as long as they are few have the power of

penetration without disintegration. Anything solid would be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a solid has

the precise quality which forbids it to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of too many qualities in Matter

If, then, what we call a dense body is so by reason of the presence of many qualities, that plenitude of

If on the other hand density is itself a quality like what they call corporeity, then the cause will be that

This would mean that the qualities of two substances do not bring about the mixing by merely being qualities

but by being apt to mixture; nor does Matter refuse to enter into a mixing as Matter but as being associated

with a quality repugnant to mixture; and this all the more since it has no magnitude of its own but only does

3. We have thus covered our main ground, but since corporeity has been mentioned, we must consider its

nature: is it the conjunction of all the qualities or is it an Idea, or ReasonPrinciple, whose presence in Matter

Now if body is the compound, the thing made up of all the required qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is

And if it is a ReasonPrinciple, one whose incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains

embraced within itself all the qualities. If this ReasonPrinciple is to be no mere principle of definition

exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain

Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body: thus the body will be

Matter associated with an indwelling ReasonPrinciple which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even

though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man treated

elsewhere which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle.

1. Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced and close together, however far apart they be: within easy

Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn together for vision and the light must be

concentrated to suit the size of the pupil; besides, as we are placed farther and farther away from the material

mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude

Or it may be that we appreciate the magnitude of an object by observing the salience and recession of its

Or again, it may be that magnitude is known incidentally [as a deduction] from the observation of colour.

With an object at hand we know how much space is covered by the colour; at a distance, only that something

is coloured, for the parts, quantitatively distinct among themselves, do not give us the precise knowledge of

What wonder, then, if size be like sound reduced when the form reaches us but faintly for in sound the

hearing is concerned only about the form; magnitude is not discerned except incidentally.

Well, in hearing magnitude is known incidentally; but how? Touch conveys a direct impression of a visible

The magnitude of a sound is known not by actual quantity but by degree of impact, by intensity and this in

no indirect knowledge; the ear appreciates a certain degree of force, exactly as the palate perceives by no

indirect knowledge, a certain degree of sweetness. But the true magnitude of a sound is its extension; this the

hearing may define to itself incidentally by deduction from the degree of intensity but not to the point of

precision. The intensity is merely the definite effect at a particular spot; the magnitude is a matter of totality,

Still the colours seen from a distance are faint; but they are not small as the masses are.

True; but there is the common fact of diminution. There is colour with its diminution, faintness; there is

magnitude with its diminution, smallness; and magnitude follows colour diminishing stage by stage with it.

But, the phenomenon is more easily explained by the example of things of wide variety. Take mountains

dotted with houses, woods and other landmarks; the observation of each detail gives us the means of

calculating, by the single objects noted, the total extent covered: but, where no such detail of form reaches us,

our vision, which deals with detail, has not the means towards the knowledge of the whole by measurement

of any one clearly discerned magnitude. This applies even to objects of vision close at hand: where there is

variety and the eye sweeps over all at one glance so that the forms are not all caught, the total appears the less

in proportion to the detail which has escaped the eye; observe each single point and then you can estimate the

volume precisely. Again, magnitudes of one colour and unbroken form trick the sense of quantity: the vision

can no longer estimate by the particular; it slips away, not finding the standby of the difference between part

It was the detail that prevented a near object deceiving our sense of magnitude: in the case of the distant

object, because the eye does not pass stage by stage through the stretch of intervening space so as to note its

2. The explanation by lesser angle of vision has been elsewhere dismissed; one point, however, we may urge

Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied allow by their very theory that the

unoccupied portion of the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of vision,

Now consider some very large object of vision, that mountain for example. No part of the eye is unoccupied;

the mountain adequately fills it so that it can take in nothing beyond, for the mountain as seen either

corresponds exactly to the eyespace or stretches away out of range to right and to left. How does the

explanation by lesser angle of vision hold good in this case, where the object still appears smaller, far, than it

Or look up to the sky and no hesitation can remain. Of course we cannot take in the entire hemisphere at one

glance; the eye directed to it could not cover so vast an expanse. But suppose the possibility: the entire eye,

then, embraces the hemisphere entire; but the expanse of the heavens is far greater than it appears; how can

its appearing far less than it is be explained by a lessening of the angle of vision?

1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal for the

secondary can never be simplex that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity.

Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. just as the goodness of The Good is

essential and not the outgrowth of some prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential.

When we speak of The One and when we speak of The Good we must recognize an Identical Nature; we

must affirm that they are the same not, it is true, as venturing any predication with regard to that

[unknowable] Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to ourselves in the best terms we find.

Even in calling it "The First" we mean no more than to express that it is the most absolutely simplex: it is the

SelfSufficing only in the sense that it is not of that compound nature which would make it dependent upon

any constituent; it is "the SelfContained" because everything contained in something alien must also exist

Deriving, then, from nothing alien, entering into nothing alien, in no way a madeup thing, there can be

We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles; this the One and the Good is our First; next to it

follows the Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. Such is the order in nature.

Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either IntellectualPrinciple and Soul or of

IntellectualPrinciple and The First; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct.

Now what other [Divine] Kinds could there be? No Principles of the universe could be found at once simpler

They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd

to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of immaterial beings

whose existence is in Act even in lower forms no such division can be made and we cannot conceive a

duality in the IntellectualPrinciple, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can

we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the

No: the IntellectualPrinciple is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement

towards it or within it we are in the realm of the Soul's operation: such act is a ReasonPrinciple emanating

from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate

Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality of Intellectual Principles on the ground that there is one that

knows and thinks and another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction be possible in the

Divine between its Intellectual Act and its Consciousness of that Act, still all must be one projection not

unaware of its own operation: it would be absurd to imagine any such unconsciousness in the Authentic

Intelligence; the knowing principle must be one and the selfsame with that which knows of the knowing.

The contrary supposition would give us two beings, one that merely knows, and another separate being that

If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a

plurality in the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our thought can

entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to know that it knows a limitation which

would be charged as imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master

No: The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of the thought is nothing external: Thinker and

Thought are one; therefore in its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not as

something unconscious but as knowing: in this Primal Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the

knowledge of the knowing; and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be made in the case of

the Divine; the very eternity of its selfthinking precludes any such separation between that intellective act

The absurdity becomes still more blatant if we introduce yet a further distinction after that which affirms the

knowledge of the knowing, a third distinction affirming the knowing of the knowledge of the knowing: yet

To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the ReasonPrinciple, and this again

engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny

intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the IntellectualPrinciple but from an

intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the ReasonPrinciple but an image of it: the Soul could not

2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous

distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one IntellectualPrinciple unchangeably the same,

in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings,

while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one

nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in

the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the midsoul with it,

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty the appropriate dwellingplace

of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part thence to pour forth into the frame of the All

whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by

plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the

For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from

this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.

3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the AllSoul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which

by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It

Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope: given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from

the Authentic Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them?

It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another: without this communication, The Good

would not be Good, nor the IntellectualPrinciple an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself be what it

is: the law is, "some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken

chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary."

In other words, things commonly described as generated have never known a beginning: all has been and will

be. Nor can anything disappear unless where a later form is possible: without such a future there can be no

If we are told that there is always Matter as a possible term, we ask why then should not Matter itself come to

nothingness. If we are told it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the answer comes

that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the series, we return that the necessity still holds.

With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place,

walled off, so to speak; if that is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine light [and so cannot be

4. To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no

such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what

caused the fall. And when did it take place? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing:

We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist

only in its forgetting the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it create but from the

things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to

be in some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline: any inclination would be

towards its Prior, in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it

What could it have been planning to gain by worldcreating? Glory? That would be absurd a motive

Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the

And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented,

then it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it

Can it be waiting for certain souls still here? Long since would these have ceased returning for such rebirth,

having known in former life the evils of this sphere; long since would they have foreborne to come.

Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy origin because there are many jarring things in it. Such a

judgement would rate it too high, treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely its

And yet what reflection of that world could be conceived more beautiful than this of ours? What fire could

be a nobler reflection of the fire there than the fire we know here? Or what other earth than this could have

been modelled after that earth? And what globe more minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered

in its course could have been conceived in the image of the selfcentred circling of the World of

Intelligibles? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it is to be more splendid than the sun visible to us,

There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their

own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun

possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change; they deny that it is any wiser than

Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the

stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though these are far purer and

lovelier than their own souls yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing

in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to

imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to

Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which they piece together from the elements.

How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the elements? Their conjunction could

produce only a warm or cold or an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.

Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements together when it is a later thing and rises

from them? And this element soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest what can

Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has

been made for them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the ReasonForm

[the Logos] of our world. Why should they desire to live in the archetype of a world abhorrent to them?

Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world? It would appear, from the theory, that the Maker had

already declined towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into being.

Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an Intermediate World though what motive could

He have? in addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the midworld first,

If He made it later than this world abstracting the formalidea of this world and leaving the Matter out the

Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep them from

entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit the IdealForm of the Universe, what is there

6. And, what are we to think of the new forms of being they introduce their "Exiles" and "Impressions" and

If all comes to states of the Soul "Repentance" when it has undergone a change of purpose; "Impressions"

when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their simulacra there is nothing here but a jargon

invented to make a case for their school: all this terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt to the

ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the ascent from the cave and the

For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes from Plato; all the novelties through which they seek to establish a

From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body; as

for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm the Authentic Existent, the IntellectualPrinciple, the

Second Creator and the Soul all this is taken over from the Timaeus, where we read:

"As many IdealForms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that has being,

another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe though often they

substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Principle and they think that this third being is the

They are in fact quite outside of the truth in their identification of the Creator.

In every way they misrepresent Plato's theory as to the method of creation as in many other respects they

dishonour his teaching: they, we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature, while Plato and

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual

Essences; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the SenseKind: their

true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the

Second Hypostasis which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is

good except only for the first Nature and to recognize Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the

difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable

teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble

system an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul's need of

emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of

process to the world of essentialbeing. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to

adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own

theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must

establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and

stating the controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by

insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages

As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and

must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to identify what has

been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties how for example, where

they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they

cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the

Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and

7. That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly

no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a

But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and

blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire wellordered city.

We must recognize how different is the governance exercised by the AllSoul; the relation is not the same: it

is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We

[the human Soul] lies under fetter; and this in a second limitation, for the BodyKind, already fettered within

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune

of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine

and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits

nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset [as the Body], necessarily shares the conditions of

its containing principle [as the Soul], and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has

an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though

the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire

itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the

plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme

The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life: there, the

established rule commanding to permanence is sovereign; here things are like deserters kept to their own

place and duty by a double bond; there is no outlet from the All, and therefore no need of restraining or of

driving errants back to bounds: all remains where from the beginning the Soul's nature appointed.

The natural movement within the plan will be injurious to anything whose natural tendency it opposes: one

group will sweep bravely onward with the great total to which it is adapted; the others, not able to comply

with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving to its concerted plan; midway in the march, a

tortoise is intercepted; unable to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot; but if it could only

8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The

question, also, implies a beginning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a changeful

Those that so think must be instructed if they would but bear with correction in the nature of the Supernals,

and brought to desist from that blasphemy of majestic powers which comes so easily to them, where all

Even in the administration of the Universe there is no ground for such attack, for it affords manifest proof of

This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure like those lesser forms within it which are born

night and day out of the lavishness of its vitality the Universe is a life organized, effective, complex,

allcomprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image,

beautifully formed, of the Intellectual Divinities? No doubt it is copy, not original; but that is its very nature;

it cannot be at once symbol and reality. But to say that it is an inadequate copy is false; nothing has been left

Such a reproduction there must necessarily be though not by deliberation and contrivance for the

Intellectual could not be the last of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself and one outgoing;

there must, then, be something later than the Divine; for only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass

downwards something of itself. In the Supreme there flourishes a marvellous vigour, and therefore it

Since there is no Universe nobler than this, is it not clear what this must be? A representation carrying down

the features of the Intellectual Realm is necessary; there is no other Kosmos than this; therefore this is such a

This earth of ours is full of varied lifeforms and of immortal beings; to the very heavens it is crowded. And

the stars, those of the upper and the under spheres, moving in their ordered path, fellowtravellers with the

universe, how can they be less than gods? Surely they must be morally good: what could prevent them? All

that occasions vice here below is unknown there evil of body, perturbed and perturbing.

Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace, what hinders them from the intellectual grasp of the GodHead and

the Intellectual Gods? What can be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the Supernals?

Admitting that human Souls have descended under constraint of the AllSoul, are we to think the constrained

the nobler? Among Souls, what commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was

unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit if you dislike it?

And further, if the order of this Universe is such that we are able, within it, to practise wisdom and to live our

earthly course by the Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine?

9. Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of that order, are made ground of complaint. But this is to ignore

that the Sage demands no equality in such matters: he cannot think that to own many things is to be richer or

that the powerful have the better of the simple; he leaves all such preoccupations to another kind of man. He

has learned that life on earth has two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and the way of the mass, the Sage

intent upon the sublimest, upon the realm above, while those of the more strictly human type fall, again,

under two classes, the one reminiscent of virtue and therefore not without touch with good, the other mere

But what of murder? What of the feebleness that brings men under slavery to the passions?

Is it any wonder that there should be failing and error, not in the highest, the intellectual, Principle but in

Souls that are like undeveloped children? And is not life justified even so if it is a training ground with its

You are wronged; need that trouble an immortal? You are put to death; you have attained your desire. And

from the moment your citizenship of the world becomes irksome you are not bound to it.

Our adversaries do not deny that even here there is a system of law and penalty: and surely we cannot in

justice blame a dominion which awards to every one his due, where virtue has its honour, and vice comes to

its fitting shame, in which there are not merely representations of the gods, but the gods themselves, watchers

from above, and as we read easily rebutting human reproaches, since they lead all things in order from a

beginning to an end, allotting to each human being, as life follows life, a fortune shaped to all that has

preceded the destiny which, to those that do not penetrate it, becomes the matter of boorish insolence upon

A man's one task is to strive towards making himself perfect though not in the idea really fatal to

We must recognize that other men have attained the heights of goodness; we must admit the goodness of the

celestial spirits, and above all of the gods those whose presence is here but their contemplation in the

Supreme, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most blessed Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the

divinities of the Intellectual Sphere, and, above all these, the mighty King of that dominion, whose majesty is

It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity but by displaying its exuberance as the Supreme himself has

displayed it that we show knowledge of the might of God, who, abidingly what He is, yet creates that

This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to Him the Universe as a whole and every God within it and

These, in the nature of things, cannot be what He is, but that does not justify you in contempt of them, in

The more perfect the man, the more compliant he is, even towards his fellows; we must temper our

importance, not thrusting insolently beyond what our nature warrants; we must allow other beings, also, their

place in the presence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves alone next after the First in a dreamflight

which deprives us of our power of attaining identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the human

Soul, that is to say, to the point of likeness to which the IntellectualPrinciple leads us; to exalt ourselves

Yet imbeciles are found to accept such teaching at the mere sound of the words "You, yourself, are to be

nobler than all else, nobler than men, nobler than even gods." Human audacity is very great: a man once

modest, restrained and simple hears, "You, yourself, are the child of God; those men whom you used to

venerate, those beings whose worship they inherit from antiquity, none of these are His children; you without

lifting a hand are nobler than the very heavens"; others take up the cry: the issue will be much as if in a crowd

all equally ignorant of figures, one man were told that he stands a thousand cubic feet; he will naturally

accept his thousand cubits even though the others present are said to measure only five cubits; he will merely

Another point: God has care for you; how then can He be indifferent to the entire Universe in which you

We may be told that He is too much occupied to look upon the Universe, and that it would not be right for

Him to do so; yet, when He looks down and upon these people, is He not looking outside Himself and upon

the Universe in which they exist? If He cannot look outside Himself so as to survey the Kosmos, then neither

The Universe has need of Him, and He knows its ordering and its indwellers and how far they belong to it

and how far to the Supreme, and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing with the

Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some pain must be brought to them for we are to

look not to the single will of any man but to the universe entire, regarding every one according to worth but

Not one only kind of being is bent upon this quest, which brings bliss to whatsoever achieves, and earns for

the others a future destiny in accord with their power. No man, therefore, may flatter himself that he alone is

competent; a pretension is not a possession; many boast though fully conscious of their lack and many

imagine themselves to possess what was never theirs and even to be alone in possessing what they alone of

10. Under detailed investigation, many other tenets of this school indeed we might say all could be

corrected with an abundance of proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our own friends who fell in

The school, no doubt, is freespoken enough whether in the set purpose of giving its opinions a plausible

colour of verity or in honest belief but we are addressing here our own acquaintances, not those people with

whom we could make no way. We have spoken in the hope of preventing our friends from being perturbed by

a party which brings, not proof how could it? but arbitrary, tyrannical assertion; another style of address

would be applicable to such as have the audacity to flout the noble and true doctrines of the august teachers

That method we will not apply; anyone that has fully grasped the preceding discussion will know how to

Only one other tenet of theirs will be mentioned before passing the matter; it is one which surpasses all the

They first maintain that the Soul and a certain "Wisdom" [Sophia] declined and entered this lower sphere

though they leave us in doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or

whether the two are the same to them then they tell us that the other Souls came down in the descent and

that these members of Sophia took to themselves bodies, human bodies, for example.

Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of descent to the others is declared not to have

descended. "It knew no decline," but merely illuminated the darkness in such a way that an image of it was

formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape an image of that image somewhere below through the medium of

Matter or of Materiality or whatever else of many names they choose to give it in their frequent change of

terms, invented to darken their doctrine and so they bring into being what they call the Creator or Demiurge,

then this lower is severed from his Mother [Sophia] and becomes the author of the Kosmos down to the latest

11. Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can

it truly be said to have declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light does not justify the

assertion of its decline; for that, it must make an actual movement towards the object lying in the lower realm

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act

towards that end, why should it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the Kosmos draw light also from the

Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that

illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously? Why must the Soul wait till the

Then again this Plan the "Far Country" of their terminology brought into being, as they hold, by the greater

Further, how explain that under this illumination the Matter of the Kosmos produces images of the order of

Soul instead of mere bodilynature? An image of Soul could not demand darkness or Matter, but wherever

formed it would exhibit the character of the producing element and remain in close union with it.

If it is a reality, in what way does it differ from its original? By being a distinct form of the Soul? But then,

since the original is the reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be the vegetative and generative Soul; and

then, what becomes of the theory that it is produced for glory's sake, what becomes of the creation in

arrogance and selfassertion? The theory puts an end also to creation by representation and, still more

decidedly, to any thinking in the act; and what need is left for a creator creating by way of Matter and Image?

If it is an Intellection, then we ask first "What justifies the name?" and next, "How does anything come into

being unless the Soul give this Intellection creative power and how, after all, can creative power reside in a

created thing?" Are we to be told that it is a question of a first Image followed by a second?

12. And how does this image set to its task immediately after it comes into being?

But it was utterly nonexistent, it could have no vision, either it or the Mother they bestow upon it.

Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as SoulImages but as veritable Souls; yet, by great

stress and strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do attain

Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on the other

hand, this Image, a newcomer into being, is able, they tell us as also is its Mother to form at least some

dim representation of the celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the

conception of the Supreme and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the

purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else? What made it judge fire a better

Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by

thinking of the Universe? It must have conceived the product complete from the first; the constituent

The creation must have been in all respects more according to the way of Nature than to that of the arts for

the arts are of later origin than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present stage the partial things

brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such order first fire, then the several other

elements, then the various blends of these on the contrary the living organism entire is encompassed and

rounded off within the uterine germ. Why should not the material of the Universe be similarly embraced in a

Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the rest would be included? We can only suppose that these people

themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have produced the world by such a process, but that

And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens to be great in that degree to devise the obliquity of the

Zodiac and the circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of ours and all in such a way

that reason can be given for the plan this could never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power [the

Against their will, they themselves admit this: their "outshining upon the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted,

Why should this downshining take place unless such a process belonged to a universal law?

Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that order. If it is in the nature of things, it must have

taken place from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right exists in the

Supreme also; evil antedates this world; the cause of evil is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme is the

evil to us; instead of the Soul's harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the Soul.

In fine, the theory amounts to making the world one of the Primals, and with it the Matter from which it

The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the already existent Darkness. Now whence came

If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the

Soul to decline to; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature of the Soul. The theory,

therefore, refers the entire process to preexisting compulsions: the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.

13. Those, then, that censure the constitution of the Kosmos do not understand what they are doing or where

this audacity leads them. They do not understand that there is a successive order of Primals, Secondaries,

Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First;

that we can but accept, meekly, the constitution of the total, and make our best way towards the Primals,

withdrawing from the tragic spectacle, as they see it, of the Kosmic spheres which in reality are all suave

And what, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people

Even the fact that their material frame is of fire does not make them dreadful; their Movements are in keeping

with the All and with the Earth: but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on which these people

And, yet, again, their material frames are preeminent in vastness and beauty, as they cooperate in act and in

influence with the entire order of Nature, and can never cease to exist as long as the Primals stand; they enter

If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the

tyrant but to serve towards beauty and order. The action attributed to them must be understood as a foretelling

of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is due, in part to diverse destinies for there cannot be

one lot for the entire body of men in part to the birth moment, in part to wide divergencies of place, in part

Once more, we have no right to ask that all men shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal

virtue is not possible: this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the Supreme and treating

evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom as good lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous

fading out; it would be like calling the NaturePrinciple evil because it is not SensePerception and the thing

of sense evil for not being a ReasonPrinciple. If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in

the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the IntellectualPrinciple, and That too has its

14. In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme.

In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the Supernal Beings not merely the Soul but even

the Transcendents they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the idea that these

Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from any of us who is in some degree trained to use the

appropriate forms in the appropriate way certain melodies, certain sounds, specially directed breathings,

sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic potency upon the Supreme. Perhaps they would

repudiate any such intention: still they must explain how these things act upon the unembodied: they do not

see that the power they attribute to their own words is so much taken away from the majesty of the divine.

If they meant, by temperate living and an appropriate regime, they would be right and in accordance with all

sound knowledge. But they assert diseases to be SpiritBeings and boast of being able to expel them by

formula: this pretension may enhance their importance with the crowd, gaping upon the powers of magicians;

but they can never persuade the intelligent that disease arises otherwise than from such causes as overstrain,

excess, deficiency, putrid decay; in a word, some variation whether from within or from without.

The nature of illness is indicated by its very cure. A motion, a medicine, the letting of blood, and the disease

shifts down and away; sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system: presumably the Spiritual

power gets hungry or is debilitated by the purge. Either this Spirit makes a hasty exit or it remains within. If it

stays, how does the disease disappear, with the cause still present? If it quits the place, what has driven it out?

Has anything happened to it? Are we to suppose it throve on the disease? In that case the disease existed as

something distinct from the SpiritPower. Then again, if it steps in where no cause of sickness exists, why

should there be anything else but illness? If there must be such a cause, the Spirit is unnecessary: that cause is

sufficient to produce that fever. As for the notion, that just when the cause presents itself, the watchful Spirit

But the manner and motive of their teaching have been sufficiently exhibited; and this was the main purpose

of the discussion here upon their SpiritPowers. I leave it to yourselves to read the books and examine the

rest of the doctrine: you will note all through how our form of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character

and honest thinking in addition to all other good qualities, how it cultivates reverence and not arrogant

selfassertion, how its boldness is balanced by reason, by careful proof, by cautious progression, by the

utmost circumspection and you will compare those other systems to one proceeding by this method. You

will find that the tenets of their school have been huddled together under a very different plan: they do not

15. There is, however, one matter which we must on no account overlook the effect of these teachings upon

There are two theories as to the attainment of the End of life. The one proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure, as

the term; the other pronounces for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and moves, by ways

Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends pleasure and its enjoyment, all that is left to us: but the

doctrine under discussion is still more wanton; it carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence; it scorns

every law known to us; immemorial virtue and all restraint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness

be seen on earth; it cuts at the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which, innate in the moral

sense, is made perfect by thought and by selfdiscipline: all that would give us a noble human being is gone.

What is left for them except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching comes to pleasure,

selfseeking, the grudge of any share with one's fellows, the pursuit of advantage.

Their error is that they know nothing good here: all they care for is something else to which they will at some

future time apply themselves: yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the startingpoint of

the pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly

correction. The understanding of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of the body, and

This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of such matters is

missing utterly: we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is no word of all

the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients; we do not learn

what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say "Look to God"

is not helpful without some instruction as to what this looking imports: it might very well be said that one can

"look" and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word God but held in the grip

of every passion and making no effort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with

thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest: God on the lips, without a good conduct of life, is a word.

16. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the

Every evildoer began by despising the Gods; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even

Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the

Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the

beloved; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in

the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours; for

how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart?

But of this matter we have treated elsewhere: here we urge that where there is contempt for the Kin of the

What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit whatsoever to it?

And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to assert that Providence cares for them,

And is this Providence over them to be understood of their existence in that other world only or of their lives

here as well? If in the other world, how came they to this? If in this world, why are they not already raised

Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here? How else can He know either that they are

here, or that in their sojourn here they have not forgotten Him and fallen away? And if He is aware of the

goodness of some, He must know of the wickedness of others, to distinguish good from bad. That means that

He is present to all, is, by whatever mode, within this Universe. The Universe, therefore, must be participant

If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him

But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond making any concession to your

liking it remains none the less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and will

not be: a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one over fragments only; and similarly,

Participation is more perfect in the case of the AllSoul as is shown, further, by the very existence of things

and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild pretensions, who is so well

ordered, so wise, as the Universe? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place; to make it, except as a

The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but only by one so blind, so utterly devoid of

perception and thought, so far from any vision of the Intellectual Universe as not even to see this world of our

For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards

music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take

pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of order observed in visible things? Consider,

even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see

the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes

the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth the very experience out

of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that

other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense this vast orderliness, the Form

which the stars even in their remoteness display no one could be so dullwitted, so immoveable, as not to be

carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from

that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor had any vision of

17. Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who inveighs against body

as a grave hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior.

Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the Universe and study all that still remains.

They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the IdealForm realized in the Kosmos.

They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal magnitude and lead the

Intelligible out towards spatial extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its magnitude, as

adequate a representation as possible of the principle void of parts which is its model the greatness of power

there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere [the

AllSoul] as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and

through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer

governance: either approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe.

Now let them set body within it not in the sense that Soul suffers any change but that, since "In the Gods

there can be no grudging," it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing has strength to receive and at once

their conception of the Kosmos must be revised; they cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has exercised

such a weight of power as to have brought the corporealprinciple, in itself unlovely, to partake of good and

beauty to the utmost of its receptivity and to a pitch which stirs Souls, beings of the divine order.

These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such stirring, and that they see no difference

between beautiful and ugly forms of body; but, at that, they can make no distinction between the ugly and the

beautiful in conduct; sciences can have no beauty; there can be none in thought; and none, therefore, in God.

This world descends from the Firsts: if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source; springing thence, this

world, too, must have its beautiful things. And while they proclaim their contempt for earthly beauty, they

would do well to ignore that of youths and women so as not to be overcome by incontinence.

In fine, we must consider that their selfsatisfaction could not turn upon a contempt for anything indisputably

We must always keep in mind that the beauty in a partial thing cannot be identical with that in a whole; nor

And we must recognize, that, even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable

to that of the Celestials forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and convince us of

their origin in the divine, forms which show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme since they cannot

hold us but we must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further, wherever there is interior

beauty, we may be sure that inner and outer correspond; where the interior is vile, all is brought low by that

Nothing base within can be beautiful without at least not with an authentic beauty, for there are examples of

a good exterior not sprung from a beauty dominant within; people passing as handsome but essentially base

have that, a spurious and superficial beauty: if anyone tells me he has seen people really finelooking but

interiorly vile, I can only deny it; we have here simply a false notion of personal beauty; unless, indeed, the

inner vileness were an accident in a nature essentially fine; in this Sphere there are many obstacles to

In any case the All is beautiful, and there can be no obstacle to its inner goodness: where the nature of a thing

does not comport perfection from the beginning, there may be a failure in complete expression; there may

even be a fall to vileness, but the All never knew a childlike immaturity; it never experienced a progress

bringing novelty into it; it never had bodily growth: there was nowhere from whence it could take such

And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of process: or, if this were conceded, certainly it

18. But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of

In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them declaims against its plan and against its

Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire

competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no further need of

a house: the malcontent imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned

to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and that the place falls far short of a true home; he

does not see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with necessity assuming that his conduct, his

grumbling, does not cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same "stones." As long as we have

bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of

Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are

they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very

Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have

become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very

closely resembling the indwelling. of the AllSoul in the universal frame. And this means continence,

selfrestraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to

disturb the mind. The AllSoul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our

passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and

of the heavenly bodies: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit

will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we

are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the

This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to themselves, but they are not any the nearer to

vision by the claim or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the ordering of the

Heavens, can never stand outside the material universe, they themselves have their freedom in their death.

This is a failure to grasp the very notion of "standing outside," a failure to appreciate the mode in which the

No: it is possible to go free of love for the body; to be cleanliving, to disregard death; to know the Highest

and aim at that other world; not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it and faithful to

it; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our sense they stand still the error

which in another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the StarNature, only because they do not see

1. In the two orders of things those whose existence is that of process and those in whom it is Authentic

Cause might conceivably underly all the entities in both orders or none in either. It might underly some, only,

in each order, the others being causeless. It might, again, underly the Realm of Process universally while in

the Realm of Authentic Existence some things were caused, others not, or all were causeless. Conceivably, on

the other hand, the Authentic Existents are all caused while in the Realm of Process some things are caused

The Firsts among these, by the fact that they are Firsts, cannot be referred to outside Causes; but all such as

And in all cases the Act may be referred to the Essence [as its cause], for their Essence consists, precisely, in

As for Things of Process or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable we must hold that

these are due to Cause; Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for unwarranted

"slantings," for sudden movement of bodies apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a soul

with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind the Soul under an even

sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause.

Something willed within itself or without something desired, must lead it to action; without motive it can

On the assumption that all happens by Cause, it is easy to discover the nearest determinants of any particular

The cause of a visit to the centre of affairs will be that one thinks it necessary to see some person or to receive

a debt, or, in a word, that one has some definite motive or impulse confirmed by a judgement of expediency.

Sometimes a condition may be referred to the arts, the recovery of health for instance to medical science and

the doctor. Wealth has for its cause the discovery of a treasure or the receipt of a gift, or the earning of money

by manual or intellectual labour. The child is traced to the father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of

favourable outside circumstances such as a particular diet or, more immediately, a special organic aptitude or

2. But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing to penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a

How comes it that the same surface causes produce different results? There is moonshine, and one man steals

and the other does not: under the influence of exactly similar surroundings one man falls sick and the other

keeps well; an identical set of operations makes one rich and leaves another poor. The differences amongst us

One school postulates material principles, such as atoms; from the movement, from the collisions and

combinations of these, it derives the existence and the mode of being of all particular phenomena, supposing

that all depends upon how these atoms are agglomerated, how they act, how they are affected; our own

Such teaching, then, obtrudes this compulsion, an atomic Anagke, even upon Real Being. Substitute, for the

atoms, any other material entities as principles and the cause of all things, and at once Real Being becomes

Others rise to the firstprinciple of all that exists and from it derive all they tell of a cause penetrating all

things, not merely moving all but making each and everything; but they pose this as a fate and a supremely

dominating cause; not merely all else that comes into being, but even our own thinking and thoughts would

spring from its movement, just as the several members of an animal move not at their own choice but at the

Yet another school fastens on the universal Circuit as embracing all things and producing all by its motion

and by the positions and mutual aspect of the planets and fixed stars in whose power of foretelling they find

Finally, there are those that dwell on the interconnection of the causative forces and on their linked descent

every later phenomenon following upon an earlier, one always leading back to others by which it arose and

without which it could not be, and the latest always subservient to what went before them but this is

obviously to bring in fate by another path. This school may be fairly distinguished into two branches; a

section which makes all depend upon some one principle and a section which ignores such a unity.

Of this last opinion we will have something to say, but for the moment we will deal with the former, taking

3. "Atoms" or "elements" it is in either case an absurdity, an impossibility, to hand over the universe and its

contents to material entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order, reasoning, and the

governing soul into being; but the atomic origin is, if we may use the phrase, the most impossible.

A good deal of truth has resulted from the discussion of this subject; but, even to admit such principles does

These atoms are to move, one downwards admitting a down and an up another slantwise, all at

haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the

outcome, this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus prediction and divination are utterly

impossible, whether by the laws of the science what science can operate where there is no order? or by

divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated.

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under compulsion to yield to whatsoever the

atoms may bring: but would anyone pretend that the acts and states of a soul or mind could be explained by

any atomic movements? How can we imagine that the onslaught of an atom, striking downwards or dashing

in from any direction, could force the soul to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any

reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? And what of the soul's resistance to bodily

states? What movement of atoms could compel one man to be a geometrician, set another studying arithmetic

or astronomy, lead a third to the philosophic life? In a word, if we must go, like soulless bodies, wherever

bodies push and drive us, there is an end to our personal act and to our very existence as living beings.

The School that erects other material forces into universal causes is met by the same reasoning: we say that

while these can warm us and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of nothing

that is done in the sphere of mind or soul: all this must be traceable to quite another kind of Principle.

The Universe is permeated by one Soul, Cause of all things and events; every separate phenomenon as a

member of a whole moves in its place with the general movement; all the various causes spring into action

from one source: therefore, it is argued, the entire descending claim of causes and all their interaction must

follow inevitably and so constitute a universal determination. A plant rises from a root, and we are asked on

that account to reason that not only the interconnection linking the root to all the members and every member

to every other but the entire activity and experience of the plant, as well, must be one organized overruling, a

But such an extremity of determination, a destiny so allpervasive, does away with the very destiny that is

It would be unreasonable to attribute to destiny the movement of our limbs dictated by the mind and will: this

is no case of something outside bestowing motion while another thing accepts it and is thus set into action;

Similarly in the case of the universal system; if all that performs act and is subject to experience constitutes

one substance, if one thing does not really produce another thing under causes leading back continuously one

to another, then it is not a truth that all happens by causes, there is nothing but a rigid unity. We are no "We":

nothing is our act; our thought is not ours; our decisions are the reasoning of something outside ourselves; we

No; each several thing must be a separate thing; there must be acts and thoughts that are our own; the good

and evil done by each human being must be his own; and it is quite certain that we must not lay any vileness

5. But perhaps the explanation of every particular act or event is rather that they are determined by the

spheric movement the Phora and by the changing position of the heavenly bodies as these stand at setting

Augury, it is urged, is able from these indications to foretell what is to happen not merely to the universe as a

whole, but even to individuals, and this not merely as regards external conditions of fortune but even as to the

events of the mind. We observe, too, how growth or check in other orders of beings animals and Plants is

determined by their sympathetic relations with the heavenly bodies and how widely they are influenced by

them, how, for example, the various countries show a different produce according to their situation on the

earth and especially their lie towards the sun. And the effect of place is not limited to plants and animals; it

rules human beings too, determining their appearance, their height and colour, their mentality and their

desires, their pursuits and their moral habit. Thus the universal circuit would seem to be the monarch of the

Now a first answer to this theory is that its advocates have merely devised another shift to immolate to the

heavenly bodies all that is ours, our acts of will and our states, all the evil in us, our entire personality;

nothing is allowed to us; we are left to be stones set rolling, not men, not beings whose nature implies a task.

But we must be allowed our own with the understanding that to what is primarily ours, our personal

holding, there is added some influx from the All the distinction must be made between our individual act

Place and climate, no doubt, produce constitutions warmer or colder; and the parents tell on the offspring, as

is seen in the resemblance between them, very general in personal appearance and noted also in some of the

None the less, in spite of physical resemblance and similar environment, we observe the greatest difference in

temperament and in ideas: this side of the human being, then, derives from some quite other Principle [than

any external causation or destiny]. A further confirmation is found in the efforts we make to correct both

If the stars are held to be causing principles on the ground of the possibility of foretelling individual fate or

fortune from observation of their positions, then the birds and all the other things which the soothsayer

The heavens are observed at the moment of a birth and the individual fate is thence predicted in the idea that

the stars are no mere indications, but active causes, of the future events. Sometimes the Astrologers tell of

noble birth; "the child is born of highly placed parents"; yet how is it possible to make out the stars to be

causes of a condition which existed in the father and mother previously to that star pattern on which the

They are really announcing the fortunes of parents from the birth of children; the character and career of

children are included in the predictions as to the parents they predict for the yet unborn! in the lot of one

brother they are foretelling the death of another; a girl's fate includes that of a future husband, a boy's that of a

Now, can we think that the stargrouping over any particular birth can be the cause of what stands already

announced in the facts about the parents? Either the previous stargroupings were the determinants of the

child's future career or, if they were not, then neither is the immediate grouping. And notice further that

physical likeness to the parents the Astrologers hold is of purely domestic origin: this implies that ugliness

Again, there must at one and the same time be a widespread coming to birth men, and the most varied forms

of animal life at the same moment and these should all be under the one destiny since the one pattern rules

at the moment; how explain that identical stargroupings give here the human form, there the animal?

6. But in fact everything follows its own Kind; the birth is a horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a

man by springing from the Human Kind; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a

very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being: allow the stars a wide material action upon the

bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical constitution; still

does such action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems quite independent of material

elements, a man taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of these

pursuits? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings, bestowing wickedness? And what of a doctrine that

makes them wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are being carried to a

position beneath the earth as if a decline from our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if

they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure around the earth.

Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in goodness as they see this one or another of the

company in various aspects, and that in their happier position they are benignant to us and, less pleasantly

situated, turn maleficent. We can but believe that their circuit is for the protection of the entirety of things

while they furnish the incidental service of being letters on which the augur, acquainted with that alphabet,

may look and read the future from their pattern arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a

7. It remains to notice the theory of the one CausingPrinciple alleged to interweave everything with

everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon a

Principle which, acting through seminal ReasonForms Logoi Spermatikoi elaborates all that exists and

The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and

of all movement whether without or supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards

But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity: all the causative forces enter into the system,

and so every several phenomenon rises necessarily; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power to

check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one general cause leave us no resource but

to go where they drive. All our ideas will be determined by a chain of previous causes; our doings will be

determined by those ideas; personal action becomes a mere word. That we are the agents does not save our

freedom when our action is prescribed by those causes; we have precisely what belongs to everything that

lives, to infants guided by blind impulses, to lunatics; all these act; why, even fire acts; there is act in

No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate: unable to halt at such a determinant principle, we

8. What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that

preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for

Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the

Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of

union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from lifeseeds, but a firsthand Cause,

bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be

largely led by secondary causes [or, by chancecauses]: there will therefore be a compromise; the action of

the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the

way where it will. The nobler Soul will have the greater power; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul which

defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in

wealth, arbitrary in power. The soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is more apt to

change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make

9. We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is brought about by this compromise between evil and accidental

circumstance: what room was there for anything else than the thing that is? Given all the causes, all must

happen beyond aye or nay that is, all the external and whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit therefore

when the Soul has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more

than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary: so,

too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of

But when our Soul holds to its ReasonPrinciple, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only

then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as our

doing, for they have no other source; they are the issue of the unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First, a

leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires

which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus.

10. To sum the results of our argument: All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by

causes; but the causation is of two Kinds; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to other

In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the light of sound reason is the Soul's work,

while what is done where they are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered.

Unwisdom, then, is not due to the Soul, and, in general if we mean by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves

But all our best is of our own doing: such is our nature as long as we remain detached. The wise and good do

perform acts; their right action is the expression of their own power: in the others it comes in the breathing

spaces when the passions are in abeyance; but it is not that they draw this occasional wisdom from outside

1. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend upon automatic activity and upon

Such a notion could be entertained only where there is neither intelligence nor even ordinary perception; and

But there is still the question as to the process by which the individual things of this sphere have come into

Some of them seem so undesirable as to cast doubts upon a Universal Providence; and we find, on the one

hand, the denial of any controlling power, on the other the belief that the Kosmos is the work of an evil

This matter must be examined through and through from the very first principles. We may, however, omit for

the present any consideration of the particular providence, that beforehand decision which accomplishes or

holds things in abeyance to some good purpose and gives or withholds in our own regard: when we have

established the Universal Providence which we affirm, we can link the secondary with it.

Of course the belief that after a certain lapse of time a Kosmos previously nonexistent came into being

would imply a foreseeing and a reasoned plan on the part of God providing for the production of the Universe

and securing all possible perfection in it a guidance and partial providence, therefore, such as is indicated.

But since we hold the eternal existence of the Universe, the utter absence of a beginning to it, we are forced,

in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in the Universe as a universal consonance

with the divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos is subsequent not in time but in the fact of derivation, in the

fact that the Divine Intelligence, preceding it in Kind, is its cause as being the Archetype and Model which it

merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, it has its existence and subsistence.

The authentic and primal Kosmos is the Being of the Intellectual Principle and of the Veritable Existent. This

contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and even its parts

bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual is not severed from the entire. In this Nature inheres all

life and all intellect, a life living and having intellection as one act within a unity: every part that it gives forth

is a whole; all its content is its very own, for there is here no separation of thing from thing, no part standing

in isolated existence estranged from the rest, and therefore nowhere is there any wronging of any other, any

opposition. Everywhere one and complete, it is at rest throughout and shows difference at no point; it does

not make over any of its content into any new form; there can be no reason for changing what is everywhere

Why should Reason elaborate yet another Reason, or Intelligence another Intelligence? An indwelling power

of making things is in the character of a being not at all points as it should be but making, moving, by reason

of some failure in quality. Those whose nature is all blessedness have no more to do than to repose in

A widespread activity is dangerous to those who must go out from themselves to act. But such is the

blessedness of this Being that in its very nonaction it magnificently operates and in its selfdwelling it

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

It is multiple, divided into various elements, thing standing apart from thing in a new estrangement. No

longer is there concord unbroken; hostility, too, has entered as the result of difference and distance;

imperfection has inevitably introduced discord; for a part is not selfsufficient, it must pursue something

outside itself for its fulfillment, and so it becomes the enemy to what it needs.

This Kosmos of parts has come into being not as the result of a judgement establishing its desirability, but by

The Intellectual Realm was not of a nature to be the ultimate of existents. It was the First and it held great

power, all there is of power; this means that it is productive without seeking to produce; for if effort and

search were incumbent upon it, the Act would not be its own, would not spring from its essential nature; it

would be, like a craftsman, producing by a power not inherent but acquired, mastered by dint of study.

The Intellectual Principle, then, in its unperturbed serenity has brought the universe into being, by

communicating from its own store to Matter: and this gift is the ReasonForm flowing from it. For the

Emanation of the Intellectual Principle is Reason, an emanation unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle

The ReasonPrinciple within a seed contains all the parts and qualities concentrated in identity; there is no

distinction, no jarring, no internal hindering; then there comes a pushing out into bulk, part rises in distinction

with part, and at once the members of the organism stand in each other's way and begin to wear each other

So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the ReasonForm emanating from it, our Universe rises and

develops part, and inevitably are formed groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups discordant

and combative; sometimes of choice and sometimes incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering

Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act; each utters its

own voice, but all is brought into accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the ruling

ReasonPrinciple. This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason, like the Supernal, but participant in

Intelligence and Reason: it stands in need of the harmonizing because it is the meeting ground of Necessity

and divine ReasonNecessity pulling towards the lower, towards the unreason which is its own characteristic,

The Intellectual Sphere [the Divine] alone is Reason, and there can never be another Sphere that is Reason

and nothing else; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be Reason: yet

since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two

extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of

the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an

3. Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than beautiful, as less than the noblest possible in

The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind

engendering in its own likeness by a natural process. And none the less, a second consideration, if a

considered plan brought it into being it would still be no disgrace to its maker for it stands a stately whole,

complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose and that of all its parts which, leading and lesser alike,

are of such a nature as to further the interests of the total. It is, therefore, impossible to condemn the whole on

the merits of the parts which, besides, must be judged only as they enter harmoniously or not into the whole,

the main consideration, quite overpassing the members which thus cease to have importance. To linger about

the parts is to condemn not the Kosmos but some isolated appendage of it; in the entire living Being we

fasten our eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvellous spectacle of the complete Man; we ignore all the

tribes and kinds of animals except for the meanest; we pass over an entire race, humanity, and bring forward

No: this thing that has come into Being is the Kosmos complete: do but survey it, and surely this is the

I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function,

selfsufficing, lacking nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the

Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of SpiritBeings and lofty souls and men happy in their

And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and with living things of every race, and

while the very sea has answered to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air and the ether and the

farspread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into

that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its conscious movement ever about the one Centre,

seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. And all that is within me strives towards the

Good; and each, to the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend, with all my

own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you

But there are degrees of participation: here no more than Existence, elsewhere Life; and, in Life, sometimes

mainly that of Sensation, higher again that of Reason, finally Life in all its fullness. We have no right to

demand equal powers in the unequal: the finger is not to be asked to see; there is the eye for that; a finger has

4. That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should not astonish us. The thing destroyed

derived its being from outside itself: this is no case of a selforiginating substance being annihilated by an

external; it rose on the ruin of something else, and thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing strange; and for

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of our universe, while

the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to

body entering into varied forms and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell

with the one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist

by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of

change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from

that selfcloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the

The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are inevitable, since things here are derived,

brought into existence because the Divine Reason which contains all of them in the upper Heavens how

could they come here unless they were There? must outflow over the whole extent of Matter.

Similarly, the very wronging of man by man may be derived from an effort towards the Good; foiled, in their

weakness, of their true desire, they turn against each other: still, when they do wrong, they pay the penalty

that of having hurt their Souls by their evil conduct and of degradation to a lower place for nothing can ever

This is not to accept the idea, sometimes urged, that order is an outcome of disorder and law of lawlessness,

as if evil were a necessary preliminary to their existence or their manifestation: on the contrary order is the

original and enters this sphere as imposed from without: it is because order, law and reason exist that there

can be disorder; breach of law and unreason exist because Reason exists not that these better things are

directly the causes of the bad but simply that what ought to absorb the Best is prevented by its own nature, or

by some accident, or by foreign interference. An entity which must look outside itself for a law, may be

foiled of its purpose by either an internal or an external cause; there will be some flaw in its own nature, or it

will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm follows, unintended, upon the action of others in the

pursuit of quite unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have freedom of motion under their

Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring: a slight deviation at the beginning develops

with every advance into a continuously wider and graver error especially since there is the attached body

with its inevitable concomitant of desire and the first step, the hasty movement not previously considered

and not immediately corrected, ends by establishing a set habit where there was at first only a fall.

Punishment naturally follows: there is no injustice in a man suffering what belongs to the condition in which

he is; nor can we ask to be happy when our actions have not earned us happiness; the good, only, are happy;

5. Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not

upon the place but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where the rewards

of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And

poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good only to the evil are they disastrous and where there is body

Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the coordination and completion of the Universal

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason whose control nothing anywhere eludes employs that ending

to the beginning of something new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction, loses

power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class

or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers poverty and sickness, for example and as

for vice, even this brings something to the general service: it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many

ways even, produces good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it

calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast of the evil

under which wrongdoers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but,

as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends;

and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness,

The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in good, and good cannot be at full strength in this

Sphere where it is lodged in the alien: the good here is in something else, in something distinct from the

Good, and this something else constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this is why evil is

ineradicable: there is, first, the fact that in relation to this principle of Good, thing will always stand less than

thing, and, besides, all things come into being through it and are what they are by standing away from it.

6. As for the disregard of desert the good afflicted, the unworthy thriving it is a sound explanation no

doubt that to the good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still the question remains why

should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands? How can

No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in

the wicked, the conditions matter little: as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and a bad man

Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a propriety, a reasonableness, a regard to merit which,

as things are, do not appear, though this would certainly be in keeping with the noblest Providence: even

though external conditions do not affect a man's hold upon good or evil, none the less it would seem utterly

unfitting that the bad should be the masters, be sovereign in the state, while honourable men are slaves: a

wicked ruler may commit the most lawless acts; and in war the worst men have a free hand and perpetrate

We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence. Certainly a maker must consider his work

as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts

have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings: the Providence must reach to all the details; its

Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies under an Intellectual Principle whose power

has touched every existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of this

7. A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot

require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and

since this Universe contains body, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if

the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine Reason.

Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the finest type of the human being as known here, we would certainly

not demand that he prove identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect; we would think it enough in the

Creator to have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve and bone under Reason as to give grace to these

corporeal elements and to have made it possible for Reason to have contact with Matter.

Our progress towards the object of our investigation must begin from this principle of gradation which will

open to us the wonder of the Providence and of the power by which our universe holds its being.

We begin with evil acts entirely dependent upon the Souls which perpetrate them the harm, for example,

which perverted Souls do to the good and to each other. Unless the foreplanning power alone is to be charged

with the vice in such Souls, we have no ground of accusation, no claim to redress: the blame lies on the Soul

exercising its choice. Even a Soul, we have seen, must have its individual movement; it is not abstract Spirit;

the first step towards animal life has been taken and the conduct will naturally be in keeping with that

It is not because the world existed that Souls are here: before the world was, they had it in them to be of the

world, to concern themselves with it, to presuppose it, to administer it: it was in their nature to produce it by

whatever method, whether by giving forth some emanation while they themselves remained above, or by an

actual descent, or in both ways together, some presiding from above, others descending; some for we are not

at the moment concerned about the mode of creation but are simply urging that, however the world was

There remains the other phase of the question the distribution of evil to the opposite classes of men: the

good go bare while the wicked are rich: all that human need demands, the least deserving have in abundance;

it is they that rule; peoples and states are at their disposal. Would not all this imply that the divine power does

That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules in the lower things: animals and plants

We answer that the universe is one living organism: as well maintain that while human head and face are the

work of nature and of the ruling reasonprinciple, the rest of the frame is due to other agencies accident or

sheer necessity and owes its inferiority to this origin, or to the incompetence of unaided Nature. And even

granting that those less noble members are not in themselves admirable it would still be neither pious nor

8. Thus we come to our enquiry as to the degree of excellence found in things of this Sphere, and how far

they belong to an ordered system or in what degree they are, at least, not evil.

Now in every living being the upper parts head, face are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members

inferior. In the Universe the middle and lower members are human beings; above them, the Heavens and the

Gods that dwell there; these Gods with the entire circling expanse of the heavens constitute the greater part of

the Kosmos: the earth is but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the stars. Yet

human wrongdoing is made a matter of wonder; we are evidently asked to take humanity as the choice

But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and inclines now to the one order, now

to the other; some men grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral. But those

that are corrupted to the point of approximating to irrational animals and wild beasts pull the midfolk about

and inflict wrong upon them; the victims are no doubt better than the wrongdoers, but are at the mercy of

their inferiors in the field in which they themselves are inferior, where, that is, they cannot be classed among

A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical

training, attack and throw another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food

And surely even the lawgiver would be right in allowing the second group to suffer this treatment, the penalty

of their sloth and selfindulgence: the gymnasium lies there before them, and they, in laziness and luxury and

listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall like fatloaded sheep, a prey to the wolves.

But the evildoers also have their punishment: first they pay in that very wolfishness, in the disaster to their

human quality: and next there is laid up for them the due of their Kind: living ill here, they will not get off by

death; on every precedent through all the line there waits its sequent, reasonable and natural worse to the

This at once brings us outside the gymnasium with its fun for boys; they must grow up, both kinds, amid their

childishness and both one day stand girt and armed. Then there is a finer spectacle than is ever seen by those

that train in the ring. But at this stage some have not armed themselves and the duly armed win the day.

Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike: the law decrees that to come safe out

of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling;

healthy days are not for those that neglect their health: we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the

Again: it is childish, while we carry on all the affairs of our life to our own taste and not as the Gods would

have us, to expect them to keep all well for us in spite of a life that is lived without regard to the conditions

which the Gods have prescribed for our wellbeing. Yet death would be better for us than to go on living

lives condemned by the laws of the Universe. If things took the contrary course, if all the modes of folly and

wickedness brought no trouble in life then indeed we might complain of the indifference of a Providence

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

9. It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something reducing us to nothingness: to think of

Providence as everything, with no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the Universe; such a providence

could have no field of action; nothing would exist except the Divine. As things are, the Divine, of course,

exists, but has reached forth to something other not to reduce that to nothingness but to preside over it; thus

in the case of Man, for instance, the Divine presides as the Providence, preserving the character of human

nature, that is the character of a being under the providential law, which, again, implies subjection to what

And that law enjoins that those who have made themselves good shall know the best of life, here and later,

the bad the reverse. But the law does not warrant the wicked in expecting that their prayers should bring

others to sacrifice themselves for their sakes; or that the gods should lay aside the divine life in order to direct

their daily concerns; or that good men, who have chosen a path nobler than all earthly rule, should become

their rulers. The perverse have never made a single effort to bring the good into authority, nor do they take

any steps to improve themselves; they are all spite against anyone that becomes good of his own motion,

though if good men were placed in authority the total of goodness would be increased.

In sum: Man has come into existence, a living being but not a member of the noblest order; he occupies by

choice an intermediate rank; still, in that place in which he exists, Providence does not allow him to be

reduced to nothing; on the contrary he is ever being led upwards by all those varied devices which the Divine

employs in its labour to increase the dominance of moral value. The human race, therefore, is not deprived by

Providence of its rational being; it retains its share, though necessarily limited, in wisdom, intelligence,

executive power and right doing, the right doing, at least, of individuals to each other and even in wronging

Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect as the scheme allows; a part, no doubt, in the fabric of the All,

Now, no one of any intelligence complains of these others, man's inferiors, which serve to the adornment of

the world; it would be feeble indeed to complain of animals biting man, as if we were to pass our days asleep.

No: the animal, too, exists of necessity, and is serviceable in many ways, some obvious and many

progressively discovered so that not one lives without profit to itself and even to humanity. It is ridiculous,

also, to complain that many of them are dangerous there are dangerous men abroad as well and if they

10. But: if the evil in men is involuntary, if their own will has not made them what they are, how can we

either blame wrongdoers or even reproach their victims with suffering through their own fault?

If there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by force of the celestial movement or by a

rigorous sequence set up by the First Cause, is not the evil a thin rooted in Nature? And if thus the

ReasonPrinciple of the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is injustice?

No: Men are no doubt involuntary sinners in the sense that they do not actually desire to sin; but this does not

alter the fact that wrongdoers, of their own choice, are, themselves, the agents; it is because they themselves

The Necessity [held to underlie human wickedness] is not an outer force [actually compelling the individual],

Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us powerless: if the universe were something

outside and apart from us it would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their part, no

man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to their intention. But, as things are, efficient act

does come from men: given the starting Principle, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevitably completed; but

each and every principle contributes towards the sequence. Now Men are Principles, or, at least, they are

moved by their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature is a Principle, a freely acting

11. Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by Necessities rooted in Nature and by the

No: the ReasonPrinciple is the sovereign, making all: it wills things as they are and, in its reasonable act, it

produces even what we know as evil: it cannot desire all to be good: an artist would not make an animal all

eyes; and in the same way, the ReasonPrinciple would not make all divine; it makes Gods but also celestial

spirits, the intermediate order, then men, then the animals; all is graded succession, and this in no spirit of

We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful everywhere in the

picture: but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the

persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some scurrilous clown; yet take away the low

12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the ReasonPrinciple applying itself, quite unchanged,

to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle

then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the

ReasonPrinciple could not be a thing of entire identity or even of closely compact diversity; and the mode in

which it is here manifested is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each single thing in

But has it not, besides itself entering Matter, brought other beings down? Has it not for example brought

Souls into Matter and, in adapting them to its creation, twisted them against their own nature and been the

The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this ReasonPrinciple and that it has not adapted

them to the creation by perverting them, but has set them in the place here to which their quality entitles

13. And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the

present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future; and these have everything to do with

Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his

future good. Those that have money will be made poor and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that

have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and

those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment.

It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due

cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be

murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged.

Hence arises that awesome word "Adrasteia" [the Inevadable Retribution]; for in very truth this ordinance is

We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails

throughout the entire of existence the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total; the marvellous art

shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness as

one would think Providence must disdain: the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form;

the world of vegetation, too; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity

of exquisite bloom; and all this not issuing once, and then to die out, but made ever and ever anew as the

In all the changing, there is no change by chance: there is no taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in

ways worthy of Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its quality; its quality is the expression

of its essential Being: and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one

thing the desirable and the just for if the good and the just are not produced there, where, then, have they

14. The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in keeping with the Intellectual Principle. True, no reasoning went

to its creation, but it so stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder since no reasoning could be able to

make it otherwise at the spectacle before it, a product which, even in the Kinds of the partial and particular

Sphere, displays the Divine Intelligence to a degree in which no arranging by reason could express it. Every

one of the ceaselessly recurrent types of being manifests a creating ReasonPrinciple above all censure. No

fault is to be found unless on the assumption that everything ought to come into being with all the perfection

of those that have never known such a coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of the Intellectual realm and

In this demand for more good than exists, there is implied a failure to recognize that the form allotted to each

entity is sufficient in itself; it is like complaining because one kind of animal lacks horns. We ought to

understand both that the ReasonPrinciple must extend to every possible existent and, at the same time, that

every greater must include lesser things, that to every whole belong its parts, and that all cannot be equality

This is why in the OverWorld each entity is all, while here, below, the single thing is not all [is not the

Universe but a "Self"]. Thus too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a part, is not Humanity complete: but

wheresoever there is associated with the parts something that is no part [but a Divine, an Intellectual Being],

this makes a whole of that in which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing, cannot be required to have attained

to the very summit of goodness: if he had, he would have ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there is

any grudging in the whole towards the part that grows in goodness and dignity; such an increase in value is a

gain to the beauty of the whole; the lesser grows by being made over in the likeness of the greater, by being

admitted, as it were, to something of that greatness, by sharing in that rank, and thus even from this place of

man, from man's own self, something gleams forth, as the stars shine in the divine firmament, so that all

appears one great and lovely figure living or wrought in the furnaces of craftsmanship with stars radiant

not only in the ears and on the brow but on the breasts too, and wherever else they may be displayed in

15. These considerations apply very well to things considered as standing alone: but there is a

stumblingblock, a new problem, when we think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in

The animals devour each other: men attack each other: all is war without rest, without truce: this gives new

force to the question how Reason can be author of the plan and how all can be declared well done.

This new difficulty is not met by the former answer; that all stands as well as the nature of things allows; that

the blame for their condition falls on Matter dragging them down; that, given the plan as we know it, evil

cannot be eliminated and should not be; that the Matter making its presence felt is still not supreme but

remains an element taken in from outside to contribute to a definite total, or rather to be itself brought to

The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end; all that comes into being must be rational and fall at its

coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of

This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the transmutation of living things which could

not keep form for ever even though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must go their

Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form? It comes to no more

than the murder of one of the personages in a play; the actor alters his makeup and enters in a new role. The

actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or

even an exit from the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what

is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another?

Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed: that way would mean the bleak quenching of life,

precluded from passing outside itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe,

engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless

Men directing their weapons against each other under doom of death yet neatly lined up to fight as in the

pyrrhic sworddances of their sport this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but play, that death

is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store,

to go away earlier and come back the sooner. So for misfortunes that may accompany life, the loss of

property, for instance; the loser will see that there was a time when it was not his, that its possession is but a

mock boon to the robbers, who will in their turn lose it to others, and even that to retain property is a greater

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as

the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and

lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the

authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted

with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and

outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle

austere matters austerely is reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those

incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature.

Anyone that joins in their trifling and so comes to look on life with their eyes must understand that by lending

himself to such idleness he has laid aside his own character. If Socrates himself takes part in the trifling, he

We must remember, too, that we cannot take tears and laments as proof that anything is wrong; children cry

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

How explain that in a world organized in good, the efficient agents [human beings] behave unjustly, commit

Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can the distinction be maintained between

And what becomes of blasphemy against the divine? The blasphemer is made what he is: a dramatist has

written a part insulting and maligning himself and given it to an actor to play.

These considerations oblige us to state the Logos [the ReasonPrinciple of the Universe] once again, and

This ReasonPrinciple, then let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth this Logos is not

the Intellectual Principle unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from the pure Soul

alone; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the

Intellectual Principle and the Soul the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual Principle engender this Logos

Now all life, even the least valuable, is an activity, and not a blind activity like that of flame; even where

there is not sensation the activity of life is no mere haphazard play of Movement: any object in which life is

present, and object which participates in Life, is at once enreasoned in the sense that the activity peculiar to

Life, then, aims at pattern as does the pantomimic dancer with his set movements; the mime, in himself,

represents life, and, besides, his movements proceed in obedience to a pattern designed to symbolize life.

But this ReasonPrinciple which emanates from the complete unity, divine Mind, and the complete unity

Life [= Soul] is neither a uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete divine Mind, nor does it give itself

whole and allincluding to its subject. [By an imperfect communication] it sets up a conflict of part against

part: it produces imperfect things and so engenders and maintains war and attack, and thus its unity can be

that only of a sumtotal not of a thing undivided. At war with itself in the parts which it now exhibits, it has

the unity, or harmony, of a drama torn with struggle. The drama, of course, brings the conflicting elements to

one final harmony, weaving the entire story of the clashing characters into one thing; while in the Logos the

conflict of the divergent elements rises within the one element, the ReasonPrinciple: the comparison

therefore is rather with a harmony emerging directly from the conflicting elements themselves, and the

question becomes what introduces clashing elements among these ReasonPrinciples.

Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of ReasonPrinciples which, by the fact that

they are Principles of harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more comprehensive

Principle, greater than they and including them as its parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we find

contraries white and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless, reasoning and

unreasoning but all these elements are members of one living body, their sumtotal; the Universe is a

selfaccordant entity, its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation of a

ReasonPrinciple. That one ReasonPrinciple, then, must be the unification of conflicting ReasonPrinciples

whose very opposition is the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being.

And indeed, if it were not multiple, it could not be a Universal Principle, it could not even be at all a

ReasonPrinciple; in the fact of its being a ReasonPrinciple is contained the fact of interior difference. Now

the maximum of difference is contrariety; admitting that this differentiation exists and creates, it will create

difference in the greatest and not in the least degree; in other words, the ReasonPrinciple, bringing about

differentiation to the uttermost degree, will of necessity create contrarieties: it will be complete only by

17. The nature of the ReasonPrinciple is adequately expressed in its Act and, therefore, the wider its

extension the nearer will its productions approach to full contrariety: hence the world of sense is less a unity

than is its ReasonPrinciple; it contains a wider multiplicity and contrariety: its partial members will,

therefore, be urged by a closer intention towards fullness of life, a warmer desire for unification.

But desire often destroys the desired; it seeks its own good, and, if the desired object is perishable, the ruin

follows: and the partial thing straining towards its completing principle draws towards itself all it possibly

Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a dancer guided by one artistic

plan; we recognize in his steps the good as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of the

No; excuse lies with the ReasonPrinciple and the ReasonPrinciple does not excuse them.

No doubt all are members of this Principle but one is a good man, another is bad the larger class, this and it

goes as in a play; the poet while he gives each actor a part is also using them as they are in their own persons:

he does not himself rank the men as leading actor, second, third; he simply gives suitable words to each, and

Thus, every man has his place, a place that fits the good man, a place that fits the bad: each within the two

orders of them makes his way, naturally, reasonably, to the place, good or bad, that suits him, and takes the

position he has made his own. There he talks and acts, in blasphemy and crime or in all goodness: for the

In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors add their own quality, good or bad

for they have more to do than merely repeat the author's words in the truer drama which dramatic genius

imitates in its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part assigned by the creator of the piece.

As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a Soul is allotted its

fortunes, and not at haphazard but always under a Reason: it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to it,

attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole Principle of the piece: then it speaks out its

business, exhibiting at the same time all that a Soul can express of its own quality, as a singer in a song. A

voice, a bearing, naturally fine or vulgar, may increase the charm of a piece; on the other hand, an actor with

his ugly voice may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the drama stands as good a work as ever: the

dramatist, taking the action which a sound criticism suggests, disgraces one, taking his part from him, with

perfect justice: another man he promotes to more serious roles or to any more important play he may have,

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

personal excellence or defect, set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the author its entire role

superimposed upon its own character and conduct just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward.

But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dignity: they act in a vaster place than any stage: the Author has made

them masters of all this world; they have a wide choice of place; they themselves determine the honour or

discredit in which they are agents since their place and part are in keeping with their quality: they therefore fit

into the ReasonPrinciple of the Universe, each adjusted, most legitimately, to the appropriate environment,

as every string of the lyre is set in the precisely right position, determined by the Principle directing musical

utterance, for the due production of the tones within its capacity. All is just and good in the Universe in which

every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in the Darkness and in Tartarus the

This Universe is good not when the individual is a stone, but when everyone throws in his own voice towards

a total harmony, singing out a life thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be. The Syrinx does not utter merely one

pure note; there is a thin obscure sound which blends in to make the harmony of Syrinx music: the harmony

is made up from tones of various grades, all the tones differing, but the resultant of all forming one sound.

Similarly the ReasonPrinciple entire is One, but it is broken into unequal parts: hence the difference of place

found in the Universe, better spots and worse; and hence the inequality of Souls, finding their appropriate

surroundings amid this local inequality. The diverse places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal grade and

unlike conduct, are wen exemplified by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or any other instrument: there is

local difference, but from every position every string gives forth its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once,

What is evil in the single Soul will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature

will serve nature in the total event and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes

nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not

mar the wellgoverned state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the corresponding moral type is often

18. Souls vary in worth; and the difference is due, among other causes, to an almost initial inequality; it is in

reason that, standing to the ReasonPrinciple, as parts, they should be unequal by the fact of becoming

We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade and its third, and that, therefore, its expression

may take any one of three main forms. But this point must be dealt with here again: the matter requires all

We may perhaps think of actors having the right to add something to the poet's words: the drama as it stands

is not perfectly filled in, and they are to supply where the Author has left blank spaces here and there; the

actors are to be something else as well; they become parts of the poet, who on his side has a foreknowledge

of the word they will add, and so is able to bind into one story what the actors bring in and what is to follow.

For, in the All, the sequences, including what follows upon wickedness, become ReasonPrinciples, and

therefore in right reason. Thus: from adultery and the violation of prisoners the process of nature will produce

fine children, to grow, perhaps, into fine men; and where wicked violence has destroyed cities, other and

But does not this make it absurd to introduce Souls as responsible causes, some acting for good and some for

evil? If we thus exonerate the ReasonPrinciple from any part in wickedness do we not also cancel its credit

for the good? Why not simply take the doings of these actors for representative parts of the ReasonPrinciple

as the doings of stageactors are representative parts of the stagedrama? Why not admit that the

ReasonPrinciple itself includes evil action as much as good action, and inspires the precise conduct of all its

representatives? Would not this be all the more Plausible in that the universal drama is the completer creation

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

The explanation, also, would take away all power in the Universe from Souls, even those nearest to the

And, further unless all ReasonPrinciples are Souls why should some be souls and others exclusively

All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal ReasonPrinciple of which they

are parts strictly "included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them.

The ReasonPrinciples are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its parts [i.e., events good and evil] are

This unity, Soul, has different parts; the ReasonPrinciples, correspondingly, will also have their parts, and

The Souls are in harmony with each other and so, too, are their acts and effects; but it is harmony in the sense

of a resultant unity built out of contraries. All things, as they rise from a unity, come back to unity by a sheer

need of nature; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized

The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal life: there is one genus, horse, though

horses among themselves fight and bite and show malice and angry envy: so all the others within the unity of

All these types, again, can be ranged under the one Kind, that of living things; objects without life can be

thought of under their specific types and then be resumed under the one Kind of the "nonliving"; if we

choose to go further yet, living and nonliving may be included under the one Kind, "Beings," and, further

Having attached all to this source, we turn to move down again in continuous division: we see the Unity

fissuring, as it reaches out into Universality, and yet embracing all in one system so that with all its

differentiation it is one multiple living thing an organism in which each member executes the function of its

own nature while it still has its being in that One Whole; fire burns; horse does horse work; men give, each

the appropriate act of the peculiar personal quality and upon the several particular Kinds to which each

2. Circumstances are not sovereign over the good of life, for they are themselves moulded by their priors and

come in as members of a sequence. The LeadingPrinciple holds all the threads while the minor agents, the

individuals, serve according to their own capacities, as in a war the generalissimo lays down the plan and his

subordinates do their best to its furtherance. The Universe has been ordered by a Providence that may be

compared to a general; he has considered operations, conditions and such practical needs as food and drink,

arms and engines of war; all the problem of reconciling these complex elements has been worked out

beforehand so as to make it probable that the final event may be success. The entire scheme emerges from the

general's mind with a certain plausible promise, though it cannot cover the enemy's operations, and there is

no power over the disposition of the enemy's forces: but where the mighty general is in question whose power

extends over all that is, what can pass unordered, what can fail to fit into the plan?

3. For, even though the I is sovereign in choosing, yet by the fact of the choice the thing done takes its place

in the ordered total. Your personality does not come from outside into the universal scheme; you are a part of

This question resolves itself into two: are we to make the Creator, if Creator there is, the cause of the moral

Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility? After all, none is charged in the case of plants brought into being

without the perceptive faculties; no one is blamed because animals are not all that men are which would be

like complaining that men are not all that gods are. Reason acquits plant and animal and, their maker; how

If the reproach simply means that Man might improve by bringing from his own stock something towards his

betterment we must allow that the man failing in this is answerable for his own inferiority: but if the

betterment must come not from within the man but from without, from his Author, it is folly to ask more than

The question is not whether a thing is inferior to something else but whether in its own Kind it suffices to its

Then the ReasonPrinciple has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality?

Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the ReasonPrinciple of this Universe

follows upon a phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual

Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of

things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade

downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled

stage by stage of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the ReasonPrinciple constituting a living being,

but it is another Soul [a lesser phase], not that [the Supreme Soul] from which the ReasonPrinciple itself

derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is

still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel!

In sum nothing can secure to a thing of process the quality of the prior order, loftier than all that is product

and amenable to no charge in regard to it: the wonder is, only, that it reaches and gives to the lower at all, and

that the traces of its presence should be so noble. And if its outgiving is greater than the lower can

appropriate, the debt is the heavier; all the blame must fall upon the unreceptive creature, and Providence be

4. If man were all of one piece I mean, if he were nothing more than a made thing, acting and acted upon

according to a fixed nature he could be no more subject to reproach and punishment than the mere animals.

But as the scheme holds, man is singled out for condemnation when he does evil; and this with justice. For he

is no mere thing made to rigid plan; his nature contains a Principle apart and free.

This does not, however, stand outside of Providence or of the Reason of the All; the OverWorld cannot be

dependent upon the World of Sense. The higher shines down upon the lower, and this illumination is

Providence in its highest aspect: The ReasonPrinciple has two phases, one which creates the things of

process and another which links them with the higher beings: these higher beings constitute the

overprovidence on which depends that lower providence which is the secondary ReasonPrinciple

inseparably united with its primal: the two the Major and Minor Providence acting together produce the

Men possess, then, a distinctive Principle: but not all men turn to account all that is in their Nature; there are

men that live by one Principle and men that live by another or, rather, by several others, the least noble. For

all these Principles are present even when not acting upon the man though we cannot think of them as lying

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

But surely not where they exercise no action? If they necessarily reside in all men, surely they must be

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

There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it alone acts, giving its character to the life

For [in the case of an evil life] whether it is that the constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the

troubled paths or whether [the fault is mental or spiritual in that] the desires have gained control, we are

compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum [something inferior to the highest principle in Man]. We

would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum [the responsible source of evil] must be Matter and

not, as our argument implies, the ReasonPrinciple; it would appear that not the ReasonPrinciple but Matter

were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realized man: but we must

remember that to this free Principle in man [which is a phase of the All Soul] the Substratum [the direct

inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter but] the ReasonPrinciple itself with whatever that produces and

moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is sovereign

The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a former life; we may suppose that

previous actions have made the ReasonPrinciple now governing within us inferior in radiance to that which

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

And any ReasonPrinciple may be said to include within itself the ReasonPrinciple of Matter which

therefore it is able to elaborate to its own purposes, either finding it consonant with itself or bestowing upon it

the quality which makes it so. The ReasonPrinciple of an ox does not occur except in connection with the

Matter appropriate to the oxKind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which we read

takes place; the Soul must lose its nature, the ReasonPrinciple be transformed; thus there comes the oxsoul

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

Once more not all things are Firsts; there are Secondaries and Tertiaries, of a nature inferior to that of their

Priors; and a slight tilt is enough to determine the departure from the straight course. Further, the linking of

any one being with any other amounts to a blending such as to produce a distinct entity, a compound of the

two; it is not that the greater and prior suffers any diminution of its own nature; the lesser and secondary is

such from its very beginning; it is in its own nature the lesser thing it becomes, and if it suffers the

consequences, such suffering is merited: all our reasonings on these questions must take account of previous

5. There is, then a Providence, which permeates the Kosmos from first to last, not everywhere equal, as in a

numerical distribution, but proportioned, differing, according to the grades of place just as in some one

animal, linked from first to last, each member has its own function, the nobler organ the higher activity while

others successively concern the lower degrees of the life, each part acting of itself, and experiencing what

belongs to its own nature and what comes from its relation with every other. Strike, and what is designed for

utterance gives forth the appropriate volume of sound while other parts take the blow in silence but react in

their own especial movement; the total of all the utterance and action and receptivity constitutes what we may

call the personal voice, life and history of the living form. The parts, distinct in Kind, have distinct functions:

the feet have their work and the eyes theirs; the understanding serves to one end, the Intellectual Principle to

But all sums to a unity, a comprehensive Providence. From the inferior grade downwards is Fate: the upper is

Providence alone: for in the Intellectual Kosmos all is ReasonPrinciple or its PriorsDivine Mind and

unmingled Souland immediately upon these follows Providence which rises from Divine Mind, is the

content of the Unmingled Soul, and, through this Soul, is communicated to the Sphere of living things.

This ReasonPrinciple comes as a thing of unequal parts, and therefore its creations are unequal, as, for

example, the several members of one Living Being. But after this allotment of rank and function, all act

consonant with the will of the gods keeps the sequence and is included under the providential government,

All such rightdoing, then, is linked to Providence; but it is not therefore performed by it: men or other

agents, living or lifeless, are causes of certain things happening, and any good that may result is taken up

again by Providence. In the total, then, the right rules and what has happened amiss is transformed and

corrected. Thus, to take an example from a single body, the Providence of a living organism implies its

health; let it be gashed or otherwise wounded, and that ReasonPrinciple which governs it sets to work to

In sum, evil belongs to the sequence of things, but it comes from necessity. It originates in ourselves; it has

its causes no doubt, but we are not, therefore, forced to it by Providence: some of these causes we adapt to the

operation of Providence and of its subordinates, but with others we fail to make the connection; the act

instead of being ranged under the will of Providence consults the desire of the agent alone or of some other

element in the Universe, something which is either itself at variance with Providence or has set up some such

The one circumstance does not produce the same result wherever it acts; the normal operation will be

modified from case to case: Helen's beauty told very differently on Paris and on Idomeneus; bring together

two handsome people of loose character and two living honourably and the resulting conduct is very

different; a good man meeting a libertine exhibits a distinct phase of his nature and, similarly, the dissolute

The act of the libertine is not done by Providence or in accordance with Providence; neither is the action of

the good done by Providence it is done by the man but it is done in accordance with Providence, for it is an

act consonant with the ReasonPrinciple. Thus a patient following his treatment is himself an agent and yet is

acting in accordance with the doctor's method inspired by the art concerned with the causes of health and

sickness: what one does against the laws of health is one's act, but an act conflicting with the Providence of

6. But, if all this be true, how can evil fall within the scope of seership? The predictions of the seers are based

on observation of the Universal Circuit: how can this indicate the evil with the good?

Clearly the reason is that all contraries coalesce. Take, for example, Shape and Matter: the living being [of

the lower order] is a coalescence of these two; so that to be aware of the Shape and the ReasonPrinciple is to

The livingbeing of the compound order is not present [as pure and simple Idea] like the living being of the

Intellectual order: in the compound entity, we are aware, at once, of the ReasonPrinciple and of the inferior

element brought under form. Now the Universe is such a compound living thing: to observe, therefore, its

content is to be aware not less of its lower elements than of the Providence which operates within it.

This Providence reaches to all that comes into being; its scope therefore includes living things with their

actions and states, the total of their history at once overruled by the ReasonPrinciple and yet subject in some

These, then, are presented as mingled both by their initial nature and by the continuous process of their

existence; and the Seer is not able to make a perfect discrimination setting on the one side Providence with all

that happens under Providence and on the other side what the substrate communicates to its product. Such

discrimination is not for a man, not for a wise man or a divine man: one may say it is the prerogative of a

god. Not causes but facts lie in the Seer's province; his art is the reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell

of the ordered and never condescend to the disorderly; the movement of the Universe utters its testimony to

him and, before men and things reveal themselves, brings to light what severally and collectively they are.

Here conspires with There and There with Here, elaborating together the consistency and eternity of a

Kosmos and by their correspondences revealing the sequence of things to the trained observer for every

form of divination turns upon correspondences. Universal interdependence, there could not be, but universal

resemblance there must. This probably is the meaning of the saying that Correspondences maintain the

This is a correspondence of inferior with inferior, of superior with superior, eye with eye, foot with foot,

everything with its fellow and, in another order, virtue with right action and vice with unrighteousness. Admit

such correspondence in the All and we have the possibility of prediction. If the one order acts on the other,

the relation is not that of maker to thing made the two are coeval it is the interplay of members of one

living being; each in its own place and way moves as its own nature demands; to every organ its grade and

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

could there be an inferior without a superior or a superior without an inferior? We cannot complain about the

lower in the higher; rather, we must be grateful to the higher for giving something of itself to the lower.

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

What would Providence have to provide for? Certainly not for itself or for the Good: when we speak of a

That which resumes all under a unity is a Principle in which all things exist together and the single thing is

All. From this Principle, which remains internally unmoved, particular things push forth as from a single root

which never itself emerges. They are a branching into part, into multiplicity, each single outgrowth bearing

its trace of the common source. Thus, phase by phase, there in finally the production into this world; some

things close still to the root, others widely separate in the continuous progression until we have, in our

metaphor, bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one side all is one point of unbroken rest, on the other is

the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit, all the things of process carrying ever within themselves the

ReasonPrinciples of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in their own minor order and producing,

As for the abandoned spaces in what corresponds to the branches these two draw upon the root, from which,

despite all their variance, they also derive; and the branches again operate upon their own furthest

extremities: operation is to be traced only from point to next point, but, in the fact, there has been both inflow

and outgo [of creative or modifying force] at the very root which, itself again, has its priors.

The things that act upon each other are branchings from a faroff beginning and so stand distinct; but they

derive initially from the one source: all interaction is like that of brothers, resemblant as drawing life from the

1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and IntellectualPrinciple] remain at rest while their Hypostases, or

ExpressedIdea, come into being; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to which is due the

sensitive faculty that in any of its expressionforms Nature and all forms of life down to the vegetable

order. Even as it is present in human beings the Soul carries its Expressionform [Hypostasis] with it, but is

not the dominant since it is not the whole man (humanity including the Intellectual Principal, as well): in the

vegetable order it is the highest since there is nothing to rival it; but at this phase it is no longer reproductive,

or, at least, what it produces is of quite another order; here life ceases; all later production is lifeless.

Everything the Soul engenders down to this point comes into being shapeless, and takes form by orientation

towards its author and supporter: therefore the thing engendered on the further side can be no image of the

Soul, since it is not even alive; it must be an utter Indetermination. No doubt even in things of the nearer

order there was indetermination, but within a form; they were undetermined not utterly but only in contrast

with their perfect state: at this extreme point we have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its

highest degree and it becomes body by taking such shape as serves its scope; then it becomes the recipient of

its author and sustainer: this presence in body is the only example of the boundaries of Higher Existents

2. It is of this Soul especially that we read "All Soul has care for the Soulless" though the several Souls thus

care in their own degree and way. The passage continues "Soul passes through the entire heavens in forms

varying with the variety of place" the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form and this

means that in each "place" the phase of the soul there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule

unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has

the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the body grows and

propagates: all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant,

and when the lifeprinciple leaves the body it is what it is, what it most intensely lived.

This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous

principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of

eating and procreation; our life must be pointed towards the Intellective, towards the IntellectualPrinciple,

Those that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those that have lived wholly to sense

become animals corresponding in species to the particular temper of the life ferocious animals where the

sensuality has been accompanied by a certain measure of spirit, gluttonous and lascivious animals where all

has been appetite and satiation of appetite. Those who in their pleasures have not even lived by sensation, but

have gone their way in a torpid grossness become mere growing things, for this lethargy is the entire act of

the vegetative, and such men have been busy betreeing themselves. Those, we read, that, otherwise

untainted, have loved song become vocal animals; kings ruling unreasonably but with no other vice are

eagles; futile and flighty visionaries ever soaring skyward, become highflying birds; observance of civic and

secular virtue makes man again, or where the merit is less marked, one of the animals of communal tendency,

3. What, then, is the spirit [guiding the present life and determining the future]?

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

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

No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if

the acting force is that of men of the senselife, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by

that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the

working principle. The words "You shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by our life we elect our own

It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there; it operates during the lifetime; when we cease

to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career.

That principle [of the new birth] strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn,

possesses a guiding spirit [its next higher]: if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the

character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty: the evilliver loses grade because during his life the

active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is

able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of himself to

which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until he

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life: and each of us is an

Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine

Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual

we are fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather

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

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

No: for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself; it never knew any coming, and therefore never came

down; it remains unmoved above, and the material frame of the Universe draws close to it, and, as it were,

takes light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it.

But has the Universe, then, no sensation? "It has no Sight," we read, since it has no eyes, and obviously it has

not ears, nostrils, or tongue. Then has it perhaps such a consciousness as we have of our own inner

No: where all is the working out of one nature, there is nothing but still rest; there is not even enjoyment.

Sensibility is present as the quality of growth is, unrecognized. But the Nature of the World will be found

treated elsewhere; what stands here is all that the question of the moment demands.

5. But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by the Soul in the overworld, how can

The answer is that very choice in the overworld is merely an allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency

But if the tendency of the Soul is the masterforce and, in the Soul, the dominant is that phase which has

been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it?

The Soul's quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never

changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life?

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

But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered body, or if a perfect body falls to a

The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working

the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the

entire decision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the

casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the

individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt

The Timaeus indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves: it is not entirely outside of ourselves; is

not bound up with our nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs to us as belonging to our Soul, but not

in so far as we are particular human beings living a life to which it is superior: take the passage in this sense

and it is consistent; understand this Spirit otherwise and there is contradiction. And the description of the

Spirit, moreover, as "the power which consummates the chosen life," is, also, in agreement with this

interpretation; for while its presidency saves us from falling much deeper into evil, the only direct agent

within us is some thing neither above it nor equal to it but under it: Man cannot cease to be characteristically

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit [equivalent in all men] as cooperator in the life: the

acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle [the diviner phase of the human Soul] which therefore is

itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual Principle as possessing for presiding spirit the Prior to the

Intellectual Principle: how then does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that he now

The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth though, before all reasoning, there exists the instinctive

Not in every respect: the Soul is so constituted that its lifehistory and its general tendency will answer not

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Underworld ceases to be its guardian except when

From the passage [in the Phaedo] which tells how it presents the Soul to judgement we gather that after the

death it resumes the form it had before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in

their punishment during the period of their renewed life a time not so much of living as of expiation.

But the Souls that enter into brute bodies, are they controlled by some thing less than this presiding Spirit?

Of these higher Souls some live in the world of Sense, some above it: and those in the world of Sense inhabit

the Sun or another of the planetary bodies; the others occupy the fixed Sphere [above the planetary] holding

the place they have merited through having lived here the superior life of reason.

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a

subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic Soul. The world Soul is distributed so as to produce

the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers: so with our Souls; they must

have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul: each must give

out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in

act within and constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spiritnature and

the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that

Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the

distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its

distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its

unity can always be reconstructed: when living things animal or vegetal produce their constant succession

of new forms, they do so in virtue of the selfdistribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much

distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by

permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance in other cases it withdraws after imparting its

virtue for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is

A power corresponding to this in the All must reach down and cooperate in the life of our world in fact the

If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to

live. With this Spirit it embarks in the skiff of the universe: the "spindle of Necessity" then takes control and

The Universal circuit is like a breeze, and the voyager, still or stirring, is carried forward by it. He has a

hundred varied experiences, fresh sights, changing circumstances, all sorts of events. The vessel itself

furnishes incident, tossing as it drives on. And the voyager also acts of himself in virtue of that individuality

which he retains because he is on the vessel in his own person and character. Under identical circumstances

individuals answer very differently in their movements and acts: hence it comes about that, be the

occurrences and conditions of life similar or dissimilar, the result may differ from man to man, as on the other

hand a similar result may be produced by dissimilar conditions: this (personal answer to incident) it is that

1. What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind? Or is it, perhaps, sometimes to be thought of as a

God or Spirit and sometimes merely as an experience? And what is it essentially in each of these respects?

These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing opinions on the matter, the philosophical

treatment it has received and, especially, the theories of the great Plato who has many passages dealing with

Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls; he also makes it a Spiritbeing so that we read

Now everyone recognizes that the emotional state for which we make this "Love" responsible rises in souls

aspiring to be knit in the closest union with some beautiful object, and that this aspiration takes two forms,

that of the good whose devotion is for beauty itself, and that other which seeks its consummation in some vile

act. But this generally admitted distinction opens a new question: we need a philosophical investigation into

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a

recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. The vile and ugly is in clash, at

once, with Nature and with God: Nature produces by looking to the Good, for it looks towards Order which

has its being in the consistent total of the good, while the unordered is ugly, a member of the system of evil

and besides Nature itself, clearly, springs from the divine realm, from Good and Beauty; and when anything

Reject this explanation, and no one can tell how the mental state rises and where are its causes: it is the

explanation of even copulative love which is the will to beget in beauty; Nature seeks to produce the beautiful

Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the beauty found on earth, the beauty of image and of

body; it is because they are strangers to the Archetype, the source of even the attraction they feel towards

what is lovely here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that in the higher

realm and these love the earthly as an image; those that have not attained to this memory do not understand

what is happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once there is perfect selfcontrol, it is no

fault to enjoy the beauty of earth; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is sin.

Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether there is Reminiscence or not; but there are those that feel, also, a

desire of such immortality as lies within mortal reach; and these are seeking Beauty in their demand for

perpetuity, the desire of the eternal; Nature teaches them to sow the seed and to beget in beauty, to sow

towards eternity, but in beauty through their own kinship with the beautiful. And indeed the eternal is of the

one stock with the beautiful, the EternalNature is the first shaping of beauty and makes beautiful all that

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

the engendering of beauty; it is the expression of a lack; the subject is conscious of insufficiency and, wishing

to produce beauty, feels that the way is to beget in a beautiful form. Where the procreative desire is lawless or

against the purposes of nature, the first inspiration has been natural, but they have diverged from the way,

they have slipped and fallen, and they grovel; they neither understand whither Love sought to lead them nor

have they any instinct to production; they have not mastered the right use of the images of beauty; they do not

Those that love beauty of person without carnal desire love for beauty's sake; those that have for women, of

course the copulative love, have the further purpose of selfperpetuation: as long as they are led by these

motives, both are on the right path, though the first have taken the nobler way. But, even in the right, there is

the difference that the one set, worshipping the beauty of earth, look no further, while the others, those of

recollection, venerate also the beauty of the other world while they, still, have no contempt for this in which

they recognize, as it were, a last outgrowth, an attenuation of the higher. These, in sum, are innocent

frequenters of beauty, not to be confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall into the ugly

2. The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely; it is supported by Theologians

and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter

of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an already existing impulse thither. All this

requires philosophical examination. A cardinal passage is that in the Symposium where we are told Eros was

not a child of Aphrodite but born on the day of Aphrodite's birth, Penia, Poverty, being the mother, and

The matter seems to demand some discussion of Aphrodite, since in any case Eros is described as being

either her son or in some association with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and in what sense is Love either her

To us Aphrodite is twofold; there is the heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Ouranos or Heaven: and there is the

other the daughter of Zeus and Dione, this is the Aphrodite who presides over earthly unions; the higher was

not born of a mother and has no part in marriages for in Heaven there is no marrying.

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos who is no other than the Intellectual Principle must be the

Soul at its divinest: unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever Above, as

neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a

divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter and

therefore mythically "the unmothered" justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture,

Any Nature springing directly from the Intellectual Principle must be itself also a clean thing: it will derive a

resistance of its own from its nearness to the Highest, for all its tendency, no less than its fixity, centres upon

Soul then could never fall from its sphere; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the

light it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still.

But following upon Kronos or, if you will, upon Heaven, the father of Kronos the Soul directs its Act

towards him and holds closely to him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to look

towards him. This Act of the Soul has produced an Hypostasis, a RealBeing; and the mother and this

Hypostasis her offspring, noble Love gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus, is ever intent upon that

other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the

desirer; by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first; before it becomes the vehicle

of vision, it is itself filled with the sight; it is first, therefore, and not even in the same order for desire

attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of

3. That Love is a Hypostasis [a "Person"] a RealBeing sprung from a RealBeing lower than the parent but

For the parentSoul was a RealBeing sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it

had life; it was a constituent in the RealBeing of all that authentically is in the RealBeing which looks,

rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good,

and it rejoiced in the looking; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be

void of effect; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the

Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a strenuous

activity of contemplation in the Soul; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros

is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its

name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an

emotion, will take its name from Love, the Person, since a RealBeing cannot but be prior to what lacks this

reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular

act directed towards a particular object; but it must not be confused with the Absolute Love, the Divine

Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal Soul must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as

being of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very offspring; and therefore caring for

Once that Soul which is the primal source of light to the heavens is recognized as an Hypostasis standing

distinct and aloof it must be admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so loftily

celestial a being as the Soul. Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart; so, we

must think of this Love as essentially resident where the unmingling Soul inhabits.

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love the eye with

which this second Soul looks upwards like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite,

the secondary Soul, is of this Universe not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth,

therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it,

also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls

of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to

remembrance of the divine. For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of

particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring.

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

Since not only the pure AllSoul but also that of the Universe contain such a Love, it would be difficult to

explain why our personal Soul should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life.

This indwelling love is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection

dominant in each several nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular Soul, strained towards its

own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its

As the AllSoul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love: and as

closely as the single Soul holds to the AllSoul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together

constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the AllLove. Similarly, the individual

love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the AllSoul; and the Love within

the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any

moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will.

In the same way we must conceive many Aphrodites in the All, Spirits entering it together with Love, all

emanating from an Aphrodite of the All, a train of particular Aphrodites dependent upon the first, and each

with the particular Love in attendance: this multiplicity cannot be denied, if Soul be the mother of Love, and

This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to The Good, is twofold: the Love in the loftier Soul would be a

god ever linking the Soul to the divine; the Love in the mingling Soul will be a celestial spirit.

The SpiritKind is treated in the Symposium where, with much about the others, we learn of Eros Love

born to Penia Poverty and Poros Possession who is son of Metis Resource at Aphrodite's birth feast.

But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this Universe and not simply the Love native within it involves

For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as selfsufficing, while this "Love" is

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore

Aphrodite would necessarily he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man's Soul, if

the world is, similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And

why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung

from the same EssentialBeing? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.

Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children: does this apply to the Universe? Love is

represented as homeless, bedless and barefooted: would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and

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

Clearly we have to establish the significance, here, of Poverty and Possession, and show in what way the

parentage is appropriate: we have also to bring these two into line with the other Supernals since one spirit

nature, one spirit essence, must characterize all unless they are to have merely a name in common.

We must, therefore, lay down the grounds on which we distinguish the Gods from the Celestials that is,

when we emphasize the separate nature of the two orders and are not, as often in practice, including these

It is our teaching and conviction that the Gods are immune to all passion while we attribute experience and

emotion to the Celestials which, though eternal Beings and directly next to the Gods, are already a step

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

Does the Intellectual Realm include no member of this spirit order, not even one? And does the Kosmos

contain only these spirits, God being confined to the Intellectual? Or are there Gods in the subcelestial too,

the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and the Powers down to the Moon being all

It is best not to use the word "Celestial" of any Being of that Realm; the word "God" may be applied to the

EssentialCelestial the autodaimon and even to the Visible Powers of the Universe of Sense down to the

Moon; Gods, these too, visible, secondary, sequent upon the Gods of the Intellectual Realm, consonant with

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

Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a God; hence it is that we have spoken

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

On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul towards the good and beautiful is an

Eros; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other SpiritBeings, equally born

from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul, have other functions: they are for the direct

service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire. The Soul of the All

must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one

Certainly none in bodily Matter; that would make them simply living things of the order of sense. And if,

even, they are to invest themselves in bodies of air or of fire, the nature must have already been altered before

they could have any contact with the corporeal. The Pure does not mix, unmediated, with body though many

think that the CelestialKind, of its very essence, comports a body aerial or of fire.

But why should one order of Celestial descend to body and another not? The difference implies the existence

of some cause or medium working upon such as thus descend. What would constitute such a medium?

We are forced to assume that there is a Matter of the Intellectual Order, and that Beings partaking of it are

The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, "wine yet not existing"; Love is born

before the realm of sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the lower

image of that divine Realm had appeared; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly

of Form but partly also of that indetermination which belongs to the Soul before she attains the Good and

when all her knowledge of Reality is a foreintimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this

This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a

being not yet illuminated: the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not selfsufficient, but unfinished,

bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving and the selfsufficient Reason. This offspring is a

ReasonPrinciple but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration illdefined, unreasoned,

unlimited it can never be sated as long as it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love,

then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including

an element of the ReasonPrinciple which did not remain selfconcentrated but blended with the

indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad;

It cannot be satisfied because a thing of mixture never can be so: true satisfaction is only for what has its

plenitude in its own being; where craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at some

given moment but it does not last. Love, then, has on the one side the powerlessness of its native inadequacy,

Such must be the nature and such the origin of the entire Spirit Order, each like its fellow, Love has its

appointed sphere, is powerful there, and wholly devoted to it, and, like Love, none is ever complete of itself

but always straining towards some good which it sees in things of the partial sphere.

We understand, now, why good men have no other Love other Eros of life than that for the Absolute and

Authentic Good, and never follow the random attractions known to those ranged under the lower Spirit Kind.

Each human being is set under his own SpiritGuides, but this is mere blank possession when they ignore

their own and live by some other spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the operative part of the

Soul in them. Those that go after evil are natures that have merged all the LovePrinciples within them in the

evil desires springing in their hearts and allowed the right reason, which belongs to our kind, to fall under the

All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good; in a lesser Soul, inferior in rank and in

scope; in the greater Soul, superior; but all belong to the order of Being. Those forms of Love that do not

serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they RealBeings

or even manifestations of any Reality; for they are no true issue of Soul; they are merely accompaniments of

a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct.

In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all

this is RealBeing: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it: a

parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of

authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly

knowable object and authentic existence and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being

that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the IntellectualPrinciple manifest in every several

In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the authentic Intellective Act and of the

authentically knowable object though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are not these in the

absolute and not exclusively these and hence our longing for absolute things: it is the expression of our

intellective activities: if we sometimes care for the partial, that affection is not direct but accidental, like our

knowledge that a given triangular figure is made up of two right angles because the absolute triangle is so.

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

We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the ReasonPrinciple of

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

Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader

though elsewhere he seems to rank him as one of three but in the Philebus he speaks more plainly when he

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons

but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle.

Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite [= the habra,

delicate] indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul.

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls to

every Intellectual Principle its companion Soul we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the Soul of

Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one

9. This Poros, Possession, then, is the ReasonPrinciple of all that exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the

supreme Intellect; but being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch Soul, be in Soul, [as the next

For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect is native to it: nothing enters from without; but "Poros intoxicated" is

some Power deriving satisfaction outside itself: what, then, can we understand by this member of the

Supreme filled with Nectar but a ReasonPrinciple falling from a loftier essence to a lower? This means that

the ReasonPrinciple upon "the birth of Aphrodite" left the Intellectual for the Soul, breaking into the garden

A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness that Zeus maintains takes its splendour

from the ReasonPrinciple within him; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine Intellect upon the

Divine Soul, which it has penetrated. What could the Garden of Zeus indicate but the images of his Being and

the splendours of his glory? And what could these divine splendours and beauties be but the Ideas streaming

These ReasonPrinciples this Poros who is the lavishness, the abundance of Beauty are at one and are

made manifest; this is the Nectardrunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than what the

godnature essentially demands; and this is the Reason pouring down from the divine Mind.

The Intellectual Principle possesses Itself to satiety, but there is no "drunken" abandonment in this possession

which brings nothing alien to it. But the ReasonPrinciple as its offspring, a later hypostasis is already a

separate Being and established in another Realm, and so is said to lie in the garden of this Zeus who is divine

Mind; and this lying in the garden takes place at the moment when, in our way of speaking, Aphrodite enters

10. "Our way of speaking" for myths, if they are to serve their purpose, must necessarily import

timedistinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ

in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the unbegotten and discriminate where all is one substance;

the truth is conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to bring all together again.

On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet

again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every

splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely Soul which, taken as one all, is

Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the ReasonPrinciples summed under the names of Plenty and

Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are

thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden

in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among

the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital

blessedness. And Love "born at the banquet of the gods" has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it

springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has

Still this Love is of mixed quality. On the one hand there is in it the lack which keeps it craving: on the other,

it is not entirely destitute; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly nothing absolutely void of

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of

the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its

Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor:

the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack of shape and of

Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good, and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth

of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Idealprinciple only when the striving [with

attainment] will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when it must take in something other than itself, its

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul;

1. In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement:

the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the judgement resides in

the Soul, and is distinct from the state for, if it is not distinct, another judgement is demanded, one that is

Still, this leaves it undecided whether in the act of judgement the judging faculty does or does not take to

If the judging faculty does actually receive an imprint, then it partakes of the state though what are called

the Impressions may be of quite another nature than is supposed; they may be like Thought, that is to say they

may be acts rather than states; there may be, here too, awareness without participation.

For ourselves, it could never be in our system or in our liking to bring the Soul down to participation in

What is known as the Impressionable faculty of the soul to pathetikon would need to be identified: we

must satisfy ourselves as to whether this too, like the Soul as a unity, is to be classed as immune or, on the

contrary, as precisely the only part susceptible of being affected; this question, however, may be held over;

Even in the superior phase of the Soul that which precedes the impressionable faculty and any sensation

how can we reconcile immunity with the indwelling of vice, false notions, ignorance? Inviolability; and yet

likings and dislikings, the Soul enjoying, grieving, angry, grudging, envying, desiring, never at peace but

If the Soul were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult, indeed quite impossible, to make it appear

to be immune, unchangeable, when any of such emotions lodge in it. And even considering it as an Authentic

Being, devoid of magnitude and necessarily indestructible, we must be very careful how we attribute any

such experiences to it or we will find ourselves unconsciously making it subject to dissolution. If its essence

is a Number or as we hold a ReasonPrinciple, under neither head could it be susceptible of feeling. We can

think, only, that it entertains unreasoned reasons and experiences unexperienced, all transmuted from the

material frames, foreign and recognized only by parallel, so that it possesses in a kind of nonpossession and

2. Let us begin with virtue and vice in the Soul. What has really occurred when, as we say, vice is present? In

speaking of extirpating evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to replace a former

Now when we make virtue a harmony, and vice a breach of harmony, we accept an opinion approved by the

ancients; and the theory helps us decidedly to our solution. For if virtue is simply a natural concordance

among the phases of the Soul, and vice simply a discord, then there is no further question of any foreign

presence; harmony would be the result of every distinct phase or faculty joining in, true to itself; discord

would mean that not all chimed in at their best and truest. Consider, for example, the performers in a choral

dance; they sing together though each one has his particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the

others are silent; and each brings to the chorus something of his own; it is not enough that all lift their voices

together; each must sing, choicely, his own part to the music set for him. Exactly so in the case of the Soul;

Yes: but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the Soul must depend upon a previous virtue, that of

each several faculty within itself; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the vice of the

single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual presence of vice as they can be good only by the

presence of virtue. It is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with ignorance in the

reasoning faculty of the Soul; ignorance is not a positive thing; but in the presence of false judgements the

main cause of vice must it not be admitted that something positive has entered into the Soul, something

perverting the reasoning faculty? So, the initiative faculty; is it not, itself, altered as one varies between

timidity and boldness? And the desiring faculty, similarly, as it runs wild or accepts control?

Our teaching is that when the particular faculty is sound it performs the reasonable act of its essential nature,

obeying the reasoning faculty in it which derives from the Intellectual Principle and communicates to the rest.

And this following of reason is not the acceptance of an imposed shape; it is like using the eyes; the Soul sees

by its act, that of looking towards reason. The faculty of sight in the performance of its act is essentially what

it was when it lay latent; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the relation that belongs to its

essential character; it knows that is, sees without suffering any change: so, precisely, the reasoning phase

of the Soul stands towards the Intellectual Principle; this it sees by its very essence; this vision is its knowing

faculty; it takes in no stamp, no impression; all that enters it is the object of vision possessed, once more,

without possession; it possesses by the fact of knowing but "without possession" in the sense that there is no

incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the impression of the seal on sealingwax.

And note that we do not appeal to storedup impressions to account for memory: we think of the mind

Be it so; but it has suffered no change unless we are to think of the mere progress from latency to actuality

as change nothing has been introduced into the mind; it has simply achieved the Act dictated by its nature.

It is universally true that the characteristic Act of immaterial entities is performed without any change in

them otherwise they would at last be worn away theirs is the Act of the unmoving; where act means

suffering change, there is Matter: an immaterial Being would have no ground of permanence if its very Act

Thus in the case of Sight, the seeing faculty is in act but the material organ alone suffers change: judgements

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

Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the ReasonPrinciple or by looking towards some

inferior phase of it or by some defect in the organs of action some lack or flaw in the bodily equipment or

by outside prevention of the natural act or by the mere absence of adequate stimulus: boldness would arise

from the reverse conditions: neither implies any change, or even any experience, in the Soul.

So with the faculty of desire: what we call loose living is caused by its acting unaccompanied; it has done all

of itself; the other faculties, whose business it is to make their presence felt in control and to point the right

way, have lain in abeyance; the Seer in the Soul was occupied elsewhere, for, though not always at least

sometimes, it has leisure for a certain degree of contemplation of other concerns.

Often, moreover, the vice of the desiring faculty will be merely some ill condition of the body, and its virtue,

bodily soundness; thus there would again be no question of anything imported into the Soul.

3. But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear are

This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp

contradiction to obvious facts. But, while we recognize this, we must make very sure what it is that changes.

To represent the Soul or Mind as being the seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or

turn pale; it is to forget that while the Soul or Mind is the means, the effect takes place in the distinct

At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul; but the body is occupied by the Soul not to trouble about

words is, at any rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter; and so, is affected in the blood,

mobile in its nature. Fear begins in the mind; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in

pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the body; the purely mental phase has not reached the

point of sensation: the same is true of pain. So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise;

When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved as in desire, reasoning, judging we do not mean that it is

In the same way when we call Life a movement we have no idea of a changing substance; the naturally

appropriate act of each member of the living thing makes up the Life, which is, therefore, not a shifting thing.

To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no changements; that memories are not forms

stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealingwax; we thence draw the

general conclusion that in all such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in

essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the Soul as heat and cold, blackness or

whiteness are importations into body but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and

4. We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase of the Soul. This has, no doubt, been

touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the

Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its choice: but more is required; we must begin by

In general terms it means the centre about which we recognize the affections to be grouped; and by affections

Now among these affections we must distinguish. Some are pivoted upon judgements; thus, a Man judging

his death to be at hand may feel fear; foreseeing some fortunate turn of events, he is happy: the opinion lies in

one sphere; the affection is stirred in another. Sometimes the affections take the lead and automatically bring

in the notion which thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty: but as we have explained, an act of

opinion does not introduce any change into the Soul or Mind: what happens is that from the notion of some

impending evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in turn, becomes known in that part of

The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. It should, however, be

quite clear that the Soul or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation both the higher representation

known as opinion or judgement and the lower representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague

notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the "Nature"

of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all

that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the body, belongs to the senseorder;

trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. The

Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that

case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation,

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

Now Matter is the one field of the desiring faculty, as of the principles of nutrition growth and engendering,

which are root and spring to desire and to every other affection known to this Idealform. No Idealform can

be the victim of disturbance or be in any way affected: it remains in tranquillity; only the Matter associated

with it can be affected by any state or experience induced by the movement which its mere presence suffices

to set up. Thus the vegetal Principle induces vegetal life but it does not, itself, pass through the processes of

vegetation; it gives growth but it does not grow; in no movement which it originates is it moved with the

motion it induces; it is in perfect repose, or, at least, its movement, really its act, is utterly different from what

The nature of an Idealform is to be, of itself, an activity; it operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody

itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection;

it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sensepresentment or independently and it is a

question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not but the

affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement

may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the strings of his instrument, and once more, the

Melodic Principle itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he

could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody.

5. But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it is thus immune from the beginning?

Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a

disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts to an affection and

Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the wellbeing of the Soul which by the mere

absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present.

Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances presented before the Soul or Mind from

without but taken [for practical purposes] to be actual experiences within it then Philosophy's task is like

that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking

But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been stained and by the separation of the

The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company; when it

looks to nothing without itself; when it entertains no alien thoughts be the mode or origin of such notions or

affections what they may, a subject on which we have already touched when it no longer sees in the world

of image, much less elaborates images into veritable affections. Is it not a true purification to turn away

Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is

In the particular case of the affective phase of the Soul, purification is its awakening from the baseless visions

which beset it, the refusal to see them; its separation consists in limiting its descent towards the lower and

accepting no picture thence, and of course in the banning for its part too of all which the higher Soul ignores

when it has arisen from the trouble storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by the chains of sensuality and

of multiplicity but has subdued to itself the body and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignty,

6. the Intellectual Essence, wholly of the order of Idealform, must be taken as impassive has been already

But Matter also is an incorporeal, though after a mode of its own; we must examine, therefore, how this

stands, whether it is passive, as is commonly held, a thing that can be twisted to every shape and Kind, or

whether it too must be considered impassive and in what sense and fashion so. But in engaging this question

and defining the nature of matter we must correct certain prevailing errors about the nature of the Authentic

The Existent rightly so called is that which has authentic existence, that, therefore, which is existent

completely, and therefore, again, that which at no point fails in existence. Having existence perfectly, it needs

nothing to preserve it in being; it is, on the contrary, the source and cause from which all that appears to exist

derives that appearance. This admitted, it must of necessity be in life, in a perfect life: if it failed it would be

more nearly the nonexistent than the existent. But: The Being thus indicated is Intellect, is wisdom unalloyed.

It is, therefore, determined and rounded off; it is nothing potentially that is not of the same determined order,

Hence its eternity, its identity, its utter irreceptivity and impermeability. If it took in anything, it must be

taking in something outside itself, that is to say, Existence would at last include nonexistence. But it must be

Authentic Existence all through; it must, therefore, present itself equipped from its own stores with all that

makes up Existence so that all stands together and all is one thing. The Existent [Real Being] must have thus

much of determination: if it had not, then it could not be the source of the Intellectual Principle and of Life

which would be importations into it originating in the sphere of nonBeing; and Real Being would be lifeless

and mindless; but mindlessness and lifelessness are the characteristics of nonbeing and must belong to the

lower order, to the outer borders of the existent; for Intellect and Life rise from the BeyondExistence [the

Indefinable Supreme] though Itself has no need of them and are conveyed from It into the Authentic

If we have thus rightly described the Authentic Existent, we see that it cannot be any kind of body nor the

understuff of body; in such entities the Being is simply the existing of things outside of Being.

But body, a nonexistence? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a nonexistence? Mountain and rock, the

wide solid earth, all that resists, all that can be struck and driven, surely all proclaims the real existence of the

corporeal? And how, it will be asked, can we, on the contrary, attribute Being, and the only Authentic Being,

to entities like Soul and Intellect, things having no weight or pressure, yielding to no force, offering no

Yet even the corporeal realm witnesses for us; the resting earth has certainly a scantier share in Being than

belongs to what has more motion and less solidity and less than belongs to its own most upward element,

In fact, it appears to be precisely the most selfsufficing that bear least hardly, least painfully, on other

things, while the heaviest and earthiest bodies deficient, falling, unable to bear themselves upward these,

by the very downthrust due to their feebleness, offer the resistance which belongs to the falling habit and to

the lack of buoyancy. It is lifeless objects that deal the severest blows; they hit hardest and hurt most; where

there is life that is to say participation in Being there is beneficence towards the environment, all the

Again, Movement, which is a sort of life within bodies, an imitation of true Life, is the more decided where

there is the least of body a sign that the waning of Being makes the object affected more distinctly corporeal.

The changes known as affections show even more clearly that where the bodily quality is most pronounced

susceptibility is at its intensest earth more susceptible than other elements, and these others again more or

less so in the degree of their corporeality: sever the other elements and, failing some preventive force, they

join again; but earthy matter divided remains apart indefinitely. Things whose nature represents a

diminishment have no power of recuperation after even a slight disturbance and they perish; thus what has

most definitely become body, having most closely approximated to nonbeing lacks the strength to reknit its

unity: the heavy and violent crash of body against body works destruction, and weak is powerful against

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real

being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who,

like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision. The sphere of sense, the Soul in its

slumber; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true gettingup is not bodily but from the body: in

any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to

bed; the veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things; for these, belonging to the Kind directly opposed

to Soul, present to it what is directly opposed to its essential existence: their origin, their flux, and their

perishing are the warning of their exclusion from the Kind whose Being is Authentic.

7. We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter and the things believed to be based upon

it; investigation will show us that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected.

Matter must be bodiless for body is a later production, a compound made by Matter in conjunction with

some other entity. Thus it is included among incorporeal things in the sense that body is something that is

Matter is no Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no IdealPrinciple, no ReasonPrinciple; it is no limit or

bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce?

It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no tide to the name of Being. It will be more

plausibly called a nonbeing, and this in the sense not of movement [away from Being] or station (in

NotBeing) but of veritable NotBeing, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare

aspiration towards substantial existence; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is in itself

invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly

presenting contraries in the things based upon it; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive;

a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw not even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it

failed to accept strength from the Intellectual Principle, so absolute its lack of all Being.

Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie; it pretends to be great and it is little, to be more and it is less; and the

Existence with which it masks itself is no Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of all that seems to

be present in it, phantasms within a phantasm; it is like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are

really elsewhere, filled in appearance but actually empty, containing nothing, pretending everything. Into it

and out of it move mimicries of the Authentic Existents, images playing upon an image devoid of Form,

visible against it by its very formlessness; they seem to modify it but in reality effect nothing, for they are

ghostly and feeble, have no thrust and meet none in Matter either; they pass through it leaving no cleavage, as

through water; or they might be compared to shapes projected so as to make some appearance upon what we

Further: if visible objects were of the rank of the originals from which they have entered into Matter we

might believe Matter to be really affected by them, for we might credit them with some share of the power

inherent in their Senders: but the objects of our experiences are of very different virtue than the realities they

represent, and we deduce that the seeming modification of matter by visible things is unreal since the visible

thing itself is unreal, having at no point any similarity with its source and cause. Feeble, in itself, a false thing

and projected upon a falsity, like an image in dream or against water or on a mirror, it can but leave Matter

unaffected; and even this is saying too little, for water and mirror do give back a faithful image of what

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

Thus where heat is present, the change comes by something that chills, where damp by some drying agency:

A further evidence is in our speaking of a fire being burned out, when it has passed over into another element;

we do not say that the Matter has been burned out: in other words, modification affects what is subject to

dissolution; the acceptance of modification is the path towards dissolution; susceptibility to modification and

susceptibility to dissolution go necessarily together. But Matter can never be dissolved. What into? By what

Still: Matter harbours heat, cold, qualities beyond all count; by these it is differentiated; it holds them as if

they were of its very substance and they blend within it since no quality is found isolated to itself Matter

lies there as the meeting ground of all these qualities with their changes as they act and react in the blend:

how, then, can it fail to be modified in keeping? The only escape would be to declare Matter utterly and for

ever apart from the qualities it exhibits; but the very notion of Substance implies that any and every thing

9. In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be

present to another or to exist in another. There is a "presence" which acts by changing the object for good or

for ill as we see in the case of bodies, especially where there is life. But there is also a "presence" which

acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the Soul.

Then there is the case represented by the stamping of a design upon wax, where the "presence" of the added

pattern causes no modification in the substance nor does its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example

of Light whose presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object illuminated. A stone becoming

cold does not change its nature in the process; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a

The intermediary mass on which these surface changes appear is certainly not transmuted by them; but might

No: it is impossible to think of Matter being modified by, for instance, colour for, of course we must not

talk of modification when there is no more than a presence, or at most a presenting of shape.

Mirrors and transparent objects, even more, offer a close parallel; they are quite unaffected by what is seen in

or through them: material things are reflections, and the Matter on which they appear is further from being

affected than is a mirror. Heat and cold are present in Matter, but the Matter itself suffers no change of

temperature: growing hot and growing cold have to do only with quality; a quality enters and brings the

impassible Substance under a new state though, by the way, research into nature may show that cold is

nothing positive but an absence, a mere negation. The qualities come together into Matter, but in most cases

they can have no action upon each other; certainly there can be none between those of unlike scope: what

effect, for example, could fragrance have on sweetness or the colourquality on the quality of form, any

quality on another of some unrelated order? The illustration of the mirror may well indicate to us that a given

substratum may contain something quite distinct from itself even something standing to it as a direct

contrary and yet remain entirely unaffected by what is thus present to it or merged into it.

A thing can be hurt only by something related to it, and similarly things are not changed or modified by any

chance presence: modification comes by contrary acting upon contrary; things merely different leave each

other as they were. Such modification by a direct contrary can obviously not occur in an order of things to

which there is no contrary: Matter, therefore [the mere absence of Reality] cannot be modified: any

modification that takes place can occur only in some compound of Matter and reality, or, speaking generally,

in some agglomeration of actual things. The Matter itself isolated, quite apart from all else, utterly simplex

must remain immune, untouched in the midst of all the interacting agencies; just as when people fight within

their four walls, the house and the air in it remain without part in the turmoil.

We may take it, then, that while all the qualities and entities that appear upon Matter group to produce each

the effect belonging to its nature, yet Matter itself remains immune, even more definitely immune than any of

those qualities entering into it which, not being contraries, are not affected by each other.

10. Further: If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must acquire something by the incoming of the new

state; it will either adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way different from what it was. Now upon

this first incoming quality suppose a second to supervene; the recipient is no longer Matter but a modification

of Matter: this second quality, perhaps, departs, but it has acted and therefore leaves something of itself after

it; the substratum is still further altered. This process proceeding, the substratum ends by becoming

something quite different from Matter; it becomes a thing settled in many modes and many shapes; at once it

is debarred from being the allrecipient; it will have closed the entry against many incomers. In other words,

No: if there is to be a Matter at all, it must be always identically as it has been from the beginning: to speak of

Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing changing must remain within its constitutive Idea

so that the alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential thing; the changing object must retain

this fundamental permanence, and the permanent substance cannot be the member of it which accepts

Therefore there are only two possibilities: the first, that Matter itself changes and so ceases to be itself, the

We may be answered that it does not change in its character as Matter: but no one could tell us in what other

character it changes; and we have the admission that the Matter in itself is not subject to change.

Just as the Ideal Principles stand immutably in their essence which consists precisely in their permanence

so, since the essence of Matter consists in its being Matter [the substratum to all material things] it must be

permanent in this character; because it is Matter, it is immutable. In the Intellectual realm we have the

11. I think, in fact, that Plato had this in mind where he justly speaks of the Images of Real Existents

"entering and passing out": these particular words are not used idly: he wishes us to grasp the precise nature

The difficulty on this point is not really that which presented itself to most of our predecessors how the

It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact, unaffected by Idealforms present within

it, especially seeing that these are affected by each other. It is surprising, too, that the entrant Forms should

regularly expel preceding shapes and qualities, and that the modification [which cannot touch Matter] should

affect what is a compound [of Idea with Matter] and this, again, not a haphazard but precisely where there is

need of the incoming or outgoing of some certain Idealform, the compound being deficient through the

But the reason is that the fundamental nature of Matter can take no increase by anything entering it, and no

decrease by any withdrawal: what from the beginning it was, it remains. It is not like those things whose lack

is merely that of arrangement and order which can be supplied without change of substance as when we dress

But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature, the base original must be transmuted: it

can leave ugliness for beauty only by a change of substance. Matter, then, thus brought to order must lose its

own nature in the supreme degree unless its baseness is an accidental: if it is base in the sense of being

Baseness the Absolute, it could never participate in order, and, if evil in the sense of being Evil the Absolute,

We conclude that Matter's participation in Idea is not by way of modification within itself: the process is very

different; it is a bare seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the difficulty as to how Matter,

essentially evil, can be reaching towards The Good: there would be no such participation as would destroy its

essential nature. Given this mode of pseudoparticipation in which Matter would, as we say, retain its

nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been there is no longer any reason to wonder as to

how while essentially evil, it yet participates in Idea: for, by this mode, it does not abandon its own character:

participation is the law, but it participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under a mode of participation

which allows it to remain on its own footing, its essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever the Idea,

within that limit, may communicate to it: it is by no means the less evil for remaining immutably in its own

order. If it had authentic participation in The Good and were veritably changed, it would not be essentially

In a word, when we call Matter evil we are right only if we mean that it is not amenable to modification by

12. This is Plato's conception: to him participation does not, in the case of Matter, comport any such presence

of an Idealform in a Substance to be shaped by it as would produce one compound thing made up of the two

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

In his haste to his purpose he raises many difficult questions, but he is determined to disown that view; he

labours to indicate in what mode Matter can receive the Idealforms without being, itself, modified. The

direct way is debarred since it is not easy to point to things actually present in a base and yet leaving that base

unaffected: he therefore devises a metaphor for participation without modification, one which supports, also,

his thesis that all appearing to the senses is void of substantial existence and that the region of mere seeming

Holding, as he does, that it is the patterns displayed upon Matter that cause all experience in living bodies

while the Matter itself remains unaffected, he chooses this way of stating its immutability, leaving us to make

out for ourselves that those very patterns impressed upon it do not comport any experience, any modification,

In the case, no doubt, of the living bodies that take one pattern or shape after having borne another, it might

be said that there was a change, the variation of shape being made verbally equivalent to a real change: but

since Matter is essentially without shape or magnitude, the appearing of shape upon it can by no freedom of

phrase be described as a change within it. On this point one must have "a rule for thick and thin" one may

safely say that the underlying Kind contains nothing whatever in the mode commonly supposed.

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

The answer is that in the metaphor cited we have some reasonably adequate indication of the impassibility of

Matter coupled with the presence upon it of what may be described as images of things not present.

But we cannot leave the point of its impassibility without a warning against allowing ourselves to be deluded

Plato speaks of Matter as becoming dry, wet, inflamed, but we must remember the words that follow: "and

taking the shape of air and of water": this blunts the expressions "becoming wet, becoming inflamed"; once

we have Matter thus admitting these shapes, we learn that it has not itself become a shaped thing but that the

shapes remain distinct as they entered. We see, further, that the expression "becoming inflamed" is not to be

taken strictly: it is rather a case of becoming fire. Becoming fire is very different from becoming inflamed,

which implies an outside agency and, therefore, susceptibility to modification. Matter, being itself a portion

of fire, cannot be said to catch fire. To suggest that the fire not merely permeates the matter, but actually sets

Further, if what enters must be an IdealPrinciple how could it set Matter aflame? But what if it is a pattern

or condition? No: the object set aflame is so in virtue of the combination of Matter and condition.

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

Even if such a unity had been produced, it would be a unity of things not mutually sharing experiences but

acting upon each other. And the question would then arise whether each was effective upon the other or

whether the sole action was not that of one (the form) preventing the other [the Matter] from slipping away?

But when any material thing is severed, must not the Matter be divided with it? Surely the bodily

modification and other experience that have accompanied the sundering, must have occurred, identically,

This reasoning would force the destructibility of Matter upon us: "the body is dissolved; then the Matter is

dissolved." We would have to allow Matter to be a thing of quantity, a magnitude. But since it is not a

magnitude it could not have the experiences that belong to magnitude and, on the larger scale, since it is not

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

13. Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that Matter tends to slip away from its form [the Idea].

Can we conceive it stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else envelops it?

And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases rebels and sometimes not. For if once it makes

away of its own will, why should it not always escape? If it is fixed despite itself, it must be enveloped by

some IdealForm for good and all. This, however, leaves still the question why a given portion of Matter

does not remain constant to any one given form: the reason lies mainly in the fact that the Ideas are constantly

But does not this precisely mean that it never ceases to be itself, in other words that its one form is an

invincible formlessness? In no other sense has Plato's dictum any value to those that invoke it.

Now if Matter is such a receptacle and nurse, all generation is distinct from it; and since all the changeable

lies in the realm of generation, Matter, existing before all generation, must exist before all change.

"Receptacle" and "nurse"; then it "retains its identity; it is not subject to modification. Similarly if it is" [as

again we read] "the ground on which individual things appear and disappear," and so, too, if it is a "place, a

base." Where Plato describes and identifies it as "a ground to the ideas" he is not attributing any state to it; he

This which we think of as a NatureKind cannot be included among Existents but must utterly rebel from the

Essence of Real Beings and be therefore wholly something other than they for they are ReasonPrinciples

and possess Authentic Existence it must inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to the

point of being permanently closed against them and, more, of rejecting close participation in any image of

Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took any Idea to hearth and home, it would

become a new thing, for it would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of

absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be

unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant Idea will enter as an image, the untrue entering the

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

Is this then a pseudoentry into a pseudoentity something merely brought near, as faces enter the mirror,

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

Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an IdealForm of a Kind [has some degree of Real Being]; but

bare Matter, which is no Idea, is not a visible thing; if it were, it would have been visible in its own character

before anything else appeared upon it. The condition of Matter may be illustrated by that of air penetrated by

The reflections in the mirror are not taken to be real, all the less since the appliance on which they appear is

seen and remains while the images disappear, but Matter is not seen either with the images or without them.

But suppose the reflections on the mirror remaining and the mirror itself not seen, we would never doubt the

If, then, there is, really, something in a mirror, we may suppose objects of sense to be in Matter in precisely

that way: if in the mirror there is nothing, if there is only a seeming of something, then we may judge that in

Matter there is the same delusion and that the seeming is to be traced to the SubstantialExistence of the

RealBeings, that SubstantialExistence in which the Authentic has the real participation while only an

unreal participation can belong to the unauthentic since their condition must differ from that which they

would know if the parts were reversed, if the Authentic Existents were not and they were.

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

A thing whose very nature is to be lodged in something else cannot exist where the base is lacking and it is

Of course supposing anything to desert from the Authentic Beings, this would not need an alien base: but

these Beings are not subject to flux, and therefore any outside manifestation of them implies something other

than themselves, something offering a base to what never enters, something which by its presence, in its

insistence, by its cry for help, in its beggardom, strives as it were by violence to acquire and is always

This alien base exists and the myth represents it as a pauper to exhibit its nature, to show that Matter is

destitute of The Good. The claimant does not ask for all the Giver's store, but it welcomes whatever it can

The name, too [Poverty], conveys that Matter's need is never met. The union with Poros, Possession, is

designed to show that Matter does not attain to Reality, to Plenitude, but to some bare sufficiency in point of

It is, of course, impossible that an outside thing belonging in any degree to RealBeing whose Nature is to

engender RealBeings should utterly fail of participation in Reality: but here we have something

perplexing; we are dealing with utter NonBeing, absolutely without part in Reality; what is this participation

by the nonparticipant, and how does mere neighbouring confer anything on that which by its own nature is

The answer is that all that impinges upon this NonBeing is flung back as from a repelling substance; we

may think of an Echo returned from a repercussive plane surface; it is precisely because of the lack of

retention that the phenomenon is supposed to belong to that particular place and even to arise there.

If Matter were participant and received Reality to the extent which we are apt to imagine, it would be

penetrated by a Reality thus sucked into its constitution. But we know that the Entrant is not thus absorbed:

Matter remains as it was, taking nothing to itself: it is the check to the forthwelling of Authentic Existence; it

is a ground that repels; it is a mere receptacle to the Realities as they take their common path and here meet

and mingle. It resembles those reflecting vessels, filled with water, which are often set against the sun to

produce fire: the heat rays prevented, by their contrary within, from being absorbed are flung out as one

It is in this sense and way that Matter becomes the cause of the generated realm; the combinations within it

15. Now the objects attracting the sunrays to themselves illuminated by a fire of the senseorder are

necessarily of the senseorder; there is perceptibility because there has been a union of things at once

external to each other and continuous, contiguous, in direct contact, two extremes in one line. But the

ReasonPrinciple operating upon Matter is external to it only in a very different mode and sense: exteriority

in this case is amply supplied by contrariety of essence and can dispense with any opposite ends [any

question of lineal position]; or, rather, the difference is one that actually debars any local extremity; sheer

incongruity of essence, the utter failure in relationship, inhibits admixture [between Matter and any form of

The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant principle neither possesses it nor is

possessed by it. Consider, as an example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in the

mind; there is no admixture; the notion that came goes in its time, still integrally itself alone, taking nothing

with it, leaving nothing after it, because it has not been blended with the mind; there is no "outside" in the

sense of contact broken, and the distinction between base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the

In that example, no doubt, the mental representation though it seems to have a wide and unchecked control

is an image, while the Soul [Mind] is in its nature not an image [but a Reality]: none the less the Soul or Mind

certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some analogous relation. The representation, however, does

not cover the Mind over; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there; however urgently it

presses in, it never effects such an obliteration as to be taken for the Soul; it is confronted there by indwelling

Matter feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of the Authentic

Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it

is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating

thought may arrive at it, discriminating it from Authentic Existence; then, it is discerned as something

abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every

16. An IdealPrinciple approaches and leads Matter towards some desired dimension, investing this

nonexistent underlie with a magnitude from itself which never becomes incorporate for Matter, if it really

Eliminate this IdealForm and the substratum ceases to be a thing of magnitude, or to appear so: the mass

produced by the Idea was, let us suppose, a man or a horse; the horsemagnitude came upon the Matter when

a horse was produced upon it; when the horse ceases to exist upon the Matter, the magnitude of the horse

departs also. If we are told that the horse implies a certain determined bulk and that this bulk is a permanent

thing, we answer that what is permanent in this case is not the magnitude of the horse but the magnitude of

mass in general. That same Magnitude might be fire or earth; on their disappearance their particular

magnitudes would disappear with them. Matter, then, can never take to itself either pattern or magnitude; if it

did, it would no longer be able to turn from being fire, let us say, into being something else; it would become

In a word, though Matter is far extended so vastly as to appear coextensive with all this senseknown

Universe yet if the Heavens and their content came to an end, all magnitude would simultaneously pass

from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its other properties; it would be abandoned to its own Kind, retaining

Where an entrant force can effect modification it will inevitably leave some trace upon its withdrawal; but

where there can be no modification, nothing can be retained; light comes and goes, and the air is as it always

That a thing essentially devoid of magnitude should come to a certain size is no more astonishing than that a

thing essentially devoid of heat should become warm: Matter's essential existence is quite separate from its

existing in bulk, since, of course, magnitude is an immaterial principle as pattern is. Besides, if we are not to

reduce Matter to nothing, it must be all things by way of participation, and Magnitude is one of those all

In bodies, necessarily compounds, Magnitude though not a determined Magnitude must be present as one of

the constituents; it is implied in the very notion of body; but Matter not a Body excludes even

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

Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an IdealPrinciple: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not

some definite Mass. The fact is that the selfgathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the AllSoul,

desires expansion [and thereby engenders secondaries]: in its images aspiring and moving towards it and

eagerly imitating its act is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The

Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Imagemaking phase [of Intellect or AllSoul] runs forth

into the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of

Matter: the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter which never

possesses a content to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude

consists in the fact that a thing [Matter] not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the

extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality,

The Magnitude inherent in each IdealPrinciple that of a horse or of anything else combines with

Magnitude the Absolute with the result that, irradiated by that Absolute, Matter entire takes Magnitude and

every particle of it becomes a mass; in this way, by virtue at once of the totality of Idea with its inherent

magnitude and of each several specific Idea, all things appear under mass; Matter takes on what we conceive

as extension; it is compelled to assume a relation to the All and, gathered under this Idea and under Mass, to

be all things in the degree in which the operating power can lead the really nothing to become all.

By the conditions of Manifestation, colour rises from noncolour [= from the colourless prototype of colour

in the Ideal Realm]. Quality, known by the one name with its parallel in the sphere of Primals, rises,

similarly, from nonquality: in precisely the same mode, the Magnitude appearing upon Matter rises from

nonMagnitude or from that Primal which is known to us by the same name; so that material things become

visible through standing midway between bare underlie and Pure Idea. All is perceptible by virtue of this

origin in the Intellectual Sphere but all is falsity since the base in which the manifestation takes place is a

Particular entities thus attain their Magnitude through being drawn out by the power of the Existents which

mirror themselves and make space for themselves in them. And no violence is required to draw them into all

the diversity of Shapes and Kinds because the phenomenal All exists by Matter [by Matter's essential

allreceptivity] and because each several Idea, moreover, draws Matter its own way by the power stored

within itself, the power it holds from the Intellectual Realm. Matter is manifested in this sphere as Mass by

the fact that it mirrors the Absolute Magnitude; Magnitude here is the reflection in the mirror. The Ideas meet

all of necessity in Matter [the Ultimate of the emanatory progress]: and Matter, both as one total thing and in

its entire scope, must submit itself, since it is the Material of the entire Here, not of any one determined thing:

what is, in its own character, no determined thing may become determined by an outside force though, in

becoming thus determined, it does not become the definite thing in question, for thus it would lose its own

18. The Ideal Principle possessing the Intellection [= Idea, Noesis] of Magnitude assuming that this

Intellection is of such power as not merely to subsist within itself but to be urged outward as it were by the

intensity of its life will necessarily realize itself in a Kind [= Matter] not having its being in the Intellective

Principle, not previously possessing the Idea of Magnitude or any trace of that Idea or any other.

No: this Principle comes from the source of Magnitude [= is primal "Magnitude"] and therefore Matter can

have no extension, in which to harbour the Magnitude of the Principle, but can take in only its reflected

To the thing which does not enjoy Magnitude in the sense of having massextension in its own substance and

parts, the only possibility is that it present some partial semblance of Magnitude, such as being continuous,

not here and there and everywhere, that its parts be related within it and ungapped. An adequate reflection of

a great mass cannot be produced in a small space mere size prevents but the greater, pursuing the hope of

that full selfpresentment, makes progress towards it and brings about a nearer approach to adequate

mirroring in the parallel from which it can never withhold its radiation: thus it confers Magnitude upon that

[= Matter] which has none and cannot even muster up the appearance of having any, and the visible resultant

Matter, then, wears Magnitude as a dress thrown about it by its association with that Absolute Magnitude to

whose movement it must answer; but it does not, for that, change its Kind; if the Idea which has clothed it

were to withdraw, it would once again be what it permanently is, what it is by its own strength, or it would

have precisely the Magnitude lent to it by any other form that happens to be present in it.

The [Universal] Soul containing the Ideal Principles of RealBeings, and itself an Ideal Principle includes

all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is complete and

selfcontained: it, therefore, sees these principles of sensible things because they are turned, as it were,

towards it and advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind;

it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no

Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active power may choose to send. In what is

thus sent, from the ReasonPrinciple in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained a degree of the

partial object that is to be formed: in the imagemaking impulse within the ReasonPrinciple there is already

a step [towards the lower manifestation] or we may put it that the downward movement from the

ReasonPrinciple is a first form of the partial: utter absence of partition would mean no movement but

[sterile] repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the Soul is: if it were so, it would

belong to the Intellective Sphere. It must be allrecipient but not in that partless mode. It is to be the Place of

all things, and it must therefore extend universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval: thus it will be

a thing unconfined to any moment [of space or time] but laid out in submission to all that is to be.

But would we not expect that some one particularized form should occupy Matter [at once] and so exclude

No: for there is no first Idea except the Ideal Principle of the Universe and, by this Idea, Matter is [the seat

of] all things at once and of the particular thing in its parts for the Matter of a living being is disparted

according to the specific parts of the organism: if there were no such partition nothing would exist but the

19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother [to be "born into the Universe"] affect it neither

Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not

with their substrata which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms Heat [the Principle] annuls

Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is

affected which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of selfidentity.

In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers

presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all

variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an

accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. [Body is modified: Mind

knows] but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because

So the appellation "Recipient and Nurse" is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense

indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as

Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being

formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as

Matter but as being an IdealForm; for only the Idea is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile.

This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the

ancient Hermes with the generative organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of

things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle: the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by

This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that it is the source of things in the sense of

being their underlie: it is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of

suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a

precisely true presentment; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they indicate that Matter is

sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy: this they accomplish by

exhibiting Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male, but castrated of that

1. Eternity and Time; two entirely separate things, we explain "the one having its being in the everlasting

Kind, the other in the realm of Process, in our own Universe"; and, by continually using the words and

assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to think that, both by instinct and by

the more detailed attack of thought, we hold an adequate experience of them in our minds without more ado.

When, perhaps, we make the effort to clarify our ideas and close into the heart of the matter we are at once

unsettled: our doubts throw us back upon ancient explanations; we choose among the various theories, or

among the various interpretations of some one theory, and so we come to rest, satisfied, if only we can

counter a question with an approved answer, and glad to be absolved from further enquiry.

Now, we must believe that some of the venerable philosophers of old discovered the truth; but it is important

to examine which of them really hit the mark and by what guiding principle we can ourselves attain to

What, then, does Eternity really mean to those who describe it as something different from Time? We begin

with Eternity, since when the standing Exemplar is known, its representation in image which Time is

understood to be will be clearly apprehended though it is of course equally true, admitting this relationship

to Time as image to Eternity the original, that if we chose to begin by identifying Time we could thence

proceed upwards by Recognition [the Platonic Anamnesis] and become aware of the Kind which it images.

This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of Heavens and Earth an opinion, it is true, which

appears to have had its adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something most august; most

august, too, is the Intellectual Kind; and there is no possibility of saying that the one is more majestic than the

other, since no such degrees can be asserted in the AboveWorld; there is therefore a certain excuse for the

identification all the more since the Intellectual Substance and Eternity have the one scope and content.

Still; by the fact of representing the one as contained within the other, by making Eternity a predicate to the

Intellectual Existents "the Nature of the Exemplar," we read, "is eternal" we cancel the identification;

Eternity becomes a separate thing, something surrounding that Nature or lying within it or present to it. And

the majestic quality of both does not prove them identical: it might be transmitted from the one to the other.

So, too, Eternity and the Divine Nature envelop the same entities, yes; but not in the same way: the Divine

may be thought of as enveloping parts, Eternity as embracing its content in an unbroken whole, with no

implication of part, but merely from the fact that all eternal things are so by conforming to it.

May we, perhaps, identify Eternity with ReposeThere as Time has been identified with MovementHere?

This would bring on the counterquestion whether Eternity is presented to us as Repose in the general sense

On the first supposition we can no more talk of Repose being eternal than of Eternity being eternal: to be

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

Again, the conception of Repose scarcely seems to include that of perpetuity I am speaking of course not of

perpetuity in the timeorder (which might follow on absence of movement) but of that which we have in

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

Besides, the conception of Eternity requires not merely Repose but also unity and, in order to keep it distinct

from Time, a unity including interval but neither that unity nor that absence of interval enters into the

Lastly, this unchangeable Repose in unity is a predicate asserted of Eternity, which, therefore, is not itself

3. What, then, can this be, this something in virtue of which we declare the entire divine Realm to be Eternal,

everlasting? We must come to some understanding of this perpetuity with which Eternity is either identical or

It must at once, be at once something in the nature of unity and yet a notion compact of diversity, or a Kind, a

Nature, that waits upon the Existents of that Other World, either associated with them or known in and upon

them, they collectively being this Nature which, with all its unity, is yet diverse in power and essence.

Considering this multifarious power, we declare it to be Essence in its relation to this sphere which is

substratum or underlie to it; where we see life we think of it as Movement; where all is unvaried selfidentity

we call it Repose; and we know it as, at once, Difference and Identity when we recognize that all is unity with

Then we reconstruct; we sum all into a collected unity once more, a sole Life in the Supreme; we concentrate

Diversity and all the endless production of act: thus we know Identity, a concept or, rather, a Life never

varying, not becoming what previously it was not, the thing immutably itself, broken by no interval; and

We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding the Universal content [time, space, and

phenomena] in actual presence; not this now and now that other, but always all; not existing now in one mode

and now in another, but a consummation without part or interval. All its content is in immediate

concentration as at one point; nothing in it ever knows development: all remains identical within itself,

knowing nothing of change, for ever in a Now since nothing of it has passed away or will come into being,

Eternity, therefore while not the Substratum [not the essential foundation of the Divine or Intellectual

Principle] may be considered as the radiation of this Substratum: it exists as the announcement of the

Identity in the Divine, of that state of being thus and not otherwise which characterizes what has no

What future, in fact, could bring to that Being anything which it now does not possess; and could it come to

There exists no source or ground from which anything could make its way into that standing present; any

imagined entrant will prove to be not alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be anything at

present outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot include any past; what can there be that once was in it and now is

gone? Futurity, similarly, is banned; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no ground is left for its

That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being; that which enjoys stable existence as

neither in process of change nor having ever changed that is Eternity. Thus we come to the definition: the

Life instantaneously entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part which belongs to the Authentic

Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we were probing for this is Eternity.

4. We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an accidental from outside grafted upon that Nature: it is native

It is discerned as present essentially in that Nature like everything else that we can predicate There all

immanent, springing from that Essence and inherent to that Essence. For whatsoever has primal Being must

be immanent to the Firsts and be a FirstEternity equally with The Good that is among them and of them and

In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of the AllBeing; but in another aspect it is

inherent in the All taken as a totality, since that Authentic All is not a thing patched up out of external parts,

but is authentically an all because its parts are engendered by itself. It is like the truthfulness in the Supreme

which is not an agreement with some outside fact or being but is inherent in each member about which it is

the truth. To an authentic All it is not enough that it be everything that exists: it must possess allness in the

full sense that nothing whatever is absent from it. Then nothing is in store for it: if anything were to come,

that thing must have been lacking to it, and it was, therefore, not All. And what, of a Nature contrary to its

own, could enter into it when it is [the Supreme and therefore] immune? Since nothing can accrue to it, it

Engendered things are in continuous process of acquisition; eliminate futurity, therefore, and at once they

lose their being; if the nonengendered are made amenable to futurity they are thrown down from the seat of

their existence, for, clearly, existence is not theirs by their nature if it appears only as a being about to be, a

The essential existence of generated things seems to lie in their existing from the time of their generation to

the ultimate of time after which they cease to be: but such an existence is compact of futurity, and the

annulment of that futurity means the stopping of the life and therefore of the essential existence.

Such a stoppage would be true, also, of the [generated] All in so far as it is a thing of process and change: for

this reason it keeps hastening towards its future, dreading to rest, seeking to draw Being to itself by a

perpetual variety of production and action and by its circling in a sort of ambition after Essential Existence.

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

The Primals, on the contrary, in their state of blessedness have no such aspiration towards anything to come:

they are the whole, now; what life may be thought of as their due, they possess entire; they, therefore, seek

nothing, since there is nothing future to them, nothing external to them in which any futurity could find

Thus the perfect and allcomprehensive essence of the Authentic Existent does not consist merely in the

completeness inherent in its members; its essence includes, further, its established immunity from all lack

with the exclusion, also, of all that is without Being for not only must all things be contained in the All and

Whole, but it can contain nothing that is, or was ever, nonexistent and this State and Nature of the

5. This EverBeing is realized when upon examination of an object I am able to say or rather, to know that

in its very Nature it is incapable of increment or change; anything that fails by that test is no EverExistent

No: the object must, farther, include such a NaturePrinciple as to give the assurance that the actual state

excludes all future change, so that it is found at every observation as it always was.

Imagine, then, the state of a being which cannot fall away from the vision of this but is for ever caught to it,

held by the spell of its grandeur, kept to it by virtue of a nature itself unfailing or even the state of one that

must labour towards Eternity by directed effort, but then to rest in it, immoveable at any point assimilated to

it, coeternal with it, contemplating Eternity and the Eternal by what is Eternal within the self.

Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent one which never turns to any Kind

outside itself, that possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that is now

receiving none and will never receive any we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement

also of perdurance and of Eternity: perdurance is the corresponding state arising from the [divine] substratum

and inherent in it; Eternity [the Principle as distinguished from the property of everlastingness] is that

Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great; it proves on investigation to be identical with God: it

may fitly be described as God made manifest, as God declaring what He is, as existence without jolt or

And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it; each of the Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue

of unlimited force; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is preeminently the limitless

Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a life limitless in the full sense of being all the

life there is and a life which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness, possesses itself

intact for ever. To the notion of a Life (a LivingPrinciple) allcomprehensive add that it never spends itself,

6. Now the Principle this stated, all good and beauty, and everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It,

and pointed towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its law; and it

is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato finely, and by no means inadvertently but with profound intention

wrote those words of his, "Eternity stable in Unity"; he wishes to convey that Eternity is not merely

something circling on its traces into a final unity but has [instantaneous] Being about The One as the

unchanging Life of the Authentic Existent. This is certainly what we have been seeking: this Principle, at rest

within rest with the One, is Eternity; possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute

selfidentical and none the less the active manifestation of an unchanging Life set towards the Divine and

dwelling within It, untrue, therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side of Life this will be Eternity

Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing variety in the mode of existence: Being is,

therefore, selfidentical throughout, and, therefore, again is one undistinguishable thing. Being can have no

this and that; it cannot be treated in terms of intervals, unfoldings, progression, extension; there is no grasping

If, then, there is no first or last in this Principle, if existence is its most authentic possession and its very self,

and this in the sense that its existence is Essence or Life then, once again, we meet here what we have been

Observe that such words as "always," "never," "sometimes" must be taken as mere conveniences of

exposition: thus "always used in the sense not of time but of incorruptibility and endlessly complete scope

might set up the false notion of stage and interval. We might perhaps prefer to speak of "Being," without any

attribute; but since this term is applicable to Essence and some writers have used the word "Essence" for

things of process, we cannot convey our meaning to them without introducing some word carrying the notion

There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being; just as there is none between a

philosopher and a true philosopher: the attribute "true" came into use because there arose what masqueraded

as philosophy; and for similar reasons "everlasting" was adjoined to "Being," and "Being" to "everlasting,"

and we have [the tautology of] "Everlasting Being." We must take this "Everlasting" as expressing no more

than Authentic Being: it is merely a partial expression of a potency which ignores all interval or term and can

look forward to nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The Principle of which this is the

statement will be the AllExistent, and, as being all, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one

Things and Beings in the Time order even when to all appearance complete, as a body is when fit to harbour

a soul are still bound to sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which they need: let

them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete;

But the conception of Eternity demands something which is in its nature complete without sequence; it is not

satisfied by something measured out to any remoter time or even by something limitless, but, in its limitless

reach, still having the progression of futurity: it requires something immediately possessed of the due fullness

of Being, something whose Being does not depend upon any quantity [such as instalments of time] but

Itself having no quantity, it can have no contact with anything quantitative since its Life cannot be made a

thing of fragments, in contradiction to the partlessness which is its character; it must be without parts in the

The phrase "He was good" [used by Plato of the Demiurge] refers to the Idea of the All; and its very

indefiniteness signifies the utter absense of relation to Time: so that even this Universe has had no temporal

beginning; and if we speak of something "before" it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes

its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects

it as inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms.

7. Now comes the question whether, in all this discussion, we are not merely helping to make out a case for

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

The whole question turns on the distinction between being in Time and being in Eternity, and this will be best

realized by probing to the Nature of Time. We must, therefore, descend from Eternity to the investigation of

Time, to the realm of Time: till now we have been taking the upward way; we must now take the downward

not to the lowest levels but within the degree in which Time itself is a descent from Eternity.

If the venerable sages of former days had not treated of Time, our method would be to begin by linking to

[the idea of] Eternity [the idea of] its Next [its inevitable downward or outgoing subsequent in the same

order], then setting forth the probable nature of such a Next and proceeding to show how the conception thus

But, as things are, our best beginning is to range over the most noteworthy of the ancient opinions and see

Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some

phenomenon of Movement: obviously it cannot be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since,

Of those that explain it as Movement, some identify it with Absolute Movement [or with the total of

Movement], others with that of the All. Those that make it a moved object would identify it with the orb of

the All. Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of Movement treat it, severally, either

as a standard of measure or as something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite.

8. Movement Time cannot be whether a definite act of moving is meant or a united total made up of all such

acts since movement, in either sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any movement not in

And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is decisive: Movement can come to rest, can

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

But, if the reference is to the Circuit of the heavenly system [it is not strictly continuous, or equable, since]

the time taken in the return path is not that of the outgoing movement; the one is twice as long as the other:

this Movement of the All proceeds, therefore, by two different degrees; the rate of the entire journey is not

Further, the fact that we hear of the Movement of the outermost sphere being the swiftest confirms our

theory. Obviously, it is the swiftest of movements by taking the lesser time to traverse the greater space the

very greatest all other moving things are slower by taking a longer time to traverse a mere segment of the

And, if Time is not even the movement of the Kosmic Sphere much less is it the sphere itself though that has

Now, to begin with, Movement, even continuous, has no unchanging extent [as Time the equable has], since,

even in space, it may be faster or slower; there must, therefore, be some unit of standard outside it, by which

these differences are measurable, and this outside standard would more properly be called Time. And failing

such a measure, which extent would be Time, that of the fast or of the slow or rather which of them all,

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

The Celestial Circuit may, no doubt, be thought of in terms of quantity. It answers to measure in two ways.

First there is space; the movement is commensurate with the area it passes through, and this area is its extent.

But this gives us, still, space only, not Time. Secondly, the circuit, considered apart from distance traversed,

has the extent of its continuity, of its tendency not to stop but to proceed indefinitely: but this is merely

amplitude of Movement; search it, tell its vastness, and, still, Time has no more appeared, no more enters into

the matter, than when one certifies a high pitch of heat; all we have discovered is Motion in ceaseless

Succession or repetition gives us Number dyad, triad, etc. and the extent traversed is a matter of

Magnitude; thus we have Quantity of Movement in the form of number, dyad, triad, decade, or in the form

of extent apprehended in what we may call the amount of the Movement: but, the idea of Time we have not.

That definite Quantity is merely something occurring within Time, for, otherwise Time is not everywhere but

is something belonging to Movement which thus would be its substratum or basicstuff: once more, then, we

would be making Time identical with Movement; for the extent of Movement is not something outside it but

is simply its continuousness, and we need not halt upon the difference between the momentary and the

continuous, which is simply one of manner and degree. The extended movement and its extent are not Time;

they are in Time. Those that explain Time as extent of Movement must mean not the extent of the movement

itself but something which determines its extension, something with which the movement keeps pace in its

course. But what this something is, we are not told; yet it is, clearly, Time, that in which all Movement

proceeds. This is what our discussion has aimed at from the first: "What, essentially, is Time?" It comes to

this: we ask "What is Time?" and we are answered, "Time is the extension of Movement in Time!"

On the one hand Time is said to be an extension apart from and outside that of Movement; and we are left to

guess what this extension may be: on the other hand, it is represented as the extension of Movement; and this

leaves the difficulty what to make of the extension of Rest though one thing may continue as long in repose

as another in motion, so that we are obliged to think of one thing Time that covers both Rest and Movements,

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

To begin with, we have the doubt which met us when we probed its identification with extent of Movement:

Have we any means of calculating disconnected and lawless Movement? What number or measure would

One Measure for movement slow and fast, for any and every movement: then that number and measure

would be like the decade, by which we reckon horses and cows, or like some common standard for liquids

and solids. If Time is this Kind of Measure, we learn, no doubt, of what objects it is a Measure of

Or: we may take the decade and think of it, apart from the horses or cows, as a pure number; this gives us a

measure which, even though not actually applied, has a definite nature. Is Time, perhaps, a Measure in this

No: to tell us no more of Time in itself than that it is such a number is merely to bring us back to the decade

If, on the other hand, Time is [not such an abstraction but] a Measure possessing a continuous extent of its

own, it must have quantity, like a footrule; it must have magnitude: it will, clearly, be in the nature of a line

traversing the path of Movement. But, itself thus sharing in the movement, how can it be a Measure of

Movement? Why should the one of the two be the measure rather than the other? Besides an accompanying

measure is more plausibly considered as a measure of the particular movement it accompanies than of

Movement in general. Further, this entire discussion assumes continuous movement, since the accompanying

principle; Time, is itself unbroken [but a full explanation implies justification of Time in repose].

The fact is that we are not to think of a measure outside and apart, but of a combined thing, a measured

If so, which of these two would be Time, the measured movement or the measuring magnitude? For Time [as

measure] must be either the movement measured by magnitude, or the measuring magnitude itself or

something using the magnitude like a yardstick to appraise the movement. In all three cases, as we have

indicated, the application is scarcely plausible except where continuous movement is assumed: unless the

Movement proceeds smoothly, and even unintermittently and as embracing the entire content of the moving

object, great difficulties arise in the identification of Time with any kind of measure.

Let us, then, suppose Time to be this "measured Movement," measured by quantity. Now the Movement if it

is to be measured requires a measure outside itself; this was the only reason for raising the question of the

accompanying measure. In exactly the same way the measuring magnitude, in turn, will require a measure,

because only when the standard shows such and such an extension can the degree of movement be appraised.

Time then will be, not the magnitude accompanying the Movement, but that numerical value by which the

magnitude accompanying the Movement is estimated. But that number can be only the abstract figure which

represents the magnitude, and it is difficult to see how an abstract figure can perform the act of measuring.

And, supposing that we discover a way in which it can, we still have not Time, the measure, but a particular

quantity of Time, not at all the same thing: Time means something very different from any definite period:

before all question as to quantity is the question as to the thing of which a certain quantity is present.

Time, we are told, is the number outside Movement and measuring it, like the tens applied to the reckoning of

the horses and cows but not inherent in them: we are not told what this Number is; yet, applied or not, it

Or "it is that which accompanies a Movement and measures it by its successive stages"; but we are still left

In any case, once a thing whether by point or standard or any other means measures succession, it must

measure according to time: this number appraising movement degree by degree must, therefore, if it is to

serve as a measure at all, be something dependent upon time and in contact with it: for, either, degree is

spatial, merely the beginning and end of the Stadium, for example or in the only alternative, it is a pure

matter of Time: the succession of early and late is stage of Time, Time ending upon a certain Now or Time

Time, therefore, is something other than the mere number measuring Movement, whether Movement in

Further: Why should the mere presence of a number give us Time a number measuring or measured; for the

same number may be either if Time is not given us by the fact of Movement itself, the Movement which

inevitably contains in itself a succession of stages? To make the number essential to Time is like saying that

Are we to take some portion of Time and find its numerical statement? That simply means that Time existed

We may, therefore, very well think that it existed before the Soul or Mind that estimates it if, indeed, it is

not to be thought to take its origin from the Soul for no measurement by anything is necessary to its

And suppose it to be true that the Soul is the appraiser, using Magnitude as the measuring standard, how does

10. Time, again, has been described as some sort of a sequence upon Movement, but we learn nothing from

this, nothing is said, until we know what it is that produces this sequential thing: probably the cause and not

And, admitting such a thing, there would still remain the question whether it came into being before the

movement, with it, or after it; and, whether we say before or with or after, we are speaking of order in Time:

Enough: Our main purpose is to show what Time is, not to refute false definition. To traverse point by point

the many opinions of our many predecessors would mean a history rather than an identification; we have

treated the various theories as fully as is possible in a cursory review: and, notice, that which makes Time the

Measure of the AllMovement is refuted by our entire discussion and, especially, by the observations upon

the Measurement of Movement in general, for all the argument except, of course, that from irregularity

11. To this end we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity, unwavering Life, undivided totality,

limitless, knowing no divagation, at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet: or at least it did not

exist for the Eternal Beings, though its being was implicit in the Idea and Principle of progressive derivation.

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

We can scarcely call upon the Muses to recount its origin since they were not in existence then perhaps not

even if they had been. The engendered thing, Time, itself, can best tell us how it rose and became manifest;

Time at first in reality before that "first" was produced by desire of succession Time lay,

selfconcentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent: it was not yet Time; it was merged in the Authentic

and motionless with it. But there was an active principle there, one set on governing itself and realizing itself

[= the AllSoul], and it chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest, and Time

stirred with it. And we, stirring to a ceaseless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the

establishment of evernew difference, traversed a portion of the outgoing path and produced an image of

For the Soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of translating elsewhere what it saw in the

Authentic Realm, and it could not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its possession.

A Seed is at rest; the natureprinciple within, uncoiling outwards, makes way towards what seems to it a

large life; but by that partition it loses; it was a unity selfgathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it

fritters its unity away; it advances into a weaker greatness. It is so with this faculty of the Soul, when it

produces the Kosmos known to sense the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in the very movement of

the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to reproduce that of the Divine. To bring this Kosmos into being,

the Soul first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time; this world of its fashioning it then gave over

to be a servant to Time, making it at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the

bournes of Time. For the Kosmos moves only in Soul the only Space within the range of the All open to it

to move in and therefore its Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in Soul.

Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of novelty, the Soul produces succession as well

as act; taking up new purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not existed in that former

period when its purpose was still dormant and its life was not as it since became: the life is changed and that

change carries with it a change of Time. Time, then, is contained in differentiation of Life; the ceaseless

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

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

Yes; for Eternity, we have said, is Life in repose, unchanging, selfidentical, always endlessly complete; and

there is to be an image of EternityTime such an image as this lower All presents of the Higher Sphere.

Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more

veritable life of the Soul; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be the movement of

some partial phase; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not

constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts; over against that oneness without extent or interval

there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and

allcomprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity; over against the

Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. The lesser must

always be working towards the increase of its Being, this will be its imitation of what is immediately

complete, selfrealized, endless without stage: only thus can its Being reproduce that of the Higher.

Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of Soul; Eternity is not outside of the Authentic Existent:

nor is it to be taken as a sequence or succession to Soul, any more than Eternity is to the Divine. It is a thing

12. We are brought thus to the conception of a NaturalPrinciple Time a certain expanse [a quantitative

phase] of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently

But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and withdraw from the lifecourse which it now

maintains, from the continuous and unending activity of an everexistent soul not selfcontained or

selfintent but concerned about doing and engendering: imagine it no longer accomplishing any Act, setting a

pause to this work it has inaugurated; let this outgoing phase of the Soul become once more, equally with the

All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things? What Earlier or Later would there be,

what longlasting or shortlasting? What ground would lie ready to the Soul's operation but the Supreme in

which it has its Being? Or, indeed, what operative tendency could it have even to That since a prior

The very sphere of the Universe would not exist; for it cannot antedate Time: it, too, has its Being and its

Movement in Time; and if it ceased to move, the SoulAct [which is the essence of Time] continuing, we

If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the origin of

Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the Soul's tendency towards the production of the sensible

universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how "Time" as we read "came into Being

simultaneously" with this All: the Soul begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the Soul this

Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the Universe is a content of Time. No doubt it will be urged

that we read also of the orbit of the Stars being Times": but do not forget what follows; "the stars exist," we

are told, "for the display and delimitation of Time," and "that there may be a manifest Measure." No

indication of Time could be derived from [observation of] the Soul; no portion of it can be seen or handled,

so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore

the Soul brings into being night and day; in their difference is given Duality from which, we read, arises the

We observe the tract between a sunrise and its return and, as the movement is uniform, we thus obtain a

Timeinterval upon which to measure ourselves, and we use this as a standard. We have thus a measure of

Time. Time itself is not a measure. How would it set to work? And what kind of thing is there of which it

could say, "I find the extent of this equal to such and such a stretch of my own extent?" What is this "I"?

Obviously something by which measurement is known. Time, then, serves towards measurement but is not

itself the Measure: the Movement of the All will be measured according to Time, but Time will not, of its

own Nature, be a Measure of Movement: primarily a Kind to itself, it will incidentally exhibit the magnitudes

And the reiterated observation of Movement the same extent found to be traversed in such and such a

This brings us to the fact that, in a certain sense, the Movement, the orbit of the universe, may legitimately be

said to measure Time in so far as that is possible at all since any definite stretch of that circuit occupies a

certain quantity of Time, and this is the only grasp we have of Time, our only understanding of it: what that

circuit measures by indication, that is will be Time, manifested by the Movement but not brought into

This means that the measure of the Spheric Movement has itself been measured by a definite stretch of that

Movement and therefore is something different; as measure, it is one thing and, as the measured, it is another;

We are no nearer knowledge than if we said that the footrule measures Magnitude while we left the concept

Magnitude undefined; or, again, we might as well define Movement whose limitlessness puts it out of our

reach as the thing measured by Space; the definition would be parallel since we can mark off a certain space

13. The Spheral Circuit, then, performed in Time, indicates it: but when we come to Time itself there is no

question of its being "within" something else: it must be primary, a thing "within itself." It is that in which all

the rest happens, in which all movement and rest exist smoothly and under order; something following a

definite order is necessary to exhibit it and to make it a subject of knowledge though not to produce it it is

known by order whether in rest or in motion; in motion especially, for Movement better moves Time into our

ken than rest can, and it is easier to estimate distance traversed than repose maintained. This last fact has led

to Time being called a measure of Movement when it should have been described as something measured by

Movement and then defined in its essential nature; it is an error to define it by a mere accidental concomitant

and so to reverse the actual order of things. Possibly, however, this reversal was not intended by the authors

of the explanation: but, at any rate, we do not understand them; they plainly apply the term Measure to what

is in reality the measured and leave us unable to grasp their meaning: our perplexity may be due to the fact

that their writings addressed to disciples acquainted with their teaching do not explain what this thing,

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

Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal

distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what

the Time is, how much it amounts to: but when his purpose is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it

sprang into Being simultaneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of Eternity, its image in motion,

Time necessarily unresting as the Life with which it must keep pace: and "coeval with the Heavens" because

it is this same Life [of the Divine Soul] which brings the Heavens also into being; Time and the Heavens are

Suppose that Life, then, to revert an impossibility to perfect unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life,

It is the height of absurdity to fasten on the succession of earlier and later occurring in the life and movement

of this sphere of ours, to declare that it must be some definite thing and to call it Time, while denying the

reality of the more truly existent Movement, that of the Soul, which has also its earlier and later: it cannot be

reasonable to recognize succession in the case of the Soulless Movement and so to associate Time with

that while ignoring succession and the reality of Time in the Movement from which the other takes its

imitative existence; to ignore, that is, the very Movement in which succession first appears, a selfactuated

movement which, engendering its own every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all

But: we treat the Kosmic Movement as overarched by that of the Soul and bring it under Time; yet we do

not set under Time that SoulMovement itself with all its endless progression: what is our explanation of this

Simply, that the SoulMovement has for its Prior Eternity which knows neither its progression nor its

extension. The descent towards Time begins with this SoulMovement; it made Time and harbours Time as a

And this is how Time is omnipresent: that Soul is absent from no fragment of the Kosmos just as our Soul is

absent from no particle of ourselves. As for those who pronounce Time a thing of no substantial existence, of

no reality, they clearly belie God Himself whenever they say "He was" or "He will be": for the existence

indicated by the "was and will be" can have only such reality as belongs to that in which it is said to be

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

he is employing: and when you know that quantity represented by the ground traversed by his feet, for, of

course, we are supposing the bodily movement to correspond with the pace he has set within himself you

You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement

causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the

Let your choice fall where it may, from this point there is nothing but the unextended: and this is the

primarily existent, the container to all else, having itself no container, brooking none.

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

And this is why Time can never be broken apart, any more than Eternity which, similarly, under diverse

manifestations, has its Being as an integral constituent of all the eternal Existences.

1. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are

striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end and this, not merely beings endowed with

reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that

produces these and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision

and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in mimicry

and in image we would scarcely find anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely

Yes; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation: our play aims at Vision; and there is every reason to

believe that child or man, in sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every act is an

effort towards Vision; the compulsory act, which tends rather to bring the Vision down to outward things,

and the act thought of as voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort towards Vision.

The case of Man will be treated later on; let us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in

general, asking ourselves what is the nature of Contemplation in them, how we relate to any Contemplative

activity the labour and productiveness of the earth, how Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of

conscious representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of the Contemplation which

2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any implement borrowed or inherent: Nature

needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity cannot depend upon

mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern?

The waxworkers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the creative act of Nature, are unable to

make colours; all they can do to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere. None the less

there is a parallel which demands attention: in the case of workers in such arts there must be something

locked within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all their

creation; and this observation should have indicated a similar phenomenon in Nature; it should be clear that

this indwelling efficacy, which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman but,

there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgoing force as against that remaining within;

the only moved thing is Matter; there can be no moved phase in this NaturePrinciple; any such moved phase

could not be the primal mover; this NaturePrinciple is no such moved entity; it is the unmoved Principle

We may be answered that the ReasonPrinciple is, no doubt, unmoved, but that the NaturePrinciple, another

But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the ReasonPrinciple; and any part of it that is

unmoved is the ReasonPrinciple. The NaturePrinciple must be an IdealForm, not a compound of Form

and Matter; there is no need for it to possess Matter, hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it

exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the

rest, when brought under Reason: Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a

This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the ReasonPrinciples are the makers and

that Nature is a ReasonPrinciple producing a second ReasonPrinciple, its offspring, which, in turn, while

itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the underlie, Matter.

The ReasonPrinciple presiding over visible Shape is the very ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to

produce further: that which produces in the created realm is the living ReasonPrinciple brother no doubt,

3. But if this ReasonPrinciple [Nature] is in act and produces by the process indicated how can it have

To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact, a ReasonPrinciple selfindwelling, it is

in its own nature a Contemplative act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct

from that Idea: the ReasonPrinciple then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the

work; not being action but ReasonPrinciple it is, necessarily, Contemplation. Taking the ReasonPrinciple,

the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act [in the higher Logos] and is itself a

contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated, but above it stands the total Logos with its

two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as AllSoul and, next, that operating in

From selfcontemplation, then? Or what are we to think? It derives from a Contemplation and some

The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty that, I mean, of planning its own content, it does

But why not, since it is a phase of Life, a ReasonPrinciple and a creative Power?

Because to plan for a thing is to lack it: Nature does not lack; it creates because it possesses. Its creative act is

simply its possession of it own characteristic Essence; now its Essence, since it is a ReasonPrinciple, is to be

at once an act of contemplation and an object of contemplation. In other words, the, NaturePrinciple

produces by virtue of being an act of contemplation, an object of contemplation and a ReasonPrinciple; on

Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contemplation, for creation is the outcome of a

contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply

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

"It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and

make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever comes into being is my is my

vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am visionloving

and create vision by the visionseeing faculty within me. The mathematicians from their vision draw their

figures: but I draw nothing: I gaze and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my

contemplation. As with my Mother (the AllSoul] and the Beings that begot me so it is with me: they are

born of a Contemplation and my birth is from them, not by their Act but by their Being; they are the loftier

It tells: that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it

possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward

but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence; that, in this immutability accompanied by what may be called

SelfConsciousness, it possesses within the measure of its possibility a knowledge of the realm of

subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and consciousness; and, achieving thus a

Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of "understanding" or "perception" in the NaturePrinciple,

this is not in the full sense applicable to other beings; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed from the

For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a selfintuition, a spectacle laid before it by virtue of its

unaccompanied selfconcentration and by the fact that in itself it belongs to the order of intuition. It is a

Vision silent but somewhat blurred, for there exists another a clearer of which Nature is the image: hence all

that Nature produces is weak; the weaker act of intuition produces the weaker object.

In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation, find in action their trace of vision

and of reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation; they are left with a void, because they

cannot adequately seize the vision; yet they long for it; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision

which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it

visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and

making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of visionattenuation if the doer was

aiming only at the thing done; complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the mere

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

The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way duller children, inapt to study and speculation,

5. This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a Contemplation: we may now take the

matter up to the higher Soul; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing

and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it in

itself, all one object of Vision to produce another Vision [that of the Kosmos]: it is just as a given science,

complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who

attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual

contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul.

The primal phase of the Soul inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its participation in the Supreme, filled and

illuminated remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal

participant, a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as

Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles

out. But, travel as far as it may, it never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the outgoing

began: if it did, it would no longer be everywhere [its continuous Being would be broken and] it would be

The Soul is to extend throughout the Universe, no spot void of its energy: but, a prior is always different from

its secondary, and energy is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act; act, however, is not at

this stage existent since it depends upon contemplation: therefore the Soul, while its phases differ, must, in all

of them, remain a contemplation and what seems to be an act done under contemplation must be in reality

that weakened contemplation of which we have spoken: the engendered must respect the Kind, but in weaker

All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a Soul in

vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent this Principle [of Nature], itself also contemplative

but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its

[Such creative contemplation is not inexplicable] for no limit exists either to contemplation or to its possible

objects, and this explains how the Soul is universal: where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical

This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same strength in each and every place and

The Charioteer [the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus Myth] gives the two horses [its two

dissonant faculties] what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what made

that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they

6. Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contemplation, so that even those whose life is

in doing have seeing as their object; what they have not been able to achieve by the direct path, they hope to

Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but

to know it, to see it present before the mind: their success is the laying up of a vision. We act for the sake of

some good; this means not for something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we possess nothing

but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind?

Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for [mind or] Soul is a ReasonPrinciple and

anything that one lays up in the Soul can be no other than a ReasonPrinciple, a silent thing, the more

This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further; the

contemplation, in one so conditioned, remains absorbed within as having acquired certainty to rest upon. The

brighter the certainty, the more tranquil is the contemplation as having acquired the more perfect unity; and

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

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

elements remain strange to one another, as when IdealPrinciples laid up in the mind or Soul remain idle.

Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the soul of the novice

The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it

always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were,

a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees [in its outgoing act] as a stranger

looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a ReasonPrinciple, even an Intellectual Principle;

For, it is a not a complete thing: it has a lack; it is incomplete in regard to its Prior; yet it, also, has a tranquil

vision of what it produces. What it has once brought into being it produces no more, for all its productiveness

is determined by this lack: it produces for the purpose of Contemplation, in the desire of knowing all its

content: when there is question of practical things it adapts its content to the outside order.

The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete

and therefore more contemplative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the object

of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by observation. It leaves its native realm and busies itself

elsewhere; then it returns, and it possesses its vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted.

The Sage, then, is the man made over into a ReasonPrinciple: to others he shows his act but in himself he is

Vision: such a man is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards

7. Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established some selfevident, others brought out by our

All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these

Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of visionmanifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to

surfaceawareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from

vision exists to produce IdealForm, that is a fresh object of vision, so that universally, as images of their

engendering principles, they all produce objects of vision, Idealforms. In the engendering of these

subexistences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that the creating powers operate not for the

sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate

purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an

effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being

the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must

be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal.

When living things reproduce their Kind, it is that the ReasonPrinciples within stir them; the procreative act

is the expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many forms, many objects of

contemplation, so that the universe may be filled full with ReasonPrinciples and that contemplation may be,

as nearly as possible, endless: to bring anything into being is to produce an IdeaForm and that again is to

enrich the universe with contemplation: all the failures, alike in being and in doing, are but the swerving of

visionaries from the object of vision: in the end the sorriest craftsman is still a maker of forms, ungracefully.

In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to

that in the IntellectualPrinciple itself the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more

intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them; and in the advanced

Soul the objects of knowledge, well on the way towards the IntellectualPrinciple, are close to identity with

Hence we may conclude that, in the IntellectualPrinciple Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and

Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the

fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing; we cannot stop at a principle containing

separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity.

The Supreme must be an entity in which the two are one; it will, therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an

object of vision like things existing in something other than themselves: what exists in an outside element is

Now admitting the existence of a living thing that is at once a Thought and its object, it must be a Life

distinct from the vegetative or sensitive life or any other life determined by Soul.

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

The fact that they are ReasonPrinciples. Every life is some form of thought, but of a dwindling clearness

like the degrees of life itself. The first and clearest Life and the first Intelligence are one Being. The First

Life, then, is an Intellection and the next form of Life is the next Intellection and the last form of Life is the

last form of Intellection. Thus every Life, of the order strictly so called, is an Intellection.

But while men may recognize grades in life they reject grade in thought; to them there are thoughts [full and

The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that whatever exists is a byework of

visioning: if, then, the truest Life is such by virtue of an Intellection and is identical with the truest

Intellection, then the truest Intellection is a living being; Contemplation and its object constitute a living

The explanation is that in a unity there can be no seeing [a pure unity has no room for vision and an object];

and in its Contemplation the One is not acting as a Unity; if it were, the IntellectualPrinciple cannot exist.

The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began; all unknown to itself, it became manifold; it

grew, as it were, pregnant: desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were better had it

never known the desire by which a Secondary came into being: it is like a Circle [in the Idea] which in

projection becomes a figure, a surface, a circumference, a centre, a system of radii, of upper and lower

segments. The Whence is the better; the Whither is less good: the Whence is not the same as the

WhencefollowedbyaWhither; the Whence all alone is greater than with the Whither added to it.

The IntellectualPrinciple on the other hand was never merely the Principle of an inviolable unity; it was a

universal as well and, being so, was the IntellectualPrinciple of all things. Being, thus, all things and the

Principle of all, it must essentially include this part of itself [this elementofplurality] which is universal

and is all things: otherwise, it contains a part which is not IntellectualPrinciple: it will be a juxtaposition of

nonIntellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass of things into the

We conclude that this Being is limitless and that, in all the outflow from it, there is no lessening either in its

emanation, since this also is the entire universe, nor in itself, the starting point, since it is no assemblage of

9. Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent; there must exist that which transcends it, that

In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The IntellectualPrinciple is a number [= the expression of a

plurality]; and number derives from unity: the source of a number such as this must be the authentically One.

Further, it is the sum of an IntellectualBeing with the object of its Intellection, so that it is a duality; and,

No: an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible object; eliminate the intelligible, and the

IntellectualPrinciple disappears with it. If, then, what we are seeking cannot be the IntellectualPrinciple

but must be something that rejects the duality there present, then the Prior demanded by that duality must be

No: for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality with the IntellectualPrinciple.

If, then, neither the IntellectualPrinciple nor the Intelligible Object can be the First Existent, what is?

It must be either Intellective or without Intellection: if Intellective it is the IntellectualPrinciple; if not, it will

be without even knowledge of itself so that, either way, what is there so august about it?

If we define it as The Good and the wholly simplex, we will, no doubt, be telling the truth, but we will not be

giving any certain and lucid account of it as long as we have in mind no entity in which to lodge the

Yet: our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our intelligence; our power is that of knowing the

intelligible by means of the intelligence: but this Entity transcends all of the intellectual nature; by what

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

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

Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this omnipresent Being that in you which is capable of

drawing from It, and you have your share in it: imagine a voice sounding over a vast waste of land, and not

only over the emptiness alone but over human beings; wherever you be in that great space you have but to

The IntellectualPrinciple in us must mount to its origins: essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver

itself over to those powers within it which tend upward; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it must become

For the IntellectualPrinciple is the earliest form of Life: it is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of

the universal Order the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous process.

In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things in their precise forms and not merely in the

agglomerate mass for this would be to contain them imperfectly and inarticulately it must of necessity

derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of

For the Universe is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or

anything belonging to the All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but the Source of

plurality, since universally a begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has

engendered the IntellectualPrinciple must be more simplex than the IntellectualPrinciple.

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

Now if it were the massed total of all, it must be of later origin than any of the things of which it is the sum; if

it precedes the total, it differs from the things that make up the total and they from it: if it and the total of

things constitute a coexistence, it is not a Source. But what we are probing for must be a Source; it must

As for the notion that it may be each separate entity of the All, this would make a selfIdentity into a what

you like, where you like, indifferently, and would, besides, abolish all distinction in things themselves.

Once more we see that this can be no thing among things but must be prior to all things.

The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose nonexistence would mean the nonexistence of all

the Universe and even of the IntellectualPrinciple which is the primal Life and all Life.

This Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life for that Manifestation of Life which is the

Universe of things is not the First Activity; it is itself poured forth, so to speak, like water from a spring.

Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by

what they take, but remains always integrally as it was; the tides that proceed from it are at one within it

before they run their several ways, yet all, in some sense, know beforehand down what channels they will

Or: think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree while yet it is the stationary Principle of the

whole, in no sense scattered over all that extent but, as it were, vested in the root: it is the giver of the entire

and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself, not manifold but the Principle of that manifold life.

And this surprises no one: though it is in fact astonishing how all that varied vitality springs from the

unvarying, and how that very manifoldness could not be unless before the multiplicity there were something

all singleness; for, the Principle is not broken into parts to make the total; on the contrary, such partition

would destroy both; nothing would come into being if its cause, thus broken up, changed character.

Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced; the All has its One, its Prior but not yet

the Absolute One; through this we reach that Absolute One, where all such reference comes to an end.

Now when we reach a One the stationary Principle in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All we have

in every case the most powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the Authentically

Existent Beings their Principle and source and potentiality shall we lose confidence and suspect it of

Certainly this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source its nature is that nothing can be

affirmed of it not existence, not essence, not life since it is That which transcends all these. But possess

yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining,

and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but

The IntellectualPrinciple is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees; therefore it is a potentiality which has

This implies the distinction of Matter and Form in it as there must be in all actual seeing the Matter in this

case being the Intelligibles which the IntellectualPrinciple contains and sees. All actual seeing implies

duality; before the seeing takes place there is the pure unity [of the power of seeing]. That unity [of principle]

acquires duality [in the act of seeing], and the duality is [always to be traced back to] a unity.

Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realization, so the vision in the

It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or to perform any other Act; for The Good

is the centre of all else, and it is by means of The Good that every thing has Act, while the Good is in need of

Once you have uttered "The Good," add no further thought: by any addition, and in proportion to that

Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it; it would become a duality, Intellect and the

Good. The Good has no need of the IntellectualPrinciple which, on the contrary, needs it, and, attaining it, is

shaped into Goodness and becomes perfect by it: the Form thus received, sprung from the Good, brings it to

Thus the traces of the Good discerned upon it must be taken as indication of the nature of that Archetype: we

form a conception of its Authentic Being from its image playing upon the IntellectualPrinciple. This image

of itself, it has communicated to the Intellect that contemplates it: thus all the striving is on the side of the

Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer. The Being beyond neither strives, since it feels

no lack, nor attains, since it has no striving. And this marks it off from the IntellectualPrinciple, to which

characteristically belongs the striving, the concentrated strain towards its Form.

Yet: The IntellectualPrinciple; beautiful; the most beautiful of all; lying lapped in pure light and in clear

radiance; circumscribing the Nature of the Authentic Existents; the original of which this beautiful world is a

shadow and an image; tranquil in the fullness of glory since in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing

dark or out of rule; a living thing in a life of blessedness: this, too, must overwhelm with awe any that has

But: As one that looks up to the heavens and sees the splendour of the stars thinks of the Maker and searches,

so whoever has contemplated the Intellectual Universe and known it and wondered for it must search after its

Maker too. What Being has raised so noble a fabric? And where? And how? Who has begotten such a child,

The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect; nor can it be an abundant power: it must have been before

Intellect and abundance were; these are later and things of lack; abundance had to be made abundant and

These are very near to the unneeding, to that which has no need of Knowing, they have abundance and

intellection authentically, as being the first to possess. But, there is that before them which neither needs nor

possesses anything, since, needing or possessing anything else, it would not be what it is the Good.

1. "The IntellectualPrinciple" [= the Divine Mind] we read [in the Timaeus] "looks upon the Ideas

indwelling in that Being which is the Essentially Living [= according to Plotinus, the Intellectual Realm],

"and then" the text proceeds "the Creator judged that all the content of that essentially living Being must

Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before the IntellectualPrinciple so that it "sees them"

The first step is to make sure whether the "Living Being" of the text is to be distinguished from the

It might be argued that the IntellectualPrinciple is the Contemplator and therefore that the LivingBeing

contemplated is not the IntellectualPrinciple but must be described as the Intellectual Object so that the

IntellectualPrinciple must possess the Ideal realm as something outside of itself.

But this would mean that it possesses images and not the realities, since the realities are in the Intellectual

Realm which it contemplates: Reality we read is in the Authentic Existent which contains the essential

No: even though the IntellectualPrinciple and the Intellectual Object are distinct, they are not apart except

Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that these two constitute one substance

though, in a unity, admitting that distinction, of the intellectual act [as against passivity], without which there

can be no question of an IntellectualPrinciple and an Intellectual Object: what is meant is not that the

contemplatory Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it contains the Intellectual Realm

The Intelligible Object is the IntellectualPrinciple itself in its repose, unity, immobility: the

IntellectualPrinciple, contemplator of that object of the IntellectualPrinciple thus in repose is an active

manifestation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating,

stands as IntellectualPrinciple to that of which it has the intellection: it is IntellectualPrinciple in virtue of

having that intellection, and at the same time is Intellectual Object, by assimilation.

This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower Universe what it saw existing in the Supreme,

No doubt the passage: [of the Timaeus] seems to imply tacitly that this planning Principle is distinct from the

other two: but the three the EssentiallyLiving, the IntellectualPrinciple and this planning Principle will, to

others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a common accident, a particular trend of thought has

We have dealt with the first two; but the third this Principle which decides to work upon the objects [the

Ideas] contemplated by the IntellectualPrinciple within the EssentiallyLiving, to create them, to establish

It is possible that in one aspect the IntellectualPrinciple is the principle of partial existence, while in another

The entities thus particularized from the unity are products of the IntellectualPrinciple which thus would be,

to that extent, the separating agent. On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible; division begins with its

offspring which, of course, means with Souls: and thus a Soul with its particular Souls may be the

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third Principle and begins

within the Third: for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the

IntellectualPrinciple but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to which precisely, divided by its own

2.... For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not

shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the

science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline

himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards

the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it

At no point did the AllSoul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that

body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The

others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure they come from the AllSoul and they have a Place

into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this

AllSoul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next,

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it; for on that path it meets Authentic

Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards nonBeing: and this is the step it takes when it is set on

self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an image of itself a nonBeing and so is wandering,

as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing,

is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the IntellectualPrinciple, far removed from

As long as it remains at the midstage it is in its own peculiar region; but when, by a sort of inferior

orientation, it looks downward, it shapes that lower image and flings itself joyfully thither.

By its omnipresence: there is nowhere where it is not; it occupies, therefore, all that is; at once, it is

If it were simply and solely everywhere, all would be this one thing alone: but it is, also, in no place, and this

gives, in the final result, that, while all exists by means of it, in virtue of its omnipresence, all is distinct from

Because, universality demands a previous unity. It must, therefore, pervade all things and make all, but not be

(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing with the IntellectualPrinciple as the object of its vision it is

undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see: in other words, Soul is Matter to [its determinant] the

We know, and it is ourselves that we know; therefore we know the reality of a knowing nature: therefore,

before that intellection in Act, there is another intellection, one at rest, so to speak.

Similarly, that selfintellection is an act upon a reality and upon a life; therefore, before the Life and

RealBeing concerned in the intellection, there must be another Being and Life. In a word, intellection is

vested in the activities themselves: since, then, the activities of selfintellection are intellectiveforms, We,

the Authentic We, are the Intelligibles and selfintellection conveys the Image of the Intellectual Sphere.

(D) The Primal is a potentiality of Movement and of Repose and so is above and beyond both its next

subsequent has rest and movement about the Primal. Now this subsequent is the IntellectualPrinciple so

characterized by having intellection of something not identical with itself whereas the Primal is without

intellection. A knowing principle has duality [that entailed by being the knower of something) and, moreover,

it knows itself as deficient since its virtue consists in this knowing and not in its own bare Being.

(E) In the case of everything which has developed from possibility to actuality the actual is that which

remains selfidentical for its entire duration and this it is which makes perfection possible even in things of

the corporeal order, as for instance in fire but the actual of this kind cannot be everlasting since [by the fact of

their having once existed only in potentiality] Matter has its place in them. In anything, on the contrary, not

composite [= never touched by Matter or potentiality] and possessing actuality, that actual existence is

eternal... There is, however, the case, also in which a thing, itself existing in actuality, stands as potentiality to

(F)... But the First is not to be envisaged as made up from Gods of a transcendent order: no; the Authentic

Existents constitute the IntellectualPrinciple with Which motion and rest begin. The Primal touches nothing,

but is the centre round which those other Beings lie in repose and in movement. For Movement is aiming,

It possesses Itself and therefore is said in general terms to know itself... But intellection does not mean

selfownership; it means turning the gaze towards the Primal: now the act of intellection is itself the Primal

Act, and there is therefore no place for any earlier one. The Being projecting this Act transcends the Act so

that Intellection is secondary to the Being in which it resides. Intellection is not the transcendently venerable

thing neither Intellection in general nor even the Intellection of The Good. Apart from and over any

If of existent Good, that Good exists before and without any such consciousness: if the act of consciousness

produces that Good, then The Good was not previously in existence and, at once, the very consciousness

All that has selfconsciousness and selfintellection is derivative; it observes itself in order, by that activity,

to become master of its Being: and if it study itself this can mean only that ignorance inheres in it and that it

All thinking and knowing must, here, be eliminated: the addition introduces deprivation and deficiency.

1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the IntellectualPrinciple [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

There the IntellectualPrinciple is a concentrated all nothing of it distinguished or divided and in that

kosmos of unity all souls are concentrated also, with no spatial discrimination.

The IntellectualPrinciple is for ever repugnant to distinction and to partition. Soul, there without distinction

and partition, has yet a nature lending itself to divisional existence: its division is secession, entry into body.

In view of this seceding and the ensuing partition we may legitimately speak of it as a partible thing.

In that the secession is not of the soul entire; something of it holds its ground, that in it which recoils from

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

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.

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,

No doubt we make a very positive statement about it when we declare it to belong to the Intellectual Kind, to

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

There are, we hold, things primarily apt to partition, tending by sheer nature towards separate existence: they

are things in which no part is identical either with another part or with the whole, while, also their part is

necessarily less than the total and whole: these are magnitudes of the realm of sense, masses, each of which

has a station of its own so that none can be identically present in entirety at more than one point at one time.

But to that order is opposed Essence [RealBeing]; this is in no degree susceptible of partition; it is unparted

and impartible; interval is foreign to it, cannot enter into our idea of it: it has no need of place and is not, in

diffusion or as an entirety, situated within any other being: it is poised over all beings at once, and this is not

in the sense of using them as a base but in their being neither capable nor desirous of existing independently

of it; it is an essence eternally unvaried: it is common to all that follows upon it: it is like the circle's centre to

which all the radii are attached while leaving it unbrokenly in possession of itself, the starting point of their

course and of their essential being, the ground in which they all participate: thus the indivisible is the

principle of these divided existences and in their very outgoing they remain enduringly in contact with that

So far we have the primarily indivisible supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent and we

have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also another Kind, of earlier

rank than the sensible yet near to it and resident within it an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of part,

but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is

correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that

multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we

may think of colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated

objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various

manifestations. In the case of such idealforms we may affirm complete partibility.

But, on the other hand, that first utterly indivisible Kind must be accompanied by a subsequent Essence,

engendered by it and holding indivisibility from it but, in virtue of the necessary outgo from source, tending

firmly towards the contrary, the wholly partible; this secondary Essence will take an intermediate Place

between the first substance, the undivided, and that which is divisible in material things and resides in them.

Its presence, however, will differ in one respect from that of colour and quantity; these, no doubt, are present

identically and entire throughout diverse material masses, but each several manifestation of them is as distinct

The magnitude present in any mass is definitely one thing, yet its identity from part to part does not imply

any such community as would entail common experience; within that identity there is diversity, for it is a

The Essence, very near to the impartible, which we assert to belong to the Kind we are now dealing with, is at

once an Essence and an entrant into body; upon embodiment, it experiences a partition unknown before it

In whatsoever bodies it occupies even the vastest of all, that in which the entire universe is included it

This unity of an Essence is not like that of body, which is a unit by the mode of continuous extension, the

mode of distinct parts each occupying its own space. Nor is it such a unity as we have dealt with in the case

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,

To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and its power, the divinity and wonder of its

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 selfgathered 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

2. It can be demonstrated that soul must, necessarily, be of just this nature and that there can be no other soul

If it had the nature of body it would consist of isolated members each unaware of the conditions of every

other; there would be a particular soul say a soul of the finger answering as a distinct and independent

entity to every local experience; in general terms, there would be a multiplicity of souls administering each

individual; and, moreover, the universe would be governed not by one soul but by an incalculable number,

each standing apart to itself. But, without a dominant unity, continuity is meaningless.

The theory that "Impressions reach the leadingprinciple by progressive stages" must be dismissed as mere

In the first place, it affirms without investigation a "leading" phase of the soul.

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 selfconsistent 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

Again, suppose sensation vested in the "leadingprinciple" 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

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

On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity utterly strange to part, a selfgathered 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 circlecentre to every object [remote on the circumference], and the entire mass

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 multipresent, since to deny this would be

to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the universe; there must be a Kind which encircles and

supports all and conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence is multiple, and yet is

one soul always since a container must be a unity: by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the

multiplicity of the series of an all; by its impartible unity, it will conduct a total to wise ends.

In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the "leadingprinciple" is their mere unity a lower

This is the deeper meaning of the profound passage [in the Timaeus], where we read "By blending the

impartible, eternally unchanging essence with that in division among bodies, he produced a third form of

Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many; the IdealForm resident in body is many and one;

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

Our general instinct to seek and learn, our longing to possess ourselves of whatsoever is lovely in the vision

will, in all reason, set us enquiring into the nature of the instrument with which we search.

Now even in the universal Intellect [Divine Mind] there was duality, so that we would expect differences of

condition in things of part: how some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine beings

will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until we are considering the mode in which soul

comes to occupy body. For the moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls to be

Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against the theory that the human soul is a

mere segment of the AllSoul the considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is

intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that equality of intellection.

They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one idealform with their wholes. And they will

adduce Plato as expressing their view where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says "As our body

is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the soul of the All." It is admitted on clear

evidence that 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

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

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

The soul considered as an entirety cannot be a soul of any one given thing since it is an Essence [a divine

RealBeing] or, at least, there must be a soul which is not exclusively the soul of any particular thing, and

In such questions as this it is important to clarify the significance of "part."

Part, as understood of body uniform or varied need not detain us; it is enough to indicate that, when part is

mentioned in respect of things whose members are alike, it refers to mass and not to idealform [specific

idea]: take for example, whiteness: the whiteness in a portion of milk is not a part of the whiteness of milk in

general: we have the whiteness of a portion not a portion of whiteness; for whiteness is utterly without

That is all we need say with regard to part in material things; but part in the unembodied may be taken in

various ways. We may think of it in the sense familiar in numbers, "two" a part of the standard "ten" in

abstract numbers of course or as we think of a segment of a circle, or line [abstractly considered], or, again,

In the case of the units of reckoning and of geometrical figure, exactly as in that of corporeal masses,

partition must diminish the total; the part must be less than the whole; for these are things of quantity, and

have their being as things of quantity; and since they are not the idealform Quantity they are subject to

The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the AllSoul as some standard ten with

The Ten could not be [essentially] a unity [the Soul would be an aggregation, not a selfstanding

RealBeing] and, further unless every one of the single constituents were itself an AllSoul the AllSoul

Again, it is admitted that the particular soul this "part of the AllSoul is of one idealform with it, but this

does not entail the relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts there is nothing

inevitably making any portion uniform with the total: take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we

may divide it in different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided into triangles; all sorts of

different figures are possible: yet an absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul.

In a line, no doubt, the part is inevitably a line; but even here there is a necessary difference in size; and if, in

the case of the soul we similarly called upon magnitude as the distinction between constituents and collective

soul, then soul, thus classed by magnitude becomes quantitative, and is simply body.

But it is admitted that all souls are alike and are entireties; clearly, soul is not subject to part in the sense in

which magnitudes are: our opponents themselves would not consent to the notion of the AllSoul being

whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they would be doing, annulling the AllSoul if any collective

soul existed at all making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it like wine separated into many

portions, each portion, in its jar, being described as a portion of the total thing, wine.

Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the sense in which we speak of some single

The theorem is separate, but the science stands as one undivided thing, the expression and summed efficiency

[energy] of each constituent notion: this is partition without severance; each item potentially includes the

No; in such a relationship the AllSoul, 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

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

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

If the particular soul is a part of the AllSoul only in the sense that this bestows itself upon all living things of

the partial sphere, such a selfbestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the identical soul that is

present everywhere, the one complete thing, multipresent 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 Idealforms that can be taken in a variety

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

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 AllSoul, 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

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

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

There is no such difficulty in the case of the IntellectualPrinciple; 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

The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls the AllSoul, with the

others issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by

the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe;

they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth,

shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance.

The AllSoul would always remain above, since essentially it has nothing to do with descent or with the

lower, or with any tendency towards this sphere: the other souls would become ours [become "partial,"

individual in us] because their lot is cast for this sphere, and because they are solicited by a thing [the body]

The one the lowest soul in the to the AllSoul 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 AllSoul, 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,

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

At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in body; but Socrates ceases to exist,

In the Supreme, the IntellectualPrinciples are not annulled, for in their differentiation there is no bodily

partition, no passing of each separate phase into a distinct unity; every such phase remains in full possession

By their succession they are linked to the several IntellectualPrinciples, for they are the expression, the

Logos, of the IntellectualPrinciples, 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

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 IntellectualPrinciple, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which abides

in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the IntellectualPrinciple, and from it spring other

ReasonPrinciples, partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the Supreme.

6. But how comes it that while the AllSoul has produced a kosmos, the soul of the particular has not, though

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

To return, then: how and why has the AllSoul produced a kosmos, while the particular souls simply

In the first place, we are not surprised when men of identical knowledge differ greatly in effective power.

The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen

away from the AllSoul, 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

AllSoul] looks towards the universal IntellectualPrinciple [the exemplar of all that can be], while the

others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that which is already of the sphere of part;

perhaps, too, these also could have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator the work

accomplished before them an impediment inevitable whichsoever of the souls were first to operate.

But it is safer to account for the creative act by nearer connection with the overworld; the souls whose

tendency is exercised within the Supreme have the greater power; immune in that pure seat they create

securely; for the greater power takes the least hurt from the material within which it operates; and this power

remains enduringly attached to the overworld: it creates, therefore, self gathered and the created things

gather round it; the other souls, on the contrary, themselves go forth; that can mean only that they have

deserted towards the abyss; a main phase in them is drawn downward and pulls them with it in the desire

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

7. So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to imply that the other souls are parts of the

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;

He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the other souls brought into existence

after the AllSoul, 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 idealnature with the AllSoul.

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

As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic circuit, and taking character and condition thence; this is no

indication that they are parts: soulnature may very well take some tincture from even the qualities of place,

from water and from air; residence in this city or in that, and the varying makeup of the body may have their

We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over something from the AllSoul; 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.

As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is

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 selfsame soul

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

lifechoice made by a soul has a correspondence" we read "with its former lives."

As regards the nature of soul in general, the differences have been defined in the passage in which we

mentioned the secondary and tertiary orders and laid down that, while all souls are allcomprehensive, 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.

But, if in the total the organization in which they have their being is compact of variety as it must be since

every ReasonPrinciple is a unity of multiplicity and variety, and may be thought of as a psychic animated

organism having many shapes at its command if this is so and all constitutes a system in which being is not

cut adrift from being, if there is nothing chance borne among beings as there is none even in bodily

organisms, then it follows that Number must enter into the scheme; for, once again, Being must be stable; the

members of the Intellectual must possess identity, each numerically one; this is the condition of individuality.

Where, as in bodily masses, the Idea is not essentially native, and the individuality is therefore in flux,

existence under ideal form can rise only out of imitation of the Authentic Existences; these last, on the

contrary, not rising out of any such conjunction [as the duality of Idea and dead Matter] have their being in

that which is numerically one, that which was from the beginning, and neither becomes what it has not been

Even supposing RealBeings [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 RealBeing; 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

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

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,

When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the LifePrinciple 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

9. But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body the manner and the process a question

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

Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any

What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from body, first comes into commerce

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

In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other place to which its nature would

allow it to descend. Since go forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists.

While the Soul [as an eternal, a Divine Being] is at rest in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute yet, as

we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of

its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings

to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever

degree of that ReasonPrinciple it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest.

Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who,

yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to

its Being as far as it can share in Being or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never

descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the kosmos is ensouled, not by a

soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul

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 farreaching 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 ReasonPrinciple proceeding from

soul; and that ReasonPrinciple is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the

10. In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the unit, and consider the entire scheme as

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 overworld 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

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

FormingIdea 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

ReasonPrinciples 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 RealBeing.

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 RealBeing; 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 ReasonPrinciple

must be aiming; in that other world [under the soul but above the material] the entire shape [as well as the

idea] comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the

engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the soul has

elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose.

Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its powers: fire produces warmth; another

source produces cold; soul has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within outwards

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

RealBeing and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it contains the

The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the

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

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the

ReasonPrinciples in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a

ReasonPrinciple which itself images a prematerial ReasonPrinciple: 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 IntellectualPrinciple 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

Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of

difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial

These Beings [the ReasonPrinciples 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

12. The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in

a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect;

it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have

descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.

Their initial descent is deepened since that midpart of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the

careneeding thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the

bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that

they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt.

For the container of the total of things must be a selfsufficing entity and remain so: in its periods it is

wrought out to purpose under its ReasonPrinciples which are perdurably valid; by these periods it reverts

unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined lifeduration, to its established character; it is leading the

things of this realm to be of one voice and plan with the Supreme. And thus the kosmic content is carried

forward to its purpose, everything in its coordinate place, under one only ReasonPrinciple operating alike

We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the kosmos; they are not

independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in

harmonious association with kosmic circuit to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their

choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars and out of this concordance rises as it were

one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth.

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 lifecareers 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 WorldSoul] maintaining the

unvarying march [of the kosmic circuit] the other [the soul of the Individual] adopting itself to times and

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

13. The Ineluctable, the Kosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural principle under which each several entity is

overruled to go, duly and in order, towards that place and Kind to which it characteristically tends, that is

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

The Souls go forth neither under compulsion nor of freewill; or, at least, freedom, here, is not to be regarded

as action upon preference; it is more like such a leap of the nature as moves men to the instinctive desire of

sexual union, or, in the case of some, to fine conduct; the motive lies elsewhere than in the reason: like is

destined unfailingly to like, and each moves hither or thither at its fixed moment.

Even the IntellectualPrinciple, which is before all the kosmos, has, it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact

above, and of giving downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose existence is implied in the law

of the universal; for the universal broods closely over the particular; it is not from without that the law derives

the power by which it is executed; on the contrary the law is given in the entities upon whom it falls; these

bear it about with them. Let but the moment arrive, and what it decrees will be brought to act by those beings

in whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it prevails because it is within them; it becomes like

a heavy burden, and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are bidden from

14. Thus it comes about that this kosmos, lit with many lights, gleaming in its souls, receives still further

graces, gifts from here and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other

IntellectualPrinciples whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably the secret of the myth in which, after

Prometheus had moulded woman, the other gods heaped gifts upon her, Hephaistos "blending the clay with

moisture and bestowing the human voice and the form of a goddess"; Aphrodite bringing her gifts, and the

Graces theirs, and other gods other gifts, and finally calling her by the name [Pandora] which tells of gift and

of all giving for all have added something to this formation brought to being by a Promethean, a

forethinking power. As for the rejection of Prometheus' gift by afterthought, Epimetheus, what can this

signify but that the wiser choice is to remain in the Intellectual realm? Pandora's creator is fettered, to signify

that he is in some sense held by his own creation; such a fettering is external and the release by Hercules tells

Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the bestowal of gifts upon the kosmos as

15. The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body;

this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude [physical

extension] they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the very

lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they

As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in the bodies entered, or to the accidents of life,

or to upbringing, or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these influences together, or to specific

Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes

are betimes too their own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne, have the strength of

selfmastery in all that is left to their own act; they have given themselves to another dispensation: they live

by the code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the ReasonPrinciples and all the

other causes ruling in the kosmos, out of soulmovements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code,

therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon them, linking their sequents back to them,

keeping unshakeably true all that is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature, and leading round

In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is determined by the descendent beings themselves.

16. The punishment justly overtaking the wicked must therefore be ascribed to the kosmic order which leads

But what of chastisements, poverty, illness, falling upon the good outside of all justice? These events, we will

be told, are equally interwoven into the world order and fall under prediction, and must consequently have a

No: such misfortunes do not answer to reasons established in the nature of things; they are not laid up in the

masterfacts of the universe, but were merely accidental sequents: a house falls, and anyone that chances to

be underneath is killed, no matter what sort of man he be: two objects are moving in perfect order or one if

you like but anything getting in the way is wounded or trampled down. Or we may reason that the

undeserved stroke can be no evil to the sufferer in view of the beneficent interweaving of the All or again, no

We may not think of some things being fitted into a system with others abandoned to the capricious; if things

must happen by cause, by natural sequences, under one ReasonPrinciple and a single set scheme, we must

admit that the minor equally with the major is fitted into that order and pattern.

Wrongdoing from man to man is wrong in the doer and must be imputed, but, as belonging to the

established order of the universe is not a wrong even as regards the innocent sufferer; it is a thing that had to

be, and, if the sufferer is good, the issue is to his gain. For we cannot think that this ordered combination

proceeds without God and justice; we must take it to be precise in the distribution of due, while, yet, the

reasons of things elude us, and to our ignorance the scheme presents matter of censure.

17. Various considerations explain why the Souls going forth from the Intellectual proceed first to the

heavenly regions. The heavens, as the noblest portion of sensible space, would border with the least exalted

of the Intellectual, and will, therefore, be first ensouled first to participate as most apt; while what is of earth

is at the very extremity of progression, least endowed towards participation, remotest from the unembodied.

All the souls, then, shine down upon the heavens and spend there the main of themselves and the best; only

their lower phases illuminate the lower realms; and those souls which descend deepest show their light

furthest down not themselves the better for the depth to which they have penetrated.

There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle of light shed from it; round centre and first

circle alike, another circle, light from light; outside that again, not another circle of light but one which,

The last we may figure to ourselves as a revolving circle, or rather a sphere, of a nature to receive light from

that third realm, its next higher, in proportion to the light which that itself receives. Thus all begins with the

great light, shining selfcentred; in accordance with the reigning plan [that of emanation] this gives forth its

brilliance; the later [divine] existents [souls] add their radiation some of them remaining above, while there

are some that are drawn further downward, attracted by the splendour of the object they illuminate. These last

find that their charges need more and more care: the steersman of a stormtossed ship is so intent on saving it

that he forgets his own interest and never thinks that he is recurrently in peril of being dragged down with the

vessel; similarly the souls are intent upon contriving for their charges and finally come to be pulled down by

them; they are fettered in bonds of sorcery, gripped and held by their concern for the realm of Nature.

If every living being were of the character of the Allperfect, selfsufficing, in peril from no outside

influence the soul now spoken of as indwelling would not occupy the body; it would infuse life while

18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether the soul uses deliberate reason before its

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 selfsufficing intelligence; craftsmen faced by a

difficulty stop to consider; where there is no problem their art works on by its own forthright power.

But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be called reasoning souls?

One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy issue, should occasion arise: but all is

met by repudiating the particular kind of reasoning intended [the earthly and discursive type]; we may

represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows uninterruptedly from the IntellectualPrinciple in them, an

inherent state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real; in this way they would be users of reason even

when in that overworld. We certainly cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though

they may occupy bodies in the heavenly region, they are essentially in the Intellectual: and very surely the

deliberation of doubt and difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There; all their act

must fall into place by sheer force of their nature; there can be no question of commanding or of taking

counsel; they will know, each, what is to be communicated from another, by present consciousness. Even in

our own case here, eyes often know what is not spoken; and There all is pure, every being is, as it were, an

eye, nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech, everything is seen and known. As for

the Celestials [the Daimones] and souls in the air, they may well use speech; for all such are simply Animate

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.

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

"In bodies": we must then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is required to produce life in the

corporeal, and what there must be of soul present throughout such a body, such a completed organism.

Now, every sensitive power by the fact of being sensitive throughout tends to become a thing of parts:

present at every distinct point of sensitiveness, it may be thought of as divided. In the sense, however, that it

is present as a whole at every such point, it cannot be said to be wholly divided; it "becomes divisible in

body." We may be told that no such partition is implied in any sensations but those of touch; but this is not

so; where the participant is body [of itself insensitive and nontransmitting] 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

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 selfstanding 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

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

The matter is difficult: if we do not allot to each of the parts of the Soul some form of Place, but leave all

unallocated no more within the body than outside it we leave the body soulless, and are at a loss to explain

plausibly the origin of acts performed by means of the bodily organs: if, on the other hand, we suppose some

of those phases to be [capable of situation] in place but others not so, we will be supposing that those parts to

which we deny place are ineffective in us, or, in other words, that we do not possess our entire soul.

This simply shows that neither the soul entire nor 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

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 passingover from the soul that selfgathered thing to the

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

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

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

Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum: anything in a substratum is a condition affecting that a

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

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

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

Because the soul is not seen and the body is: we perceive the body, and by its movement and sensation we

understand that it is ensouled, and we say that it possesses a soul; to speak of residence is a natural sequence.

If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full

force to the very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in body; we would say the minor

was within the major, the contained within the container, the fleeting within the perdurable.

21. What does all this come to? What answer do we give to 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

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

We can imagine it within the body in some incidental way for example, as a voyager in a ship but scarcely

as the steersman: and, of course, too, the steersman is not omnipresent to the ship as the soul is to the body.

May we, perhaps, compare it to the science or skill that acts through its appropriate instruments through a

helm, let us say, which should happen to be a live thing so that the soul effecting the movements dictated by

No: the comparison breaks down, since the science is something outside of helm and ship.

Is it any help to adopt the illustration of the steersman taking the helm, and to station the soul within the body

as the steersman may be thought to be within the material instrument through which he works? Soul,

whenever and wherever it chooses to operate, does in much that way move the body.

No; even in this parallel we have no explanation of the mode of presence within the instrument; we cannot be

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

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 AllSoul is

The phases present are those which the nature of body demands: they are present without being resident

For the purposes of sensation the sensitive phase of the soul is present to the entire sensitive being: for the

purposes of act, differentiation begins; every soul phase operates at a point peculiar to itself.

23. I explain: A living body is illuminated by soul: each organ and member participates in soul after some

manner peculiar to itself; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle of the

soulfaculty 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

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 soulfaculty concerned makes itself present; the

nerves start from the brain. The brain therefore has been considered as the centre and seat of the principle

which determines feeling and impulse and the entire act of the organism as a living thing; where the

instruments are found to be linked, there the operating faculty is assumed to be situated. But it would be

wiser to say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating faculty: the power to be exercised by

the operator in keeping with the particular instrument must be considered as concentrated at the point at

which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the soul's faculty is of universal scope the sounder

statement is that the point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act.

Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the sensitive and representative soul; it

draws upon the ReasonPrinciple 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 ReasonPrinciple impinges upon the brain. They saw that something must be definitely

allocated to body at the point most receptive of the act of reason while something, utterly isolated from

body must be in contact with that superior thing which is a form of soul [and not merely of the vegetative or

other quasicorporeal forms but] of that soul apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the

Such a linking there must be, since in perception there is some element of judging, in representation

something intuitional, and since impulse and appetite derive from representation and reason. The reasoning

faculty, therefore, is present where these experiences occur, present not as in a place but in the fact that what

is there draws upon it. As regards perception we have already explained in what sense it is local.

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which

maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins

and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a

place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to

birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood subtle, light, swift,

pure is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its wellspring, the place where such blood is

sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature.

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

If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that

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 foreordained 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

selfchosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law decrees, also, the intensity and the

duration of the suffering while it carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of rising from

those places of pain all by power of the harmony that maintains the universal scheme.

Souls, bodybound, are apt to bodypunishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point

any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; bodyfree, containing nothing of

body there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the Divinity, among Those, within That,

If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are and in your seeking, seek otherwise than with

25. Now comes the question, equally calling for an answer, whether those souls that have quitted the places

of earth retain memory of their lives all souls or some, of all things, or of some things, and, again, for ever

A true investigation of this matter requires us to establish first what a remembering principle must be I do

not mean what memory is, but in what order of beings it can occur. The nature of memory has been indicated,

laboured even, elsewhere; we still must try to understand more clearly what characteristics are present where

Now a memory has to do with something brought into ken from without, something learned or something

experienced; the MemoryPrinciple, therefore, cannot belong to such beings as are immune from experience

No memory, therefore, can be ascribed to any divine being, or to the AuthenticExistent or the

IntellectualPrinciple: these are intangibly immune; time does not approach them; they possess eternity

centred around Being; they know nothing of past and sequent; all is an unbroken state of identity, not

receptive of change. Now a being rooted in unchanging identity cannot entertain memory, since it has not and

never had a state differing from any previous state, or any new intellection following upon a former one, so as

to be aware of contrast between a present perception and one remembered from before.

But what prevents such a being [from possessing memory in the sense of] perceiving, without variation in

Simply the fact that following the changes of the revolving kosmos it would have perception of earlier and

We cannot hold its selfintellections to be acts of memory; this is no question of something entering from

without, to be grasped and held in fear of an escape; if its intellections could slip away from it [as a memory

might] its very Essence [as the Hypostasis of inherent Intellection] would be in peril.

For the same reason memory, in the current sense, cannot be attributed to the soul in connection with the

ideas inherent in its essence: these it holds not as a memory but as a possession, though, by its very entrance

The Soulaction which is to be observed seems to have induced the Ancients to ascribe memory, and

"Recollection," [the Platonic Anamnesis] to souls bringing into outward manifestation the ideas they contain:

we see at once that the memory here indicated is another kind; it is a memory outside of time.

But, perhaps, this is treating too summarily a matter which demands minute investigation. It might be

doubted whether that recollection, that memory, really belongs to the highest soul and not rather to another, a

dimmer, or even to the Couplement, the LivingBeing. And if to that dimmer soul, when and how has it

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

26. Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of

that double nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to

the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the body to the tool employed: the body is passive and

menial; the soul is active, reading such impressions as are made upon the body or discerned by means of the

body, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the bodily experiences.

In such a process it is at once clear that the sensation is a shared task; but the memory is not thus made over

to the Couplement, since the soul has from the first taken over the impression, either to retain or to reject.

It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function of the Couplement, on the ground that

bodily constitution determines our memories good or bad; but the answer would come that, whether the body

happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the soul. And in the case of

matters learned [and not merely felt, as corporeal experiences], how can we think of the Couplement of soul

We may be told that the livingbeing 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 livingbeing 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 honeywine all

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

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 downthrust [as of

the seal] nor [the acceptance] as in the wax: the process is entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon

things of sense; and what kind of resistance [or other physical action] can be affirmed in matters of the

intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or bodily quality as a means?

Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul; it alone can remember its

own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never

came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul

cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know.

If the soul is to have any significance to be a definite principle with a function of its own we are forced to

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.

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

27. But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that

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 jointbeing 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

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told: what can we think that other, the

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

The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty of the soul memory resides.

28. Is memory vested in the faculty by which we perceive and learn? Or does it reside in the faculty by which

we set things before our minds as objects of desire or of anger, the passionate faculty?

This will be maintained on the ground that there could scarcely be both a first faculty in direct action and a

second to remember what that first experiences. It is certain that the desiring faculty is apt to be stirred by

what it has once enjoyed; the object presents itself again; evidently, memory is at work; why else, the same

But, at that, we might reasonably ascribe to the desiring faculty the very perception of the desired objects and

then the desire itself to the perceptive faculty, and so on all through, and in the end conclude that the

Yet the perception is very different from faculty to faculty; certainly it is sight and not desire that sees the

object; desire is stirred merely as a result of the seeing, by a transmission; its act is not in the nature of an

identification of an object seen; all is simply blind response [automatic reaction]. Similarly with rage; sight

reveals the offender and the passion leaps; we may think of a shepherd seeing a wolf at his flock, and a dog,

In other words the desiring faculty has had the emotion, but the trace it keeps of the event is not a memory; it

is a condition, something passively accepted: there is another faculty that was aware of the enjoyment and

retains the memory of what has happened. This is confirmed by the fact that many satisfactions which the

desiring faculty has enjoyed are not retained in the memory: if memory resided in the desiring faculty, such

29. Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make one principle of our nature the seat

Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive

[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is not the faculty that perceives, but some other

And further if the perceptive faculty [= the memory] deals with matters learned [as well as with matters of

observation and feeling] it will be the faculty for the processes of reason also: but these two orders certainly

Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension [one covering both sense perceptions and ideas]

The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for objects of sense and objects of the

IntellectualKind; 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

And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the principle by which we perceive should be

the principle by which we remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one faculty? Why must the

seat of our intellectual action be also the seat of our remembrance of that action? The most powerful thought

does not always go with the readiest memory; people of equal perception are not equally good at

remembering; some are especially gifted in perception, others, never swift to grasp, are strong to retain.

But, once more, admitting two distinct principles, something quite separate remembering what

senseperception has first known still this something must have felt what it is required to remember?

No; we may well conceive that where there is to be memory of a senseperception, this perception becomes a

mere presentment, and that to this imagegrasping power, a distinct thing, belongs the memory, the retention

of the object: for in this imaging faculty the perception culminates; the impression passes away but the vision

By the fact of harbouring the presentment of an object that has disappeared, the imagination is, at once, a seat

of memory: where the persistence of the image is brief, the memory is poor; people of powerful memory are

those in whom the imageholding power is firmer, not easily allowing the record to be jostled out of its grip.

Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory deals with images. Its differing quality or

degree from man to man, we would explain by difference or similarity in the strength of the individual

powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily conditions present or absent, producing change and disorder or

30. But what of the memory of mental acts: do these also fall under the imaging faculty?

If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture

of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained. But if there is no

such necessary image, another solution must be sought. Perhaps memory would be the reception, into the

imagetaking faculty, of the ReasonPrinciple which accompanies the mental conception: this mental

conception an indivisible thing, and one that never rises to the exterior of the consciousness lies unknown

below; the ReasonPrinciple the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the imagetaking faculty

exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the apprehension by the imagetaking faculty would thus constitute the

This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this

imagetaking 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

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

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 coexistence in man of two lifeprinciples utterly unrelated.

And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what difference is there in the souls; and how does

The 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 selfstanding thing though its isolation

is not perceived, for the simple reason that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation.

The two have run into a unity in which, yet, one is the loftier: this loftier knows all; when it breaks from the

union, it retains some of the experiences of its companion, but dismisses others; thus we accept the talk of our

less valued associates, but, on a change of company, we remember little from the first set and more from

32. But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all that the better sort of man may reasonably

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

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

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, lightfooted, selfconducted.

Thus it is that even in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting away, amid its actual

life, all that is foreign to that order. It brings there very little of what it has gathered here; as long as it is in the

The Hercules of the heavenly regions would still tell of his feats: but there is the other man to whom all of

that is trivial; he has been translated to a holier place; he has won his way to the Intellectual Realm; he is

1. What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has

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

When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is room for nothing else than to know and to

contemplate the object; and in the knowing there is not included any previous knowledge; all such assertion

of stage and progress belongs to the lower and is a sign of the altered; this means that, once purely in the

Intellectual, no one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further; if all intellection is timeless

as appears from the fact that the Intellectual beings are of eternity not of time there can be no memory in the

intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things but none whatever: all is presence There; for nothing

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

selfcontained 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

No: in the nature of grasping all the intellectual facts of a many that constitutes a unity. For since the object

of vision has variety [distinction within its essential oneness] the intuition must be multiple and the intuitions

various, just as in a face we see at the one glance eyes and nose and all the rest.

But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity?

No: there has already been discrimination within the IntellectualPrinciple; the Act of the soul is little more

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

Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all

The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such as to allow of its being multiple to

another principle [the soul], to which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one indivisible

object of intuition: its activities do not [like its essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple

in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually become all things.

For with the Intellectual or Supreme considered as distinct from the One there is already the power of

harbouring that Principle of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its superior.

2. Enough on that point: we come now to the question of memory of the personality?

There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that the contemplator is the self Socrates, for

example or that it is Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in mind that, in contemplative

vision, especially when it is vivid, we are not at the time aware of our own personality; we are in possession

of ourselves but the activity is towards the object of vision with which the thinker becomes identified; he has

made himself over as matter to be shaped; he takes ideal form under the action of the vision while remaining,

potentially, himself. This means that he is actively himself when he has intellection of nothing.

Or, if he is himself [pure and simple], he is empty of all: if, on the contrary, he is himself [by the

selfpossession of contemplation] in such a way as to be identified with what is all, then by the act of

selfintellection he has the simultaneous intellection of all: in such a case selfintuition by personal activity

brings the intellection, not merely of the self, but also of the total therein embraced; and similarly the

intuition of the total of things brings that of the personal self as included among all.

But such a process would appear to introduce into the Intellectual that element of change against which we

The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the IntellectualPrinciple, 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

None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the dispensation of a variety confronting it and

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 IntellectualPrinciple by the

sheer fact of its selforientation, for by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is taken

into unison, and in that association becomes one with the IntellectualPrinciple 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 selfawareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the Supreme.

3. But it leaves that conjunction; it cannot suffer that unity; it falls in love with its own powers and

possessions, and desires to stand apart; it leans outward so to speak: then, it appears to acquire a memory of

In this selfmemory 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 bearinginmind 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,

4. In that realm it has also vision, through the IntellectualPrinciple, of The Good which does not so hold to

itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance and,

indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the tertiaries.

If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the same principle of penetration comes into play, and

it possesses itself, by memory and imagination, of the thing it desired: and hence the memory, even dealing

with the highest, is not the highest. Memory, of course, must be understood not merely of what might be

called the sense of remembrance, but so as to include a condition induced by the past experience or vision.

There is such a thing as possessing more powerfully without consciousness than in full knowledge; with full

awareness the possession is of something quite distinct from the self; unconscious possession runs very close

to identity, and any such approach to identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the soul.

If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its memories of the lower, it must have in some

form possessed them even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in abeyance: they

could not be in the nature of impressions permanently adopted a notion which would entail absurdities but

were no more than a potentiality 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.

5. But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective

At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within

us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed it: this

principle awakens where it wakens; and it alone has vision in that order; for this is no matter to be brought to

us by way of analogy, or by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere; the power which, even

here, we possess of discoursing upon the Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which

alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to speak, and thus attain the vision of the

Supreme, as one, standing on some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have not mounted

Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher spheres; it is first known in the

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 midrealm] 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.

They will recall their memories, of the same things, but with less force than those still in the celestial, since

they have had other experiences to remember, and the lapse of time will have utterly obliterated much of

But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have turned to the senseknown kosmos, and

They need not fall to the ultimate depth: their downward movement may be checked at some one moment of

the way; and as long as they have not touched the lowest of the region of process [the point at which

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

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

Now if, immune from all lack, they neither seek nor doubt, and never learn, nothing being absent at any time

from their knowledge what reasonings, what processes of rational investigation, can take place in them,

Even as regards human concerns they have no need for observation or method; their administration of our

affairs and of earth's in general does not go so; the right ordering, which is their gift to the universe, is

Ah, no: it is that they see God still and always, and that, as long as they see, they cannot tell themselves they

7. Well but can they not tell themselves that yesterday, or last year, they moved round the earth, that they

Their living is eternal, and eternity is an unchanging unity. To identify a yesterday or a last year in their

movement would be like isolating the movement of one of the feet, and finding a this or a that and an entire

series in what is a single act. The movement of the celestial beings is one movement: it is our measuring that

presents us with many movements, and with distinct days determined by intervening nights: There all is one

Still: the space traversed is different; there are the various sections of the Zodiac: why, then, should not the

soul say "I have traversed that section and now I am in this other?" If, also, it looks down over the concerns

of men, must it not see the changes that befall them, that they are not as they were, and, by that observation,

that the beings and the things concerned were otherwise formerly? And does not that mean memory?

8. But, we need not record in memory all we see; mere incidental concomitants need not occupy the

imagination; when things vividly present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete form, it is

not necessary unless for purposes of a strictly practical administration to pass over that direct

acquaintance, and fasten upon the partial sensepresentation, which is already known in the larger

First: it is not essential that everything seen should be laid up in the mind; for when the object is of no

importance, or of no personal concern, the sensitive faculty, stimulated by the differences in the objects

present to vision, acts without accompaniment of the will, and is alone in entertaining the impression. The

soul does not take into its deeper recesses such differences as do not meet any of its needs, or serve any of its

purposes. Above all, when the soul's act is directed towards another order, it must utterly reject the memory

of such things, things over and done with now, and not even taken into knowledge when they were present.

On the second point: circumstances, purely accidental, need not be present to the imaging faculty, and if they

do so appear they need not be retained or even observed, and in fact the impression of any such circumstance

does not entail awareness. Thus in local movement, if there is no particular importance to us in the fact that

we pass through first this and then that portion of air, or that we proceed from some particular point, we do

not take notice, or even know it as we walk. Similarly, if it were of no importance to us to accomplish any

given journey, mere movement in the air being the main concern, we would not trouble to ask at what

particular point of place we were, or what distance we had traversed; if we have to observe only the act of

movement and not its duration, nothing to do which obliges us to think of time, the minutes are not recorded

And finally, it is of common knowledge that, when the understanding is possessed of the entire act

undertaken and has no reason to foresee any departure from the normal, it will no longer observe the detail; in

a process unfailingly repeated without variation, attention to the unvarying detail is idleness.

So it is with the stars. They pass from point to point, but they move on their own affairs and not for the sake

of traversing the space they actually cover; the vision of the things that appear on the way, the journey by,

nothing of this is their concern: their passing this or that is of accident not of essence, and their intention is to

greater objects: moreover each of them journeys, unchangeably, the same unchanging way; and again, there

is no question to them of the time they spend in any given section of the journey, even supposing time

division to be possible in the case. All this granted, nothing makes it necessary that they should have any

memory of places or times traversed. Besides this life of the ensouled stars is one identical thing [since they

are one in the AllSoul] so that their very spatial movement is pivoted upon identity and resolves itself into a

movement not spatial but vital, the movement of a single living being whose act is directed to itself, a being

which to anything outside is at rest, but is in movement by dint of the inner life it possesses, the eternal life.

Or we may take the comparison of the movement of the heavenly bodies to a choral dance; if we think of it as

a dance which comes to rest at some given period, the entire dance, accomplished from beginning to end, will

be perfect while at each partial stage it was imperfect: but if the dance is a thing of eternity, it is in eternal

perfection. And if it is in eternal perfection, it has no points of time and place at which it will achieve

perfection; it will, therefore, have no concern about attaining to any such points: it will, therefore, make no

measurements of time or place; it will have, therefore, no memory of time and place.

If the stars live a blessed life in their vision of the life inherent in their souls, and if, by force of their souls'

tendency to become one, and by the light they cast from themselves upon the entire heavens, they are like the

strings of a lyre which, being struck in tune, sing a melody in some natural scale... if this is the way the

heavens, as one, are moved, and the component parts in their relation to the whole the sidereal system

moving as one, and each part in its own way, to the same purpose, though each, too, hold its own place then

our doctrine is all the more surely established; the life of the heavenly bodies is the more clearly an unbroken

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, coordinating, calculating

for what is to be, must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief in producing?

Even this matter of Zeus' memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it is a question of their being numbered,

and of his knowledge of their number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in time

[which is not so]; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know the number of his works.

The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue of one life for ever: it is in this sense that

the All is unlimited, and thus Zeus' knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from outside but as of

something embraced in true knowledge, for this unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself or, to

be more accurate, eternally follows upon him and is seen by an indwelling knowledge; Zeus knows his own

unlimited life, and, in that knowledge knows the activity that flows from him to the kosmos; but he knows it

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

When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must leave out all notions of stage and

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

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

11. The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a living unit: there is the action determined

by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the

principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals and on the parts directly affected will often be

baffled and obliged to all sorts of calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of principle and need no

deliberation. And in so far as the kosmos is a conducted thing, its administration and its administrator will

And in the case of the universe, the administration is all the less complicated from the fact that the soul

actually circumscribes, as parts of a living unity, all the members which it conducts. For all the Kinds

included in the universe are dominated by one Kind, upon which they follow, fitted into it, developing from

it, growing out of it, just as the Kind manifested in the bough is related to the Kind in the tree as a whole.

What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what place for memory, where wisdom and

knowledge are eternal, unfailingly present, effective, dominant, administering in an identical process?

The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not warrant the notion that the producer must

be subject to corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more certain the

unchanging identity of the producer: even in the single animal the events produced by Nature are many and

not simultaneous; there are the periods, the developments at fixed epochs horns, beard, maturing breasts, the

acme of life, procreation but the principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not thereby

annulled; there is process of growth, but no diversity in the initial principle. The identity underlying all the

multiplicity is confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent is exhibited unchanged,

undiminished, in the offspring. We have reason, then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops

both, and that this is the unalterable wisdom of the kosmos taken as a whole; it is manifold, diverse and yet

simplex, presiding over the most comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise altered within itself by this

multiplicity, but stably one ReasonPrinciple, the concentrated totality of things: if it were not thus all things,

12. It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are the work of Nature, but that, since there is

wisdom within the All, there must be also, by the side of such natural operation, acts of reasoning and of

But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what in fact is unwisdom, taking the search for

wisdom to be wisdom itself. For what can reasoning be but a struggle, the effort to discover the wise course,

to attain the principle which is true and derives from realbeing? To reason is like playing the cithara for the

sake of achieving the art, like practising with a view to mastery, like any learning that aims at knowing. What

reasoners seek, the wise hold: wisdom, in a word, is a condition in a being that possesses repose. Think what

happens when one has accomplished the reasoning process: as soon as we have discovered the right course,

we cease to reason: we rest because we have come to wisdom. If then we are to range the leading principle of

the All among learners, we must allow it reasonings, perplexities and those acts of memory which link the

past with the present and the future: if it is to be considered as a knower, then the wisdom within it consists in

a rest possessing the object [absolved, therefore, from search and from remembrance].

Again, if the leading principle of the universe knows the future as it must then obviously it will know by

what means that future is to come about; given this knowledge, what further need is there of its reasoning

towards it, or confronting past with present? And, of course, this knowledge of things to come admitting it

to exist is not like that of the diviners; it is that of the actual causing principles holding the certainty that the

thing will exist, the certainty inherent in the alldisposers, above perplexity and hesitancy; the notion is

constituent and therefore unvarying. The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the

present; it is a knowledge in repose and thus a knowledge transcending the processes of cogitation.

If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future which it is of itself to produce, it cannot

produce with knowledge or to purpose; it will produce just what happens to come, that is to say by haphazard.

As this cannot be, it must create by some stable principle; its creations, therefore, will be shaped in the model

stored up in itself; there can be no varying, for, if there were, there could also be failure.

The produced universe will contain difference, but its diversities spring not from its own action but from its

obedience to superior principles which, again, spring from the creating power, so that all is guided by

ReasonPrinciples in their series; thus the creating power is in no sense subjected to experimenting, to

perplexity, to that preoccupation which to some minds makes the administration of the All seem a task of

difficulty. Preoccupation would obviously imply the undertaking of alien tasks, some business that would

mean not completely within the powers; but where the power is sovereign and sole, it need take thought of

nothing but itself and its own will, which means its own wisdom, since in such a being the will is wisdom.

Here, then, creating makes no demand, since the wisdom that goes to it is not sought elsewhere, but is the

creator's very self, drawing on nothing outside not, therefore, on reasoning or on memory, which are

13. But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the universe and the principle known as

This Wisdom is a first [within the AllSoul] 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 ReasonPrinciple: 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

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

Thus the IntellectualPrinciple possesses: the Soul of the All eternally receives from it; this is the soul's life;

its consciousness is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it; what proceeds from it into Matter

and is manifested there is Nature, with which or even a little before it the series of real being comes to an

end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual order and the beginnings of the imitative.

There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul, and receives from it: soul, near to

Nature but superior, operates towards Nature but without receiving in turn; and there is the still higher phase

14. Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental materials of things are its very produce,

Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light and air remain each itself, never coalescing: is

It is rather that existing between fire and the object it has warmed: the fire withdrawn, there remains a certain

warmth, distinct from that in the fire, a property, so to speak, of the object warmed. For the shape which

Nature imparts to what it has moulded must be recognized as a form quite distinct from Nature itself, though

it remains a question to be examined whether besides this [specific] form there is also an intermediary, a link

The difference between Nature and the Wisdom described as dwelling in the All has been sufficiently dealt

15. But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement: Eternity is characteristic of the

IntellectualPrinciple, 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 AllSoul 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

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

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 AllSoul] 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

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

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 ReasonPrinciples. In the engendered, dissimilarity is not compatible with unity,

though in the ReasonPrinciples supporting the engendered such unity of dissimilars does occur hand and

foot are in unity in the ReasonPrinciple [of man], but apart in the realm of sense. Of course, even in that

ideal realm there is apartness, but in a characteristic mode, just as in a mode, there is priority.

Now, apartness may be explained as simply differentiation: but how account for priority unless on the

assumption of some ordering principle arranging from above, and in that disposal necessarily affirming a

There must be such a principle, or all would exist simultaneously; but the indicated conclusion does not

follow unless order and ordering principle are distinct; if the ordering principle is Primal Order, there is no

such affirmation of series; there is simply making, the making of this thing after that thing. The affirmation

would imply that the ordering principle looks away towards Order and therefore is not, itself, Order.

Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is soul, pure idea, the power and energy

second only to the IntellectualPrinciple: 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

The total scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a centre, the IntellectualPrinciple as

an unmoving circle, the Soul as a circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration: the IntellectualPrinciple

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

17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the ReasonPrinciples 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

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 selfdetermined but guided by the variations of the external: thus the will changes to meet

every incident as each fresh need arises and as the external impinges in its successive things and events.

A variety of governing principles must mean variety in the images formed upon the representative faculty,

images not issuing from one internal centre, but, by difference of origin and of acting point, strange to each

other, and so bringing compulsion to bear upon the movements and efficiencies of the self.

When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the 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.

No: the doubt and the change of standard are of the Conjoint [of the soulphase in contact with body]; still,

the right reason of that highest is weaker by being given over to inhabit this mingled mass: not that it sinks in

its own nature: it is much as amid the tumult of a public meeting the best adviser speaks but fails to dominate;

assent goes to the roughest of the brawlers and roarers, while the man of good counsel sits silent, ineffectual,

The lowest human type exhibits the baser nature; the man is a compost calling to mind inferior political

organization: in the midtype we have a citizenship in which some better section sways a demotic

constitution not out of control: in the superior type the life is aristocratic; it is the career of one emancipated

from what is a base in humanity and tractable to the better; in the finest type, where the man has brought

himself to detachment, the ruler is one only, and from this master principle order is imposed upon the rest, so

that we may think of a municipality in two sections, the superior city and, kept in hand by it, the city of the

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

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 masterprinciple;

the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an "ours"; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and

pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment.

The other, the most honourable phase of our being, is what we think of as the true man and into this we are

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

But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity, there is a probable source of pain to them in

the mere fact that they were inapt to partnership. This does not, of course, refer to two bodies; that is a

question of one nature; and I am speaking of two natures. When one distinct nature seeks to associate itself

with another, a different, order of being the lower participating in the higher, but unable to take more than a

faint trace of it then the essential duality becomes also a unity, but a unity standing midway between what

the lower was and what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled unity; the association is artificial and

uncertain, inclining now to this side and now to that in ceaseless vacillation; and the total hovers between

high and low, telling, downward bent, of misery but, directed to the above, of longing for unison.

19. Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled,

deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul

is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but

the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels

the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge;

then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the

cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass

pure and simple, but a mass under certain [nonmaterial] conditions; it is to that modified substance that the

sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity.

And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at every point of its being, and is thereby enabled to

assign every condition to the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs. Being present as a whole at every

point of the body, if it were itself affected the pain would take it at every point, and it would suffer as one

entire being, so that it could not know, or make known, the spot affected; it could say only that at the place of

its presence there existed pain and the place of its presence is the entire human being. As things are, when

the finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is in pain; we class him as suffering, from his

But the pain itself is in the part affected unless we include in the notion of pain the sensation following upon

it, in which case we are saying only that distress implies the perception of distress. But [this does not mean

that the soul is affected] we cannot describe the perception itself as distress; it is the knowledge of the distress

and, being knowledge, is not itself affected, or it could not know and convey a true message: a messenger,

affected, overwhelmed by the event, would either not convey the message or not convey it faithfully.

20. As with bodily pain and pleasure so with the bodily desires; their origin, also, must be attributed to what

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

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

But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the body as a determined entity [the living total] be the

Because there are [in man] two distinct things, this Nature and the body, which, through it, becomes a living

being: the Nature precedes the determined body which is its creation, made and shaped by it; it cannot

originate the desires; they must belong to the living body meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in

its distress to alter its state, to substitute pleasure for pain, sufficiency for want: this Nature must be like a

mother reading the wishes of a suffering child, and seeking to set it right and to bring it back to herself; in her

search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to the sufferer's desire and makes the child's

In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a foredesiring with, perhaps, purpose as

well; Nature desires for, and because of, that living body; granting or withholding belongs to another again,

21. That this is the phase of the human being in which desire takes its origin is shown by observation of the

different stages of life; in childhood, youth, maturity, the bodily desires differ; health or sickness also may

change them, while the [psychic] faculty is of course the same through all: the evidence is clear that the

variety of desire in the human being results from the fact that he is a corporeal entity, a living body subject to

The total movement of desire is not always stirred simultaneously with what we call the impulses to the

satisfaction even of the lasting bodily demands; it may refuse assent to the idea of eating or drinking until

reason gives the word: this shows us desire the degree of it existing in the living body advancing towards

some object, with Nature [the lower soulphase] refusing its cooperation and approval, and as sole arbiter

between what is naturally fit and unfit, rejecting what does not accord with the natural need.

We may be told that the changing state of the body is sufficient explanation of the changing desires in the

faculty; but that would require the demonstration that the changing condition of a given entity could effect a

change of desire in another, in one which cannot itself gain by the gratification; for it is not the desiring

faculty that profits by food, liquid, warmth, movement, or by any relief from overplenty or any filling of a

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?

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

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

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 IntellectualPrinciple 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

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

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,

But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the earth, upon which the earthsoul 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 senseperception 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

23. A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint,

becoming aware of the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them.

This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated, selfacting, or to soul in conjunction with some

Isolated, selfacting, how is it possible? Selfacting, it has knowledge of its own content, and this is not

perception but intellection: if it is also to know things outside itself it can grasp them only in one of two

ways: either it must assimilate itself to the external objects, or it must enter into relations with something that

Now as long as it remains selfcentred it cannot assimilate: a single point cannot assimilate itself to an

external line: even line cannot adapt itself to line in another order, line of the intellectual to line of the

sensible, just as fire of the intellectual and man of the intellectual remain distinct from fire and man of the

sensible. Even Nature, the soulphase which brings man into being, does not come to identity with the man it

shapes and informs: it has the faculty of dealing with the sensible, but it remains isolated, and, its task done,

ignores all but the intellectual as it is itself ignored by the sensible and utterly without means of grasping it.

Suppose something visible lying at a distance: the soul sees it; now, admitting to the full that at first only the

pure idea of the thing is seized a total without discerned part yet in the end it becomes to the seeing soul an

object whose complete detail of colour and form is known: this shows that there is something more here than

the outlying thing and the soul; for the soul is immune from experience; there must be a third, something not

thus exempt; and it is this intermediate that accepts the impressions of shape and the like.

This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the material object so as to be an exact

reproduction of its states, and it must be of the one elementalstuff: 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 intellectuallinking 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

If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to senseperception, as is further indicated by the

reflection that the soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of sense.

The organ must be either the body entire or some member set apart for a particular function; thus touch for

one, vision for another. The tools of craftsmanship will be seen to be intermediaries between the judging

worker and the judged object, disclosing to the experimenter the particular character of the matter under

investigation: thus a ruler, representing at once the straightness which is in the mind and the straightness of a

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

The soul, isolated, has no senseperception; 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

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

At this, senseimpressions would aim at utility. They may serve also to knowledge, but that could be service

only to some being not living in knowledge but stupefied as the result of a disaster, and the victim of a Lethe

calling for constant reminding: they would be useless to any being free from either need or forgetfulness.

This This reflection enlarges the enquiry: it is no longer a question of earth alone, but of the whole

starsystem, all the heavens, the kosmos entire. For it would follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt

from modification, senseperception would occur in every part having relation to any other part: in a whole,

however having relation only to itself, immune, universally selfdirected and selfpossessing what

Granted that the percipient must act through an organ and that this organ must be different from the object

perceived, then the universe, as an All, can have [no sensation since it has] no organ distinct from object: it

can have selfawareness, as we have; but senseperception, the constant attendant of another order, it cannot

Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the normal is the sense of something intruding

from without: but besides this, we have the apprehension of one member by another; why then should not the

All, by means of what is stationary in it, perceive that region of itself which is in movement, that is to say the

Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other regions of the All; what, then, need prevent the

All from having, in some appropriate way, the perception of those changes? In addition to that

selfcontemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not have a seeing power like that of an eye able

to announce to the AllSoul what has passed before it? Even granted that it is entirely unaffected by its

lower, why, still, should it not see like an eye, ensouled as it is, all lightsome?

Still: "eyes were not necessary to it," we read. If this meant simply that nothing is left to be seen outside of

the All, still there is the inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent it seeing what constitutes itself: if

the meaning is that such selfvision could serve to no use, we may think that it has vision not as a main

intention for vision's sake but as a necessary concomitant of its characteristic nature; it is difficult to conceive

25. But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception of any kind: there must be a state of the

Now it is the soul's character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere, and even though it were apt to

senseperception, 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

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

But if they so apply themselves, they must have memory; it is impossible that they should have no

remembrance if they are to be benefactors, their service could not exist without memory.

26. Their knowledge of our prayers is due to what we may call an enlinking, a determined relation of things

fitted into a system; so, too, the fulfillment of the petitions; in the art of magic all looks to this enlinkment:

prayer and its answer, magic and its success, depend upon the sympathy of enchained forces.

Why not, to begin with, that of contactfeeling, the apprehension of part by part, the apprehension of fire by

the rest of the entire mass in a sensation transmitted upwards to the earth's leading principle? A corporeal

mass [such as that of the earth] may be sluggish but is not utterly inert. Such perceptions, of course, would

Because those gravest movements could not possibly remain unknown where there is an immanent soul.

And there is nothing against the idea that sensation in the earth exists for the sake of the human interests

furthered by the earth. They would be served by means of the sympathy that has been mentioned; petitioners

would be heard and their prayers met, though in a way not ours. And the earth, both in its own interest and in

that of beings distinct from itself, might have the experiences of the other senses also for example, smell and

taste where, perhaps, the scent of juices or sap might enter into its care for animal life, as in the constructing

But we need not demand for earth the organs by which we, ourselves, act: not even all the animals have

For sight it would not need eyes though if light is indispensable how can it see?

That the earth contains the principle of growth must be admitted; it is difficult not to allow in consequence

that, since this vegetal principle is a member of spirit, the earth is primarily of the spiritual order; and how

can we doubt that in a spirit all is lucid? This becomes all the more evident when we reflect that, besides

being as a spirit lightsome, it is physically illuminated moving in the light of kosmic revolution.

There is, thus, no longer any absurdity or impossibility in the notion that the soul in the earth has vision: we

must, further, consider that it is the soul of no mean body; that in fact it is a god since certainly soul must be

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

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

We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries its vestige of this principle of

growth, an underphase 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 soulphase], concerned with sensation, this not interfused [like the

vegetal principle] but in contact from above: then the higher soul and the IntellectualPrinciple, constituting

together the being known as Hestia [EarthMind] and Demeter [EarthSoul] a nomenclature indicating the

human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a divine name and nature.

28. Thus much established, we may return on our path: we have to discuss the seat of the passionate element

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

Now in the first case the soulprinciple 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,

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

soulphase impinging upon the Conjoint [the animatetotal], or is there, in such conditions no question of

soulphase, but simply passion itself producing the act or state of [for example] anger?

Now we all know that we feel anger not only over our own bodily suffering, but also over the conduct of

others, as when some of our associates act against our right and due, and in general over any unseemly

conduct. It is at once evident that anger implies some subject capable of sensation and of judgement: and this

consideration suffices to show that the vegetal nature is not its source, that we must look for its origin

On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states; people in whom the blood and the bile are

intensely active are as quick to anger as those of cool blood and no bile are slow; animals grow angry though

they pay attention to no outside combinations except where they recognize physical danger; all this forces us

again to place the seat of anger in the strictly corporeal element, the principle by which the animal organism

is held together. Similarly, that anger or its first stirring depends upon the condition of the body follows from

the consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than well, fasting than after food: it would seem

that the bile and the blood, acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions.

Our conclusion [reconciling with these corporeal facts the psychic or mental element indicated] will identify,

first, some suffering in the body answered by a movement in the blood or in the bile: sensation ensues and the

soul, brought by means of the representative faculty to partake in the condition of the affected body, is

directed towards the cause of the pain: the reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above the phase not inbound

with bodyacts in its own mode when the breach of order has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of

that ready passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil disclosed.

Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason

to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon

the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life

and generation by which the body becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this principle it was that

made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus it leads the indwelling soulphase to corresponding

states churlish and angry under stress of environment so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put

it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition.

That this soulvestige, which determines the movements of passion is of one essence [consubstantial] with

the other is evident from the consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal pleasures, especially those

that wholly repudiate the body, are the least prone to anger and to all experiences not rising from reason.

That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present in trees and yet passion be lacking in them

cannot surprise us since they are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If the occasions of anger

presented themselves where there is no power of sensation there could be no more than a physical ebullition

with something approaching to resentment [an unconscious reaction]; where sensation exists there is at once

something more; the recognition of wrong and of the necessary defence carries with it the intentional act.

But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring faculty and a passionate faculty the first

identical with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the blood or bile or upon

the entire living organism such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the

This difficulty is reasonably met by considering that both faculties are derivatives and making the division

apply to them in so far as they are new productions from a common source; for the division applies to

That essence is not, of its own nature, desire; it is, however, the force which by consolidating itself with the

active manifestation proceeding from it makes the desire a completed thing. And that derivative which

culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought of as a vestigephase lodged about the heart, since

the heart is not the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the blood which is concerned in

29. But keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it

how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle?

For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately upon the withdrawal of the

other, as in the case of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly hair and nails still grow

on the dead; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time after; these are signs of a life force still indwelling.

Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of the higher and lower phases: when the sun

withdraws there goes with it not merely the light emanating from it, guided by it, attached to it, but also at

once that light seen upon obliquely situated objects, a light secondary to the sun's and cast upon things

outside of its path [reflected light showing as colour]; the two are not identical and yet they disappear

The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the corporeal life, that life which we think of as

No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that much is certain; but we have to ask whether it

But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as colour belongs to bodies by the fact that

they throw off light, yet when corruptible bodies are transformed the colour disappears and we no more ask

Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands clenched or spread; the colour is no such

accidental but is more like, for example, sweetness: when a material substance breaks up, the sweetness of

what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into

some other substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities

May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies that have been dissolved remains in being

It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law [of our own nature], so that what we call

But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon the composition of the body; it would

no longer be the ReasonPrinciples within the sperm that produce, for instance, the colours of a bird's

variegated plumage; these principles would merely blend and place them, or if they produced them would

draw also on the full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, mainly, of showing in the formed

But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the bodies remain unaltered, the light is

constant and unsevered, then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body, the light both that in

immediate contact and any other attached to that should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going

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 selfgoverning, isolated from its predecessors and able to stand

alone; in a word, whether no part of the soul is sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously

one soul and many, and, if so, by what mode; this question, however, is treated elsewhere.

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living

body: if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must: if it

is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose

in the case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except

30. We have declared acts of memory unnecessary to the stars, but we allow them perceptions, hearing as

well as seeing; for we said that prayers to them were heard our supplications to the sun, and those, even, of

certain other men to the stars. It has moreover been the belief that in answer to prayer they accomplish many

human wishes, and this so lightheartedly that they become not merely helpers towards good but even

accomplices in evil. Since this matter lies in our way, it must be considered, for it carries with it grave

difficulties that very much trouble those who cannot think of divine beings as, thus, authors or auxiliaries in

In view of all this it is especially necessary to study the question with which we began, that of memory in the

It is obvious that, if they act on our prayers and if this action is not immediate, but with delay and after long

periods of time, they remember the prayers men address to them. This is something that our former argument

did not concede; though it appeared plausible that, for their better service of mankind, they might have been

endowed with such a memory as we ascribed to Demeter and Hestia or to the latter alone if only the earth is

We have, then, to attempt to show: firstly, how acts implying memory in the heavenly bodies are to be

reconciled with our system as distinguished from those others which allow them memory as a matter of

course; secondly, what vindication of those gods of the heavenly spheres is possible in the matter of

seemingly anomalous acts a question which philosophy cannot ignore then too, since the charge goes so

far, we must ask whether credence is to be given to those who hold that the entire heavenly system can be put

under spell by man's skill and audacity: our discussion will also deal with the spiritbeings and how they may

be thought to minister to these ends unless indeed the part played by the Celestials prove to be settled by the

31. Our problem embraces all act and all experience throughout the entire kosmos whether due to nature, in

the current phrase, or effected by art. The natural proceeds, we must hold, from the All towards its members

and from the members to the All, or from member to other member: the artificial either remains, as it began,

within the limit of the art attaining finality in the artificial product alone or is the expression of an art

which calls to its aid natural forces and agencies, and so sets up act and experience within the sphere of the

When I speak of the act and experience of the All I mean the total effect of the entire kosmic circuit upon

itself and upon its members: for by its motion it sets up certain states both within itself and upon its parts,

upon the bodies that move within it and upon all that it communicates to those other parts of it, the things of

The action of part upon part is manifest; there are the relations and operations of the sun, both towards the

other spheres and towards the things of earth; and again relations among elements of the sun itself, of other

heavenly bodies, of earthly things and of things in the other stars, demand investigation.

As for the arts: Such as look to house building and the like are exhausted when that object is achieved; there

are again those medicine, farming, and other serviceable pursuits which deal helpfully with natural

products, seeking to bring them to natural efficiency; and there is a class rhetoric, music and every other

method of swaying mind or soul, with their power of modifying for better or for worse and we have to

On all these points, in so far as they bear on our present purpose, we must do what we can to work out some

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

Whether there is a return action of the lower upon the higher need not trouble us now: for the moment we are

to seek, as far as discussion can exhibit it, the method by which action takes place; and we do not challenge

We take the question back to the initial act of causation. It cannot be admitted that either heat or cold and the

like what are known as the primal qualities of the elements or any admixture of these qualities, should be

the first causes we are seeking; equally inacceptable, that while the sun's action is all by heat, there is another

member of the Circuit operating wholly by cold incongruous in the heavens and in a fiery body nor can we

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

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, slavedealers, burglars, templestrippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending

themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps,

beneath the level of any existing being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained.

32. If we can trace neither to material agencies [blind elements] nor to any deliberate intention the influences

from without which reach to us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general, what cause

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 AllSoul alone, partial where there is also a union with a lower soul.

But, with all this gradation, each several thing is affected by all else in virtue of the common participation in

This OneAll, therefore, is a sympathetic total and stands as one living being; the far is near; it happens as in

one animal with its separate parts: talon, horn, finger, and any other member are not continuous and yet are

effectively near; intermediate parts feel nothing, but at a distant point the local experience is known.

Correspondent things not side by side but separated by others placed between, the sharing of experience by

dint of like condition this is enough to ensure that the action of any distant member be transmitted to its

distant fellow. Where all is a living thing summing to a unity there is nothing so remote in point of place as

not to be near by virtue of a nature which makes of the one living being a sympathetic organism.

Where there is similarity between a thing affected and the thing affecting it, the affection is not alien; where

Such hurtful action of member upon member within one living being need not seem surprising: within

ourselves, in our own activities, one constituent can be harmed by another; bile and animal spirit seem to

press and goad other members of the human total: in the vegetal realm one part hurts another by sucking the

moisture from it. And in the All there is something analogous to bile and animal spirit, as to other such

constituents. For visibly it is not merely one living organism; it is also a manifold. In virtue of the unity the

individual is preserved by the All: in virtue of the multiplicity of things having various contacts, difference

often brings about mutual hurt; one thing, seeking its own need, is detrimental to another; what is at once

related and different is seized as food; each thing, following its own natural path, wrenches from something

else what is serviceable to itself, and destroys or checks in its own interest whatever is becoming a menace to

it: each, occupied with its peculiar function, assists no doubt anything able to profit by that, but harms or

destroys what is too weak to withstand the onslaught of its action, like fire withering things round it or greater

The rise of all these forms of being and their modification, whether to their loss or gain, all goes to the

fulfillment of the natural unhindered life of that one living being: for it was not possible for the single thing to

be as if it stood alone; the final purpose could not serve to that only end, intent upon the partial: the concern

must be for the whole to which each item is member: things are different both from each other and in their

own stages, therefore cannot be complete in one unchanging form of life; nor could anything remain utterly

without modification if the All is to be durable; for the permanence of an All demands varying forms.

33. The Circuit does not go by chance but under the ReasonPrinciple of the living whole; therefore there

must be a harmony between cause and caused; there must be some order ranging things to each other's

purpose, or in due relation to each other: every several configuration within the Circuit must be accompanied

by a change in the position and condition of things subordinate to it, which thus by their varied rhythmic

In our danceplays there are outside elements contributing to the total effect fluting, singing, and other

linked accessories and each of these changes in each new movement: there is no need to dwell on these;

their significance is obvious. But besides this there is the fact that the limbs of the dancer cannot possibly

keep the same positions in every figure; they adapt themselves to the plan, bending as it dictates, one

lowered, another raised, one active, another resting as the set pattern changes. The dancer's mind is on his

own purpose; his limbs are submissive to the dancemovement which they accomplish to the end, so that the

connoisseur can explain that this or that figure is the motive for the lifting, bending, concealment, effacing, of

the various members of the body; and in all this the executant does not choose the particular motions for their

own sake; the whole play of the entire person dictates the necessary position to each limb and member as it

Now this is the mode in which the heavenly beings [the diviner members of the All] must be held to be

Or, a better statement: the entire kosmos puts its entire life into act, moving its major members with its own

action and unceasingly setting them in new positions; by the relations thus established, of these members to

each other and to the whole, and by the different figures they make together, the minor members in turn are

brought under the system as in the movements of some one living being, so that they vary according to the

relations, positions, configurations: the beings thus coordinated are not the causes; the cause is the

coordinating All; at the same time it is not to be thought of as seeking to do one thing and actually doing

another, for there is nothing external to it since it is the cause by actually being all: on the one side the

configurations, on the other the inevitable effects of those configurations upon a living being moving as a unit

and, again, upon a living being [an All] thus by its nature conjoined and concomitant and, of necessity, at

34. For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the body of the All should be yielded to its action, we

ought to make sure that we submit only within limits, realizing that the entire man is not thus bound to it:

intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters but in part retain their personality, and are thus

The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be produced as they are, since the moving bodies

Now the movement is guided by a ReasonPrinciple; the relations of the living whole are altered in

consequence; here in our own realm all that happens reacts in sympathy to the events of that higher sphere: it

becomes, therefore, advisable to ask whether we are to think of this realm as following upon the higher by

agreement, or to attribute to the configurations the powers underlying the events, and whether such powers

would be vested in the configurations simply or in the relations of the particular items.

It will be said that one position of one given thing has by no means an identical effect whether of indication

or of causation in its relation to another and still less to any group of others, since each several being seems

The truth is that the configuration of any given group means merely the relationship of the several parts, and,

But, this being so, the power will belong, not to the positions but to the beings holding those positions?

To both taken together. For as things change their relations, and as any one thing changes place, there is a

To this double thing the particular configuration of particular beings there accrues often the twofold

power, that of causation and that of indication, but sometimes only that of indication. Thus we are obliged to

attribute powers both to the configuration and to the beings entering into them. In mime dancers each of the

hands has its own power, and so with all the limbs; the relative positions have much power; and, for a third

power, there is that of the accessories and concomitants; underlying the action of the performers' limbs, there

are such items as the clutched fingers and the muscles and veins following suit.

35. But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter requires a more definite handling. How

can there be a difference of power between one triangular configuration and another?

How can there be the exercise of power from man to man; under what law, and within what limits?

The difficulty is that we are unable to attribute causation either to the bodies of the heavenly beings or to their

wills: their bodies are excluded because the product transcends the causative power of body, their will

The being we are considering is a living unity and, therefore, necessarily selfsympathetic: it is under a law

of reason, and therefore the unfolding process of its life must be selfaccordant: that life has no haphazard,

but knows only harmony and ordinance: all the groupings follow reason: all single beings within it, all the

Holding this in mind we are forced to certain conclusions: in the expressive act of the All are comprised

equally the configurations of its members and these members themselves, minor as well as major entering

into the configurations. This is the mode of life of the All; and its powers work together to this end under the

Nature in which the producing agency within the ReasonPrinciples has brought them into being. The

groupings [within the All] are themselves in the nature of ReasonPrinciples since they are the outspacing

of a livingbeing, its reasondetermined rhythms and conditions, and the entities thus spacedout and

grouped to pattern are its various members: then again there are the powers of the living being distinct

these, too which may be considered as parts of it, always excluding deliberate will which is external to it,

The will of any organic thing is one; but the distinct powers which go to constitute it are far from being one:

yet all the several wills look to the object aimed at by the one will of the whole: for the desire which the one

member entertains for another is a desire within the All: a part seeks to acquire something outside itself, but

that external is another part of which it feels the need: the anger of a moment of annoyance is directed to

something alien, growth draws on something outside, all birth and becoming has to do with the external; but

all this external is inevitably something included among fellow members of the system: through these its

limbs and members, the All is bringing this activity into being while in itself it seeks or better,

contemplates The Good. Right will, then, the will which stands above accidental experience, seeks The

Good and thus acts to the same end with it. When men serve another, many of their acts are done under order,

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

That configuration has power in itself is within our own observation here. Why else do certain groupments, in

contradistinction to others, terrify at sight though there has been no previous experience of evil from them? If

some men are alarmed by a particular groupment and others by quite a different one, the reason can be only

that the configurations themselves have efficacy, each upon a certain type an efficacy which cannot fail to

reach anything naturally disposed to be impressed by it, so that in one groupment things attract observation

If we are told that beauty is the motive of attraction, does not this mean simply that the power of appeal to

this or that mind depends upon pattern, configuration? How can we allow power to colour and none to

configuration? It is surely untenable that an entity should have existence and yet have no power to effect:

existence carries with it either acting or answering to action, some beings having action alone, others both.

At the same time there are powers apart from pattern: and, in things of our realm, there are many powers

dependent not upon heat and cold but upon forces due to differing properties, forces which have been shaped

to idealquality by the action of ReasonPrinciples and communicate in the power of Nature: thus the natural

properties of stones and the efficacy of plants produce many astonishing results.

36. The Universe is immensely varied, the container of all the ReasonPrinciples and of infinite and diverse

efficacies. In man, we are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied powers, and so with

each separate part of hand and of foot; and there is no member or organ without its own definite function,

some separate power of its own a diversity of which we can have no notion unless our studies take that

direction. What is true of man must be true of the universe, and much more, since all this order is but a

representation of the higher: it must contain an untellably wonderful variety of powers, with which, of course,

We cannot think of the universe as a soulless habitation, however vast and varied, a thing of materials easily

told off, kind by kind wood and stone and whatever else there be, all blending into a kosmos: it must be

alert throughout, every member living by its own life, nothing that can have existence failing to exist within

And here we have the solution of the problem, "How an ensouled living form can include the soulless": for

this account allows grades of living within the whole, grades to some of which we deny life only because

they are not perceptibly selfmoved: in the truth, all of these have a hidden life; and the thing whose life is

patent to sense is made up of things which do not live to sense, but, none the less, confer upon their resultant

total wonderful powers towards living. Man would never have reached to his actual height if the powers by

which he acts were the completely soulless elements of his being; similarly the All could not have its huge

life unless its every member had a life of its own; this however does not necessarily imply a deliberate

intention; the All has no need of intention to bring about its acts: it is older than intention, and therefore its

37. We must not rob the universe of any factor in its being. If any of our theorists of today seek to explain

the action of fire or of any other such form, thought of as an agent they will find themselves in difficulties

unless they recognize the act to be the object's function in the All, and give a like explanation of other natural

We do not habitually examine or in any way question the normal: we set to doubting and working out

identifications when we are confronted by any display of power outside everyday experience: we wonder at a

novelty and we wonder at the customary when anyone brings forward some single object and explains to our

Some such power, not necessarily accompanied by reason, every single item possesses; for each has been

brought into being and into shape within a universe; each in its kind has partaken of soul through the medium

of the ensouled All, as being embraced by that definitely constituted thing: each then is a member of an

animate being which can include nothing that is less than a full member [and therefore a sharer in the total of

power] though one thing is of mightier efficacy than another, and, especially members of the heavenly

system than the objects of earth, since they draw upon a purer nature and these powers are widely

productive. But productivity does not comport intention in what appears to be the source of the thing

accomplished: there is efficacy, too, where there is no will: even attention is not necessary to the

communication of power; the very transmission of soul may proceed without either.

A living being, we know, may spring from another without any intention, and as without loss so without

consciousness in the begetter: in fact any intention the animal exercised could be a cause of propagation only

on condition of being identical with the animal [i.e., the theory would make intention a propagative animal,

And, if intention is unnecessary to the propagation of life, much more so is attention.

38. Whatever springs automatically from the All out of that distinctive life of its own, and, in addition to that

selfmoving activity, whatever is due to some specific agency for example, to prayers, simple or taking the

form of magic incantations this entire range of production is to be referred, not to each such single cause,

but to the nature of the thing produced [i.e., to a certain natural tendency in the product to exist with its own

All that forwards life or some other useful purpose is to be ascribed to the transmission characteristic of the

All; it is something flowing from the major of an integral to its minor. Where we think we see the

transmission of some force unfavourable to the production of living beings, the flaw must be found in the

inability of the subject to take in what would serve it: for what happens does not happen upon a void; there is

always specific form and quality; anything that could be affected must have an underlying nature definite and

characterized. The inevitable blendings, further, have their constructive effect, every element adding

something contributory to the life. Then again some influence may come into play at the time when the forces

of a beneficent nature are not acting: the coordination of the entire system of things does not always allow

to each several entity everything that it needs: and further we ourselves add a great deal to what is transmitted

None the less all entwines into a unity: and there is something wonderful in the agreement holding among

these various things of varied source, even of sources frankly opposite; the secret lies in a variety within a

unity. When by the standard of the better kind among things of process anything falls short the reluctance of

its material substratum having prevented its perfect shaping under idea it may be thought of as being

deficient in that noble element whose absence brings to shame: the thing is a blend, something due to the high

Because all is ever being knit, all brought to culmination in unity, therefore all events are indicated; but this

does not make virtue a matter of compulsion; its spontaneity is equally inwoven into the ordered system by

the general law that the things of this sphere are pendant from the higher, that the content of our universe lies

39. We cannot, then, refer all that exists to ReasonPrinciples inherent in the seed of things [Spermatic

Reasons]; the universe is to be traced further back, to the more primal forces, to the principles by which that

seed itself takes shape. Such spermatic principles cannot be the containers of things which arise

independently of them, such as what enters from Matter [the reasonless] into membership of the All, or what

No: the ReasonPrinciple of the universe would be better envisaged as a wisdom uttering order and law to a

state, in full knowledge of what the citizens will do and why, and in perfect adaptation of law to custom; thus

the code is made to thread its way in and out through all their conditions and actions with the honour or

The signification which exists is not a first intention; it arises incidentally by the fact that in a given

collocation the members will tell something of each other: all is unity sprung of unity and therefore one thing

is known by way of another other, a cause in the light of the caused, the sequent as rising from its precedent,

the compound from the constituents which must make themselves known in the linked total.

If all this is sound, at once our doubts fall and we need no longer ask whether the transmission of any evil is

For, in sum: Firstly, intentions are not to be considered as the operative causes; necessities inherent in the

nature of things account for all that comes from the other realm; it is a matter of the inevitable relation of

parts, and, besides, all is the sequence to the living existence of a unity. Secondly, there is the large

contribution made by the individual. Thirdly, each several communication, good in itself, takes another

quality in the resultant combination. Fourthly, the life in the kosmos does not look to the individual but to the

whole. Finally, there is Matter, the underlie, which being given one thing receives it as something else, and is

By the reigning sympathy and by the fact in Nature that there is an agreement of like forces and an opposition

of unlike, and by the diversity of those multitudinous powers which converge in the one living universe.

There is much drawing and spellbinding dependent on no interfering machination; the true magic is internal

to the All, its attractions and, not less, its repulsions. Here is the primal mage and sorcerer discovered by

men who thenceforth turn those same ensorcellations and magic arts upon one another.

Love is given in Nature; the qualities inducing love induce mutual approach: hence there has arisen an art of

magic lovedrawing 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

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

41. The prayer is answered by the mere fact that part and other part are wrought to one tone like a musical

string which, plucked at one end, vibrates at the other also. Often, too, the sounding of one string awakens

what might pass for a perception in another, the result of their being in harmony and tuned to one musical

scale; now, if the vibration in a lyre affects another by virtue of the sympathy existing between them, then

certainly in the All even though it is constituted in contraries there must be one melodic system; for it

contains its unisons as well, and its entire content, even to those contraries, is a kinship.

Thus, too, whatever is hurtful to man the passionate spirit, for example, drawn by the medium of the gall

into the principle seated in the liver comes with no intention of hurt; it is simply as one transferring fire to

another might innocently burn him: no doubt, since he actually set the other on fire he is a cause, but only as

the attacking fire itself is a cause, that is by the merely accidental fact that the person to whom the fire was

42. It follows that, for the purposes which have induced this discussion, the stars have no need of memory or

of any sense of petitions addressed to them; they give no such voluntary attention to prayers as some have

thought: it is sufficient that, in virtue simply of the nature of parts and of parts within a whole, something

proceeds from them whether in answer to prayer or without prayer. We have the analogy of many powers as

in some one living organism which, independently of plan or as the result of applied method, act without

any collaboration of the will: one member or function is helped or hurt by another in the mere play of natural

forces; and the art of doctor or magic healer will compel some one centre to purvey something of its own

power to another centre. just so the All: it purveys spontaneously, but it purveys also under spell; some entity

[acting like the healer] is concerned for a member situated within itself and summons the All which, then,

pours in its gift; it gives to its own part by the natural law we have cited since the petitioner is no alien to it.

Even though the suppliant be a sinner, the answering need not shock us; sinners draw from the brooks; and

the giver does not know of the gift but simply gives though we must remember that all is one woof and the

giving is always consonant with the order of the universe. There is, therefore, no necessity by ineluctable law

that one who has helped himself to what lies open to all should receive his deserts then and there.

In sum, we must hold that the All cannot be affected; its leading principle remains for ever immune

whatsoever happens to its members; the affection is really present to them, but since nothing existent can be

at strife with the total of existence, no such affection conflicts with its impassivity.

Thus the stars, in so far as they are parts, can be affected and yet are immune on various counts; their will,

like that of the All, is untouched, just as their bodies and their characteristic natures are beyond all reach of

harm; if they give by means of their souls, their souls lose nothing; their bodies remain unchanged or, if there

43. And the Proficient [the Sage], how does he stand with regard to magic and philtrespells?

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. PhiltreLove, 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 counterincantations.

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

That the effects of magic should be not instantaneous but developed is only in accord with Nature's way.

Even the Celestials, the Daimones, are not on their unreasoning side immune: there is nothing against

ascribing acts of memory and experiences of sense to them, in supposing them to accept the traction of

methods laid up in the natural order, and to give hearing to petitioners; this is especially true of those of them

For everything that looks to another is under spell to that: what we look to, draws us magically. Only the

selfintent go free of magic. Hence every action has magic as its source, and the entire life of the practical

man is a bewitchment: we move to that only which has wrought a fascination upon us. This is indicated

where we read "for the burgher of greathearted Erechtheus has a pleasant face [but you should see him naked;

then you would be cautious]." For what conceivably turns a man to the external? He is drawn, drawn by the

arts not of magicians but of the natural order which administers the deceiving draught and links this to that,

44. Contemplation alone stands untouched by magic; no man selfgathered falls to a spell; for he is one, and

that unity is all he perceives, so that his reason is not beguiled but holds the due course, fashioning its own

In the other way of life, it is not the essential man that gives the impulse; it is not the reason; the unreasoning

also acts as a principle, and this is the first condition of the misfortune. Caring for children, planning

marriage everything that works as bait, taking value by dint of desire these all tug obviously: so it is with

our action, sometimes stirred, not reasonably, by a certain spirited temperament, sometimes as foolishly by

greed; political interests, the siege of office, all betray a forthsummoning lust of power; action for security

springs from fear; action for gain, from desire; action undertaken for the sake of sheer necessities that is, for

supplying the insufficiency of nature indicates, manifestly, the cajoling force of nature to the safeguarding

We may be told that no such magic underlies good action, since, at that, Contemplation itself, certainly a

The answer is that there is no magic when actions recognized as good are performed upon sheer necessity

with the recollection that the veritable good is elsewhere; this is simply knowledge of need; it is not a

bewitchment binding the life to this sphere or to any thing alien; all is permissible under duress of human

nature, and in the spirit of adaptation to the needs of existence in general or even to the needs of the

individual existence, since it certainly seems reasonable to fit oneself into life rather than to withdraw from it.

When, on the contrary, the agent falls in love with what is good in those actions, and, cheated by the mere

track and trace of the Authentic Good makes them his own, then, in his pursuit of a lower good, he is the

victim of magic. For all dalliance with what wears the mask of the authentic, all attraction towards that mere

semblance, tells of a mind misled by the spell of forces pulling towards unreality.

The sorcery of Nature is at work in this; to pursue the nongood as a good, drawn in unreasoning impulse by

its specious appearance: it is to be led unknowing down paths unchosen; and what can we call that but magic.

Alone in immunity from magic is he who, though drawn by the alien parts of his total being, withholds his

assent to their standards of worth, recognizing the good only where his authentic self sees and knows it,

neither drawn nor pursuing, but tranquilly possessing and so never charmed away.

45. From this discussion it becomes perfectly clear that the individual member of the All contributes to that

All in the degree of its kind and condition; thus it acts and is acted upon. In any particular animal each of the

limbs and organs, in the measure of its kind and purpose, aids the entire being by service performed and

counts in rank and utility: it gives what is in it its gift and takes from its fellows in the degree of receptive

power belonging to its kind; there is something like a common sensitiveness linking the parts, and in the

orders in which each of the parts is also animate, each will have, in addition to its rank as part, the very

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.

For the good man, the giving and the taking and the changes of state go quite the other way; the particular

tendencies of the nature, we may put it, transpose the cords [so that we are moved by that only which, in

Thus this universe of ours is a wonder of power and wisdom, everything by a noiseless road coming to pass

according to a law which none may elude which the base man never conceives though it is leading him, all

unknowingly, to that place in the All where his lot must be cast which the just man knows, and, knowing,

sets out to the place he must, understanding, even as he begins the journey, where he is to be housed at the

In a living being of small scope the parts vary but slightly, and have but a faint individual consciousness, and,

unless possibly in a few and for a short time, are not themselves alive. But in a living universe, of high

expanse, where every entity has vast scope and many of the members have life, there must be wider

movement and greater changes. We see the sun and the moon and the other stars shifting place and course in

an ordered progression. It is therefore within reason that the souls, also, of the All should have their changes,

not retaining unbrokenly the same quality, but ranged in some analogy with their action and experience

some taking rank as head and some as foot in a disposition consonant with the Universal Being which has its

degrees in better and less good. A soul, which neither chooses the highest that is here, nor has lent itself to the

lowest, is one which has abandoned another, a purer, place, taking this sphere in free election.

The punishments of wrongdoing are like the treatment of diseased parts of the body here, medicines to knit

sundered flesh; there, amputations; elsewhere, change of environment and condition and the penalties are

planned to bring health to the All by settling every member in the fitting place: and this health of the All

requires that one man be made over anew and another, sick here, be taken hence to where he shall be weakly

1. We undertook to discuss the question whether sight is possible in the absence of any intervening medium,

such as air or some other form of what is known as transparent body: this is the time and place.

It has been explained that seeing and all senseperception 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.

Senseperception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form

any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of

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].

Admitting, then, that some contact with an object is necessary for knowing it, the question of a medium falls

to the ground in the case of things identified by any form of touch; but in the case of sight we leave hearing

over for the present we are still in doubt; is there need of some bodily substance between the eye and the

No: such an intervening material may be a favouring circumstance, but essentially it adds nothing to seeing

power. ! Dense bodies, such as clay, actually prevent sight; the less material the intervening substance is, the

more clearly we see; the intervening substance, then, is a hindrance, or, if not that, at least not a help.

It will be objected that vision implies that whatever intervenes between seen and seer must first [and

progressively] experience the object and be, as it were, shaped to it; we will be reminded that [vision is not a

direct and single relation between agent and object, but is the perception of something radiated since] anyone

facing to the object from the side opposite to ourselves sees it equally; we will be asked to deduce that if all

the space intervening between seen and seer did not carry the impression of the object we could not receive it.

But all the need is met when the impression reaches that which is adapted to receive it; there is no need for

the intervening space to be impressed. If it is, the impression will be of quite another order: the rod between

the fisher's hand and the torpedo fish is not affected in the same way as the hand that feels the shock. And yet

there too, if rod and line did not intervene, the hand would not be affected though even that may be

questioned, since after all the fisherman, we are told, is numbed if the torpedo merely lies in his net.

The whole matter seems to bring us back to that sympathy of which we have treated. If a certain thing is of a

nature to be sympathetically affected by another in virtue of some similitude between them, then anything

intervening, not sharing in that similitude, will not be affected, or at least not similarly. If this be so, anything

naturally disposed to be affected will take the impression more vividly in the absence of intervening

2. If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the light leading progressively to the illumined

object, then, by the very hypothesis, one intervening substance, the light, is indispensable: but if the

illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent operating certain changes, some such

change might very well impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium; this all the more, since as

things are the intervening substance, which actually does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of

Those who have made vision a forthgoing act [and not an incoming from the object] need not postulate an

intervening substance unless, indeed, to provide against the ray from the eye failing on its path but this is a

ray of light and light flies straight. Those who make vision depend upon resistance are obliged to postulate an

The champions of the image, with its transit through a void, are seeking the way of least resistance; but since

the entire absence of intervenient gives a still easier path they will not oppose that hypothesis.

So, too, those that explain vision by sympathy must recognize that an intervening substance will be a

hindrance as tending to check or block or enfeeble that sympathy; this theory, especially, requires the

admission that any intervenient, and particularly one of kindred nature, must blunt the perception by itself

absorbing part of the activity. Apply fire to a body continuous through and through, and no doubt the core

will be less affected than the surface: but where we are dealing with the sympathetic parts of one living being,

there will scarcely be less sensation because of the intervening substance, or, if there should be, the degree of

sensation will still be proportionate to the nature of the separate part, with the intervenient acting merely as a

certain limitation; this, though, will not be the case where the element introduced is of a kind to overleap the

But this is saying that the sympathetic quality of the universe depends upon its being one living thing, and

that our amenability to experience depends upon our belonging integrally to that unity; would it not follow

The explanation is that continuity and its concomitant, the bridging substance, come into play because a

living being must be a continuous thing, but that, none the less, the receiving of impression is not an

essentially necessary result of continuity; if it were, everything would receive such impression from

everything else, and if thing is affected by thing in various separate orders, there can be no further question of

Why it should be especially requisite in the act of seeing would have to be explained: in general, an object

passing through the air does not affect it beyond dividing it; when a stone falls, the air simply yields; nor is it

reasonable to explain the natural direction of movement by resistance; to do so would bring us to the

absurdity that resistance accounts for the upward movement of fire, which on the contrary, overcomes the

resistance of the air by its own essentially quick energy. If we are told that the resistance is brought more

swiftly into play by the very swiftness of the ascending body, that would be a mere accidental circumstance,

not a cause of the upward motion: in trees the upthrust from the root depends on no such external propulsion;

we, too, in our movements cleave the air and are in no wise forwarded by its resistance; it simply flows in

If the severance of the air by such bodies leaves it unaffected, why must there be any severance before the

And, further, once we reject the theory that these images reach us by way of some outstreaming from the

objects seen, there is no reason to think of the air being affected and passing on to us, in a progression of

If our perception is to depend upon previous impressions made upon the air, then we have no direct

knowledge of the object of vision, but know it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are

aware of warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the warmed intervening air. That is a

matter of contact; but sight is not produced by contact: the application of an object to the eye would not

produce sight; what is required is the illumination of the intervening medium; for the air in itself is a dark

substance: If it were not for this dark substance there would probably be no reason for the existence of light:

the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires that it be overcome by light. Perhaps also the

reason why an object brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a double obscuration,

3. For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of impressions of any

kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars

No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness and come to us in linked progression;

if the fire thus rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night, when the

very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their light, we can see the fire of the beaconstations and of

Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to believe that in these examples the fire [as light]

traverses the air, then, in so far as anything is visible, it must be that dimmed reproduction in the air, not the

fire itself. But if an object can be seen on the other side of some intervening darkness, much more would it be

We may hold one thing certain: the impossibility of vision without an intervening substance does not depend

upon that absence in itself: the sole reason is that, with the absence, there would be an end to the sympathy

reigning in the living whole and relating the parts to each other in an existent unity.

Perception of every kind seems to depend on the fact that our universe is a whole sympathetic to itself: that it

is so, appears from the universal participation in power from member to member, and especially in remote

No doubt it would be worth enquiry though we pass it for the present what would take place if there were

another kosmos, another living whole having no contact with this one, and the far ridges of our heavens had

sight: would our sphere see that other as from a mutually present distance, or could there be no dealing at all

To return; there is a further consideration showing that sight is not brought about by this alleged modification

Any modification of the air substance would necessarily be corporeal: there must be such an impression as is

made upon sealing wax. But this would require that each part of the object of vision be impressed on some

corresponding portion of the intervenient: the intervenient, however, in actual contact with the eye would be

just that portion whose dimensions the pupil is capable of receiving. But as a matter of fact the entire object

appears before the pupil; and it is seen entire by all within that air space for a great extent, in front, sideways,

close at hand, from the back, as long as the line of vision is not blocked. This shows that any given portion of

the air contains the object of vision, in face view so to speak, and, at once, we are confronted by no merely

corporeal phenomena; the facts are explicable only as depending upon the greater laws, the spiritual, of a

4. But there is the question of the linked light that must relate the visual organ to its object.

Now, firstly: since the intervening air is not necessary unless in the purely accidental sense that air may be

necessary to light the light that acts as intermediate in vision will be unmodified: vision depends upon no

modification whatever. This one intermediate, light, would seem to be necessary, but, unless light is

corporeal, no intervening body is requisite: and we must remember that intervenient and borrowed light is

essential not to seeing in general but to distant vision; the question whether light absolutely requires the

presence of air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us:

If, in the act of vision, that linked light becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into

union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding which is what vision really is then

the intervening light is not a necessity: the process of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of

the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light; all that intervenes remains unaffected,

This brings up the question whether the sight is made active over its field by the sheer presence of a distance

spread before it, or by the presence of a body of some kind within that distance.

If by the presence of such a body, then there will be vision though there be no intervenient; if the intervenient

is the sole attractive agent, then we are forced to think of the visible object as being a Kind utterly without

energy, performing no act. But so inactive a body cannot be: touch tells us that, for it does not merely

announce that something is by and is touched: it is acted upon by the object so that it reports distinguishing

qualities in it, qualities so effective that even at a distance touch itself would register them but for the

We catch the heat of a fire just as soon as the intervening air does; no need to wait for it to be warmed: the

denser body, in fact, takes in more warmth than the air has to give; in other words, the air transmits the heat

When on the one side, that of the object, there is the power in any degree of an outgoing act, and on the other,

that of the sight, the capability of being acted upon, surely the object needs no medium through which to be

effective upon what it is fully equipped to affect: this would be needing not a help but a hindrance.

Or, again, consider the Dawn: there is no need that the light first flood the air and then come to us; the event

is simultaneous to both: often, in fact, we see [in the distance] when the light is not as yet round our eyes at

all but very far off, before, that is, the air has been acted upon: here we have vision without any modified

intervenient, vision before the organ has received the light with which it is to be linked.

It is difficult to reconcile with this theory the fact of seeing stars or any fire by night.

If [as by the theory of an intervenient] the percipient mind or soul remains within itself and needs the light

only as one might need a stick in the hand to touch something at a distance, then the perception will be a sort

of tussle: the light must be conceived as something thrusting, something aimed at a mark, and similarly, the

object, considered as an illuminated thing, must be conceived to be resistant; for this is the normal process in

Besides, even on this explanation, the mind must have previously been in contact with the object in the entire

absence of intervenient; only if that has happened could contact through an intervenient bring knowledge, a

knowledge by way of memory, and, even more emphatically, by way of reasoned comparison [ending in

identification]: but this process of memory and comparison is excluded by the theory of first knowledge

Finally, we may be told that the impinging light is modified by the thing to be seen and so becomes able to

present something perceptible before the visual organ; but this simply brings us back to the theory of an

intervenient changed midway by the object, an explanation whose difficulties we have already indicated.

Perhaps we are to understand the process thus: the air is modified by the first movement; layer by layer it is

successively acted upon by the object causing the sound: it finally impinges in that modified form upon the

sense, the entire progression being governed by the fact that all the air from starting point to hearing point is

Perhaps, on the other hand, the intervenient is modified only by the accident of its midway position, so that,

failing any intervenient, whatsoever sound two bodies in clash might make would impinge without medium

Still air is necessary; there could be no sound in the absence of the air set vibrating in the first movement,

however different be the case with the intervenient from that onwards to the perception point.

The air would thus appear to be the dominant in the production of sound: two bodies would clash without

even an incipient sound, but that the air, struck in their rapid meeting and hurled outward, passes on the

But if the determinant is the air, and the impression is simply of airmovements, what accounts for the

differences among voices and other sounds? The sound of bronze against bronze is different from that of

bronze against some other substance: and so on; the air and its vibration remain the one thing, yet the

If we decide that sound is caused by a percussion upon the air, then obviously nothing turning upon the

distinctive nature of air is in question: it sounds at a moment in which it is simply a solid body, until [by its

distinctive character] it is sent pulsing outwards: thus air in itself is not essential to the production of sound;

all is done by clashing solids as they meet and that percussion, reaching the sense, is the sound. This is shown

also by the sounds formed within living beings not in air but by the friction of parts; for example, the

grinding of teeth and the crunching of bones against each other in the bending of the body, cases in which the

But all this may now be left over; we are brought to the same conclusion as in the case of sight; the

phenomena of hearing arise similarly in a certain cosensitiveness inherent in a living whole.

6. We return, then, to the question whether there could be light if there were no air, the sun illuminating

corporeal surfaces across an intermediate void which, as things are, takes the light accidentally by the mere

fact of being in the path. Supposing air to be the cause of the rest of things being thus affected, the substantial

existence of light is due to the air; light becomes a modification of the air, and of course if the thing to be

The fact is that primarily light is no appanage of air, and does not depend upon the existence of air: it belongs

to every fiery and shining body, it constitutes even the gleaming surface of certain stones.

Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming, could it exist in the absence of its

There is a distinction to be made: if it is a quality, some quality of some substance, then light, equally with

other qualities, will need a body in which to lodge: if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising from something

else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there be no neighbouring body but, if that is possible, a blank

void which it will overleap and so appear on the further side: it is powerful, and may very well pass over

unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall, nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes its

light; there is no reason why they should draw the light from its source and speed it onwards.

Light is not an accidental to something else, requiring therefore to be lodged in a base; nor is it a

modification, demanding a base in which the modification occurs: if this were so, it would vanish when the

object or substance disappeared; but it does not; it strikes onward; so, too [requiring neither air nor object] it

With unchecked motion of the light outward, the material sun will be losing its energy, for the light is its

Perhaps; and [from this untenable consequence] we may gather that the light never was an appanage of

anything, but is the expressive Act proceeding from a base [the sun] but not seeking to enter into a base,

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

If we are told that light is a mode of the air, we answer that this would necessarily imply that the air itself is

changed to produce the new mode; in other words, its characteristic darkness must change into nondarkness;

but we know that the air maintains its character, in no wise affected: the modification of a thing is an

experience within that thing itself: light therefore is not a modification of the air, but a selfexistent in whose

7. Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring: Whether light finally perishes or simply returns to its

If it be a thing requiring to be caught and kept, domiciled within a recipient, we might think of it finally

passing out of existence: if it be an Act not flowing out and away but in circuit, with more of it within than

is in outward progress from the luminary of which it is the Act then it will not cease to exist as long as that

centre is in being. And as the luminary moves, the light will reach new points not in virtue of any change of

course in or out or around, but simply because the act of the luminary exists and where there is no

impediment is effective. Even if the distance of the sun from us were far greater than it is, the light would be

continuous all that further way, as long as nothing checked or blocked it in the interval.

We distinguish two forms of activity; one is gathered within the luminary and is comparable to the life of the

shining body; this is the vaster and is, as it were, the foundation or wellspring of all the act; the other lies next

to the surface, the outer image of the inner content, a secondary activity though inseparable from the former.

For every existent has an Act which is in its likeness: as long as the one exists, so does the other; yet while

the original is stationary the activity reaches forth, in some things over a wide range, in others less far. There

are weak and faint activities, and there are some, even, that do not appear; but there are also things whose

activities are great and fargoing; in the case of these the activity must be thought of as being lodged, both in

the active and powerful source and in the point at which it settles. This may be observed in the case of an

animal's eyes where the pupils gleam: they have a light which shows outside the orbs. Again there are living

things which have an inner fire that in darkness shines out when they expand themselves and ceases to ray

outward when they contract: the fire has not perished; it is a mere matter of it being rayed out or not.

No: it is simply no longer on the outside because the fire [of which it is the activity] is no longer outward

No: only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only of the nonluminous body; the fire can

The light, then, raying from bodies is an outgoing activity of a luminous body; the light within luminous

bodies understand; such as are primarily luminous is the essential being embraced under the idea of that

body. When such a body is brought into association with Matter, its activity produces colour: when there is

no such association, it does not give colour it gives merely an incipient on which colour might be formed

for it belongs to another being [primal light] with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or from its

And light is incorporeal even when it is the light of a body; there is therefore no question, strictly speaking, of

its withdrawal or of its being present these terms do not apply to its modes and its essential existence is to

be an activity. As an example: the image upon a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the

reflected object upon the potential recipient: there is no outgoing from the object [or ingoing into the

reflecting body]; it is simply that, as long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form of

colour shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not there, the reflecting surface no longer holds

So it is with the soul considered as the activity of another and prior soul: as long as that prior retains its place,

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity as we maintained the

lifeprinciple domiciled in the body to be is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held in

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 lifeprinciple of the body is something that holds from another soul closely

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 lifegiving soul, or by the presence of any secondary

phase of it, it is clear that the lifeprinciple 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 outshining; it is merely no longer where it was.

8. Imagine that beyond the heavenly system there existed some solid mass, and that from this sphere there

was directed to it a vision utterly unimpeded and unrestricted: it is a question whether that solid form could

be perceived by what has no sympathetic relation with it, since we have held that sympathetic relation comes

Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that percipients and things perceived are all

members of one living being, no acts of perception could take place: that far body could be known only if it

were a member of this living universe of ours which condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if,

without being thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting light and colour and the qualities by

which we perceive things, and belonging to the same ideal category as the organ of vision?

If our supposition [of perception by sympathy] is true, there would still be no perception though we may be

told that the hypothesis is clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can fail in grasping

an illuminated object lying before it, and that the other senses in the presence of their particular objects

[The following passage, to nearly the end, is offered tentatively as a possible help to the interpretation of an

[But why does such a failing appear impossible to us? We answer, because here and now in all the act and

experience of our senses, we are within a unity, and members of it. What the conditions would be otherwise,

remains to be considered: if living sympathy suffices the theory is established; if not, there are other

That every living being is selfsensitive allows of no doubt; if the universe is a living being, no more need be

said; and what is true of the total must be true of the members, as inbound in that one life.

But what if we are invited to accept the theory of knowledge by likeness (rejecting knowledge by the

Awareness must be determined by the nature and character of the living being in which it occurs; perception,

then, means that the likeness demanded by the hypothesis is within this selfidentical living being (and not in

the object) for the organ by which the perception takes place is in the likeness of the living being (is merely

the agent adequately expressing the nature of the living being): thus perception is reduced to a mental

If, then, something that is a living whole perceives not its own content but things like to its content, it must

perceive them under the conditions of that living whole; this means that, in so far as it has perception, the

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.]

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

1. Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of as sealimpressions on soul or mind:

accepting this statement, there is one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected.

Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue of the lingering of an impression

which in fact was never made; the two things stand or fall together; either an impression is made upon the

mind and lingers when there is remembrance, or, denying the impression, we cannot hold that memory is its

lingering. Since we reject equally the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another

explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that the sensible object striking upon soul

If we study what occurs in the case of the most vivid form of perception, we can transfer our results to the

In any perception we attain by sight, the object is grasped there where it lies in the direct line of vision; it is

there that we attack it; there, then, the perception is formed; the mind looks outward; this is ample proof that

it has taken and takes no inner imprint, and does not see in virtue of some mark made upon it like that of the

ring on the wax; it need not look outward at all if, even as it looked, it already held the image of the object,

seeing by virtue of an impression made upon itself. It includes with the object the interval, for it tells at what

distance the vision takes place: how could it see as outlying an impression within itself, separated by no

interval from itself? Then, the point of magnitude: how could the mind, on this hypothesis, define the external

size of the object or perceive that it has any the magnitude of the sky, for instance, whose stamped imprint

would be too vast for it to contain? And, most convincing of all, if to see is to accept imprints of the objects

of our vision, we can never see these objects themselves; we see only vestiges they leave within us, shadows:

the things themselves would be very different from our vision of them. And, for a conclusive consideration,

we cannot see if the living object is in contact with the eye, we must look from a certain distance; this must

be more applicable to the mind; supposing the mind to be stamped with an imprint of the object, it could not

grasp as an object of vision what is stamped upon itself. For vision demands a duality, of seen and seeing: the

seeing agent must be distinct and act upon an impression outside it, not upon one occupying the same point

The mind affirms something not contained within it: this is precisely the characteristic of a power not to

Besides, the very condition of the mind being able to exercise discrimination upon what it is to see and hear

is not, of course, that these objects be equally impressions made upon it; on the contrary, there must be no

impressions, nothing to which the mind is passive; there can be only acts of that in which the objects become

Our tendency is to think of any of the faculties as unable to know its appropriate object by its own

uncompelled act; to us it seems to submit to its environment rather than simply to perceive it, though in

As with sight, so with hearing. It is the air which takes the impression, a kind of articulated stroke which may

be compared to letters traced upon it by the object causing the sound; but it belongs to the faculty, and the

soulessence, to read the imprints thus appearing before it, as they reach the point at which they become

In taste and smell also we distinguish between the impressions received and the sensations and judgements;

these last are mental acts, and belong to an order apart from the experiences upon which they are exercised.

The knowing of the things belonging to the Intellectual is not in any such degree attended by impact or

impression: they come forward, on the contrary, as from within, unlike the senseobjects known as from

without: they have more emphatically the character of acts; they are acts in the stricter sense, for their origin

is in the soul, and every concept of this Intellectual order is the soul about its Act.

Whether, in this selfvision, the soul is a duality and views itself as from the outside while seeing the

IntellectualPrincipal as a unity, and itself with the IntellectualPrinciple as a unity this question is

That the soul, or mind, having taken no imprint, yet achieves perception of what it in no way contains need

not surprise us; or rather, surprising though it is, we cannot refuse to believe in this remarkable power.

The Soul is the ReasonPrinciple 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 ReasonPrinciple of the entire

Thus it has dealings with both orders benefited and quickened by the one, but by the other beguiled, falling

before resemblances, and so led downwards as under spell. Poised midway, it is aware of both spheres.

Of the Intellectual it is said to have intuition by memory upon approach, for it knows them by a certain

natural identity with them; its knowledge is not attained by besetting them, so to speak, but by in a definite

degree possessing them; they are its natural vision; they are itself in a more radiant mode, and it rises from its

duller pitch to that greater brilliance in a sort of awakening, a progress from its latency to its act.

To the senseorder it stands in a similar nearness and to such things it gives a radiance out of its own store

and, as it were, elaborates them to visibility: the power is always ripe and, so to say, in travail towards them,

so that, whenever it puts out its strength in the direction of what has once been present in it, it sees that object

as present still; and the more intent its effort the more durable is the presence. This is why, it is agreed,

children have long memory; the things presented to them are not constantly withdrawn but remain in sight; in

their case the attention is limited but not scattered: those whose faculty and mental activity are busied upon a

Now, if memory were a matter of sealimpressions retained, the multiplicity of objects would have no

weakening effect on the memory. Further, on the same hypothesis, we would have no need of thinking back

to revive remembrance; nor would we be subject to forgetting and recalling; all would lie engraved within.

The very fact that we train ourselves to remember shows that what we get by the process is a strengthening of

the mind: just so, exercises for feet and hands enable us to do easily acts which in no sense contained or laid

How else can it be explained that we forget a thing heard once or twice but remember what is often repeated,

and that we recall a long time afterwards what at first hearing we failed to hold?

It is no answer to say that the parts present themselves sooner than the entire imprint why should they too be

forgotten? [there is no question of parts, for] the last hearing, or our effort to remember, brings the thing

All these considerations testify to an evocation of that faculty of the soul, or mind, in which remembrance is

vested: the mind is strengthened, either generally or to this particular purpose.

Observe these facts: memory follows upon attention; those who have memorized much, by dint of their

training in the use of leading indications [suggestive words and the like], reach the point of being easily able

to retain without such aid: must we not conclude that the basis of memory is the soulpower brought to full

The lingering imprints of the other explanation would tell of weakness rather than power; for to take imprint

easily is to be yielding. An impression is something received passively; the strongest memory, then, would go

with the least active nature. But what happens is the very reverse: in no pursuit to technical exercises tend to

make a man less the master of his acts and states. It is as with senseperception; the advantage is not to the

weak, the weak eye for example, but to that which has the fullest power towards its exercise. In the old, it is

And, once it is admitted that sensations are not impressions, the memory of a sensation cannot consist in the

Yes: but if it is an active power of the mind, a fitness towards its particular purpose, why does it not come at

Simply because the power needs to be poised and prepared: in this it is only like all the others, which have to

be readied for the task to which their power reaches, some operating very swiftly, others only after a certain

Quick memory does not in general go with quick wit: the two do not fall under the same mental faculty;

runner and boxer are not often united in one person; the dominant idea differs from man to man.

Yet there could be nothing to prevent men of superior faculty from reading impressions on the mind; why

should one thus gifted be incapable of what would be no more than a passive taking and holding?

That memory is a power of the Soul [not a capacity for taking imprint] is established at a stroke by the

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

1. Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or whether something of us passes

over to dissolution and destruction, while something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever this

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

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

And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is still not a unity; for it is divisible into shape

and matter, the duality without which bodies at their very simplest cannot cohere.

The mere fact that, as material forms, they have bulk means that they can be lopped and crushed and so come

If this body, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly immortal; if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a

The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and

If material, then definitely it must fall apart; for every material entity, at least, is something put together.

If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new substance must be investigated in the same way

But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since such the soul is to be, can dissolve.

Now: of necessity life is inherent to soul: this material entity, then, which we call soul must have life

ingrained within it; but [being a composite as by hypothesis, material] it must be made up of two or more

bodies; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of those bodies or in one of them to the exclusion

of the other or others; if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere.

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. But what sort of an entity have we there;

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

None of these, then, having life, it would be extraordinary if life came about by bringing them together; it is

impossible, in fact, that the collocation of material entities should produce life, or mindless entities mind.

No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give such results: some regulating

principle would be necessary, some Cause directing the admixture: that guiding principle would be soul.

Body not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex could not exist unless there were soul

in the universe, for body owes its being to the entrance of a ReasonPrinciple into Matter, and only from soul

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 selfsensitiveness, and soul is selfsensitive. And, again, constituents void of part

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 selfspringing life since

matter is without quality but that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under

FormingIdea. But if by this FormingIdea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of

body and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being [by hypothesis]

outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body would simply force us to repeat our former analysis.

If on the contrary they do not mean by this FormingIdea a real being, but some condition or modification of

the Matter, they must tell us how and whence this modification, with resultant life, can have found the way

into the Matter: for very certainly Matter does not mould itself to pattern or bring itself to life.

It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode has this power, life must be brought upon the

stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal.

In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soulpower 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

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

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

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" [finerbody 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

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

If it is nothing, only the pneuma exists, the "certain state" being no more than a word; this leads imperatively

to the assertion that Matter alone exists, Soul and God mere words, the lowest alone is.

If on the contrary this "configuration" is really existent something distinct from the underlie or Matter,

something residing in Matter but itself immaterial as not constructed out of Matter, then it must be a

Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or white, and so on through all the qualities by

which one is different from another; and, again, if a body is warm it diffuses only warmth, if cold it can only

chill, if light its presence tells against the total weight which if heavy it increases; black, it darkens; white, it

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

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

Then there is growth under a timelaw, and within a definite limit: how can this belong strictly to body?

Body can indeed be brought to growth, but does not itself grow except in the sense that in the material mass a

capacity for growing is included as an accessory to some principle whose action upon the body causes

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

And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably

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

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 "alleverywhere," a complete identity present at each and

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

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

6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there could be no senseperception, no mental

There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity enables it to grasp an object as an

The several senses will each be the entrance point of many diverse perceptions; in any one object there may

be many characteristics; any one organ may be the channel of a group of objects, as for instance a face is

known not by a special sense for separate features, nose, eyes; etc., but by one sense observing all in one act.

When sight and hearing gather their varying information, there must be some central unity to which both

report. How could there be any statement of difference unless all senseimpressions appeared before a

This there must be, as there is a centre to a circle; the senseimpressions converging from every point of

occurrence will be as lines striking from a circumference to what will be a true centre of perception as being a

If this centre were to break into separate points so that the senseimpressions fell upon the two ends of a

line then, either it must reknit itself to unity and identity, perhaps at the midpoint of the line, or all remains

unrelated, every end receiving the report of its particular field exactly as you and I have our distinct sense

Suppose the senseobject be such a unity as a face: all the points of observation must be brought together in

one visual total, as is obvious since there could be no panorama of great expanses unless the detail were

Much more must this be true in the case of thoughts, partless entities as they are, impinging upon the centre

Either this or, supposing the centre of consciousness to be a thing of quantity and extension, the sensible

object will coincide with it point by point of their coexpansion so that any given point in the faculty will

perceive solely what coincides with it in the object: and thus nothing in us could perceive any thing as a

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

If the sentient be a material entity sensation could only be of the order of sealimpressions struck by a ring on

If, at this, the impression is like one made in liquids as would be reasonable it will be confused and

wavering as upon water, and there can be no memory. If the impressions are permanent, then either no fresh

ones can be stamped upon the occupied ground and there can be no change of sensations or, others being

made, the former will be obliterated; and all record of the past is done away with.

If memory implies fresh sensations imposed upon former ones, the earlier not barring their way, the soul

7. We come to the same result by examining the sense of pain. We say there is pain in the finger: the trouble

is doubtless in the finger, but our opponents must admit that the sensation of the pain is in the centre of

consciousness. The suffering member is one thing, the sense of suffering is another: how does this happen?

By transmission, they will say: the psychic pneuma [= the semimaterial principle of life] stationed at the

finger suffers first; and stage by stage the trouble is passed on until at last it reaches the centre of

But on this theory, there must be a sensation in the spot first suffering pain, and another sensation at a second

point of the line of transmission, another in the third and so on; many sensations, in fact an unlimited series,

to deal with one pain; and at the last moment the centre of consciousness has the sensation of all these

sensations and of its own sensation to boot. Or to be exact, these serial sensations will not be of the pain in

the finger: the sensation next in succession to the suffering finger will be of pain at the joint, a third will tell

of a pain still higher up: there will be a series of separate pains: The centre of consciousness will not feel the

pain seated at the finger, but only that impinging upon itself: it will know this alone, ignore the rest and so

Thus: Transmission would not give sensation of the actual condition at the affected spot: it is not in the nature

of body that where one part suffers there should be knowledge in another part; for body is a magnitude, and

the parts of every magnitude are distinct parts; therefore we need, as the sentient, something of a nature to be

identical to itself at any and every spot; this property can belong only to some other form of being than body.

8. It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the soul were any form of

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 IntellectualPrinciple. 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

When such nonmagnitudes come before the soul, it receives them by means of its partless phase and they

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

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 bodynature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux.

8. A. [sometimes appearing as 9] There are those who insist on the activities observed in bodies warming,

chilling, thrusting, pressing and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. This ignores the

double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers

operating in them, and that these are not the powers we attribute to soul: intellection, perception, reasoning,

desire, wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very different form of being.

In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this school leaves nothing to that higher order. And

yet that it is precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their efficiency is clear from certain

It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different things, that body is always a thing of quantity

but not always a thing of quality: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied that quality,

being a different thing from quantity, is a different thing from body. Obviously quality could not be body

when it has not quantity as all body must; and, again, as we have said, body, any thing of mass, on being

reduced to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but the quality it possessed remains intact in every particle

for instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck this shows that sweetness and all other

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 nonmagnitude. 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

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

8. B. (10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire bodymass, still even in this entire permeation the

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

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

Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But soul does this. It is therefore

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 IntellectualPrinciple 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 natureprinciple, and always the later

If they treat God as they do the IntellectualPrinciple 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

No doubt the eternally selfidentical may have potentiality and be selfled to selfrealization, but even in

this case the being considered as actualized is of higher order than the being considered as merely capable of

Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body, and it exists always in actuality:

IntellectualPrinciple and Soul precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of body.

These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have been framed, to show that the soul is

8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it something which, while distinct from

The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the

accord in the strings of a lyre. When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the strings, and

this is known as accord: in the same way our body is formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the

blend produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing upon the bodily total.

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a

secondary to the lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could not do

these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials

which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct

entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its own accord or note], so that there would be many souls

to each person. Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the

accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the

strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human

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 selfcaused. 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.

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

It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is

the ensouled body not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural

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 EntelechySoul] must have oneuniform experience throughout, and be

aware of no internal contradiction. Senseperception 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

Even the senseperceiving 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

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 lifeprinciple,

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 lifeprinciple is

situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes from large growth to small and from the small to the entire

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

The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving as Form to anything: it is an

Essence which does not come into being by finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the soul of

some particular, for example, of a living being, whose body would by this doctrine be the author of its soul.

What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither body nor a state or experience of body, but is act and creation:

if it holds much and gives much, and is an existence outside of body; of what order and character must it be?

Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process; it

appears and it perishes; in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as it has the

9. (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is selfcaused, 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

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider of motion to all else: it moves by its

own quality, and every living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life that,

Not all things can have a life merely at second hand; this would give an infinite series: there must be some

nature which, having life primally, shall be of necessity indestructible, immortal, as the source of life to all

else that lives. This is the point at which all that is divine and blessed must be situated, living and having

being of itself, possessing primal being and primal life, and in its own essence rejecting all change, neither

Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear: the very word, strictly used, means that the

thing is perdurable. Similarly white, the colour, cannot be now white and now not white: if this "white" were

a real being it would be eternal as well as being white: the colour is merely white but whatsoever possesses

being, indwelling by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an entity this primal and

eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it

remains selfgathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation

to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by

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.

Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses a life beneficent and wise, we take the next

Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or

any other such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as possible has no

commerce with the bodily. Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged

soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native store.

If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is 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

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.

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

To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the

reality. Clear, then look: or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not doubt his

immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an

IntellectualPrinciple looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having

intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual substance, himself having become an

Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates

Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word "Farewell: I am to you an immortal God," for he has ascended

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

Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all that kept it in selfignorance preventing it

from knowing itself as gold; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows

that it has no need of any other glory than its own, triumphant if only it be allowed to remain purely to itself.

11. (16) What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a value, one in which there is a life

This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in the mode of the heat in fire for if heat is

characteristic of the fire proper, it certainly is adventitious to the Matter underlying the fire; or fire, too,

would be everlasting it is not in any such mode that the soul has life: this is no case of a Matter underlying

and a life brought into that Matter and making it into soul [as heat comes into matter and makes it fire].

Either life is Essential Reality, and therefore selfliving the very thing we have been seeking and

undeniably immortal: or it, too, is a compound and must be traced back through all the constituents until an

immortal substance is reached, something deriving movement from itself, and therefore debarred from

Even supposing life could be described as a condition imposed upon Matter, still the source from which this

condition entered the Matter must necessarily be admitted to be immortal simply by being unable to take into

Of course, life is no such mere condition, but an independent principle, effectively living.

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.

Each is a principle of motion, each is selfliving, each touches the same sphere by the same tentacles, each

has intellection of the celestial order and of the supercelestial, each is seeking to win to what has essential

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

Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment, must in the nature of things be broken

apart by that very mode which brought it together: but the soul is one and simplex, living not in the sense of

potential reception of life but by its own energy; and this can be no cause of dissolution.

But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been divided (in the body) and so becoming

No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying substance: and that could not happen

13. (18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual?

There is the IntellectualPrinciple 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 IntellectualPrinciple:

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

IntellectualPrinciple 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

IntellectualPrinciple, 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

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 lifegiver, is, still, that one principle of life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order.

All have sprung from one source, all have life as their own, all are incorporeal, indivisible, all are

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

But even that inferior phase thus laid aside will not be destroyed as long as its source continues to exist, for

15. (20) Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to those asking for demonstration: those

whose need is conviction by evidence of the more material order are best met from the abundant records

relevant to the subject: there are also the oracles of the Gods ordering the appeasing of wronged souls and the

honouring of the dead as still sentient, a practice common to all mankind: and again, not a few souls, once

among men, have continued to serve them after quitting the body and by revelations, practically helpful,

1. Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and

selfencentered; 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

Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of compulsory alternation from contrary to

contrary, speaks of ascent and descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is weariness to keep toiling at

the same things and always beginning again"; but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself

about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he

Empedocles where he says that it is law for faulty souls to descend to this sphere, and that he himself was

here because he turned a deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord reveals neither more

nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters; but in his

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.

We will not find him so consistent throughout that it is easy to discover his mind.

Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of 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

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

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

2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in

general to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what

this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity.

We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has planned well or ill...... like our souls, which it

may be, are such that governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and deeper into it if they are to

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 WorldSoul complete, competent, selfsufficing, 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

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 worldsoul 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

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

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 AllSoul, which has not been deprived of its natural standing and from eternity

possesses and will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it

against the course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither failing ever nor ever beginning.

Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as the All to the material forms within it for

these starry bodies are declared to be members of the soul's circuit we are given to understand that the

starsouls also enjoy the blissful condition of transcendence and immunity that becomes them.

And so we might expect: commerce with the body is repudiated for two only reasons, as hindering the soul's

intellective act and as filling with pleasure, desire, pain; but neither of these misfortunes can befall a soul

which has never deeply penetrated into the body, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an order

as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor fear.

There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to such a body nor is there any such

preoccupied concern, bringing about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed

vision; it remains always intent upon the Supreme, and its governance of this universe is effected by a power

Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears

and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or cavern.

Now this does not clash with the first theory [that of the impassivity of soul as in the All]; for the descent of

All that is IntellectualPrinciple has its being whole and all in the place of Intellection, what we call the

Intellectual Kosmos: but there exist, too, the intellective powers included in its being, and the separate

intelligences for the IntellectualPrinciple is not merely one; it is one and many. In the same way there must

be both many souls and one, the one being the source of the differing many just as from one genus there rise

various species, better and worse, some of the more intellectual order, others less effectively so.

In the IntellectualPrinciple a distinction is to be made: there is the IntellectualPrinciple 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,

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 IntellectualPrinciple. To its quality of being

intellective it adds the quality by which it attains its particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an

IntellectualPrinciple, it has thenceforth its own task too, as everything must that exists among real beings.

It looks towards its higher and has intellection; towards itself and conserves its peculiar being; towards its

The total of things could not have remained stationary in the Intellectual Kosmos, once there was the

possibility of continuous variety, of beings inferior but as necessarily existent as their superiors.

4. So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source,

but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light

attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then,

they remain with soulentire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the

soulentire, 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 selfcentred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of

its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it;

its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon

the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering

into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away

from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and

tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that

innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the AllSoul, that earlier state to which

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.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is

loosed from the shackles and soars when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of

essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the

life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect,

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixingbowl,

describes them as "parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and

delivering orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by

generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being

5. It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions the divine sowing to birth, as opposed to a

voluntary descent aiming at the completion of the universe; the judgement and the cave; necessity and free

choice in fact the necessity includes the choiceembodiment as an evil; the Empedoclean teaching of a

flight from God, a wandering away, a sin bringing its punishment; the "solace by flight" of Heraclitus; in a

All degeneration is no doubt involuntary, yet when it has been brought about by an inherent tendency, that

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

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

illdoing incurs a proportionately greater punishment administered under the surveillance of chastising

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

The act reveals the power, a power hidden, and we might almost say obliterated or nonexistent, unless at

some moment it became effective: in the world as it is, the richness of the outer stirs us all to the wonder of

6. Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried, shapeless within that

unbroken whole: none of the real beings [of the Intellectual Kosmos] would exist if that unity remained at

halt within itself: the plurality of these beings, offspring of the unity, could not exist without their own nexts

In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls, their issue stifled: every Kind must

produce its next; it must unfold from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance to

its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat; but there

is the lower phase, begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the Supreme.

To this power we cannot impute any halt, any limit of jealous grudging; it must move for ever outward until

the universe stands accomplished to the ultimate possibility. All, thus, is produced by an inexhaustible power

giving its gift to the universe, no part of which it can endure to see without some share in its being.

There is, besides, no principle that can prevent anything from partaking, to the extent of its own individual

receptivity in the Nature of Good. If therefore Matter has always existed, that existence is enough to ensure

its participation in the being which, according to each receptivity, communicates the supreme good

universally: if on the contrary, Matter has come into being as a necessary sequence of the causes preceding it,

that origin would similarly prevent it standing apart from the scheme as though it were out of reach of the

In sum: The loveliness that is in the senserealm is an index of the nobleness of the Intellectual sphere,

displaying its power and its goodness alike: and all things are for ever linked; the one order Intellectual in its

being, the other of sense; one selfexistent, the other eternally taking its being by participation in that first,

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

senserealm also. There is no grievance in its not being, through and through, the highest; it holds midrank

among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and

skirting the senseknown 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.

The outgoing that takes place in the IntellectualPrinciple 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

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 AllSoul, 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

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

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 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

The souls that have gone into division and become appropriated to some thing partial have also their

transcendent phase, but are preoccupied by sensation, and in the mere fact of exercising perception they take

in much that clashes with their nature and brings distress and trouble since the object of their concern is

partial, deficient, exposed to many alien influences, filled with desires of its own and taking its pleasure, that

But there is always the other, that which finds no savour in passing pleasure, but holds its own even way.

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

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

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

First we must assure ourselves of the possibility of all souls being one as that of any given individual is.

It must, no doubt, seem strange that my soul and that of any and everybody else should be one thing only: it

might mean my feelings being felt by someone else, my goodness another's too, my desire, his desire, all our

experience shared with each other and with the (onesouled) universe, so that the very universe itself would

Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul

Yet if we reject that unity, the universe itself ceases to be one thing and souls can no longer be included under

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

In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two

We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of

the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge seabeasts, it is said, the animal as a whole

will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.

Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt

with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the experience may be

expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.

That one identical soul should be virtuous in me and vicious in someone else is not strange: it is only saying

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

In myself some experience occurring in a part of the body may take no effect upon the entire man but

anything occurring in the higher reaches would tell upon the partial: in the same way any influx from the All

upon the individual will have manifest effect since the points of sympathetic contact are numerous but as to

3. Yet, looking at another set of facts, reflection tells us that we are in sympathetic relation to each other,

suffering, overcome, at the sight of pain, naturally drawn to forming attachments; and all this can be due only

Again, if spells and other forms of magic are efficient even at a distance to attract us into sympathetic

A quiet word induces changes in a remote object, and makes itself heard at vast distances proof of the

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

senseperception 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.

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

The nourishing faculty as dependent from the All belongs also to the AllSoul: why then does it not come

Because what is nourished by the action of this power is a member of the All, which itself has sensation

passively; but the perception, which is an intellectual judgement, is individual and has no need to create what

already exists, though it would have done so had the power not been previously included, of necessity, in the

4. These reflections should show that there is nothing strange in that reduction of all souls to one. But it is

Is it the unity of origin in a unity? And if so, is the one divided or does it remain entire and yet produce

variety? and how can an essential being, while remaining its one self, bring forth others?

Invoking God to become our helper, let us assert, that the very existence of many souls makes certain that

Then [by the nature of body] the many souls could result only from the splitting up of that entity, each an

entirely different substance: if this bodysoul be uniform in kind, each of the resultant souls must be of the

one kind; they will all carry the one Form undividedly and will differ only in their volumes. Now, if their

being souls depended upon their volumes they would be distinct; but if it is idealform that makes them

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

Obviously either the one essence will be entire in all, or the many will rise from a one which remains

unaltered and yet includes the one many in virtue of giving itself, without selfabandonment, to its own

It is competent thus to give and remain, because while it penetrates all things it can never itself be sundered:

There is no reason for dismissing this explanation: we may think of a science with its constituents standing as

one total, the source of all those various elements: again, there is the seed, a whole, producing those new parts

in which it comes to its division; each of the new growths is a whole while the whole remains undiminished:

only the material element is under the mode of part, and all the multiplicity remains an entire identity still.

It may be objected that in the case of science the constituents are not each the whole.

But even in the science, while the constituent selected for handling to meet a particular need is present

actually and takes the lead, still all the other constituents accompany it in a potential presence, so that the

whole is in every part: only in this sense [of particular attention] is the whole science distinguished from the

part: all, we may say, is here simultaneously effected: each part is at your disposal as you choose to take it;

the part invites the immediate interest, but its value consists in its approach to the whole.

The detail cannot be considered as something separate from the entire body of speculation: so treated it would

have no technical or scientific value; it would be childish divagation. The one detail, when it is a matter of

science, potentially includes all. Grasping one such constituent of his science, the expert deduces the rest by

[As a further illustration of unity in plurality] the geometrician, in his analysis, shows that the single

proposition includes all the items that go to constitute it and all the propositions which can be developed from

It is our feebleness that leads to doubt in these matters; the body obscures the truth, but There all stands out

1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in selfwill, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the

primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and

largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting

further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young

from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself:

the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank

brings selfdepreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their

awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and

they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves

Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and nothing thus holding itself inferior to

things that rise and perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else it admires

A double discipline must be applied if human beings in this pass are to be reclaimed, and brought back to

There is the method, which we amply exhibit elsewhere, declaring the dishonour of the objects which the

Soul holds here in honour; the second teaches or recalls to the soul its race and worth; this latter is the leading

It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to which it is the natural preliminary: the seeker

is soul and it must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which soul may undertake the search;

it must study itself in order to learn whether it has the faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the object proposed,

whether in fact we ought to seek; for if the object is alien the search must be futile, while if there is

2. Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has

breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine

stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that

rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and

it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or

abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived:

That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look,

emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not

merely the enveloping body be at peace, body's turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea

at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll

inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun

throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material

expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the

heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a

blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body clay and

water or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, "the execration of the

The Soul's nature and power will be brought out more clearly, more brilliantly, if we consider next how it

envelops the heavenly system and guides all to its purposes: for it has bestowed itself upon all that huge

The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others

variously interdependent; the soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of

the soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the soul entire,

omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. By the

power of the soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and

the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that same Ideal

nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value

which we have found soul to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth, and, taking

fire itself, what [but soul] is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with

If, then, it is the presence of soul that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things?

3. The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are

already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must

But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward neighbour of the soul, its prior and source.

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the

IntellectualPrinciple: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way

soul is an utterance of the IntellectualPrinciple: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life

sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also

heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double

aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the

IntellectualPrinciple, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for

its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the

Thus its substantial existence comes from the IntellectualPrinciple; and the Reason within it becomes Act in

virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks

to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soulacts which are of this intellective nature and are determined

by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign [traceable to Matter] and is accidental to the soul in the

In two ways, then, the IntellectualPrinciple enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as

immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is

succession, that over against a recipient there stands the idealform received; but this recipient, Matter to the

Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded.

What the IntellectualPrinciple must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior.

Admiring the world of sense as we look out upon its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march,

thinking of the gods within it, seen and hidden, and the celestial spirits and all the life of animal and plant, let

us mount to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere: there we are to contemplate all things as members

of the Intellectual eternal in their own right, vested with a selfspringing consciousness and life and,

presiding over all these, the unsoiled Intelligence and the unapproachable wisdom.

That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Kronos, who is the IntellectualPrinciple as being the

offspring or exuberance of God. For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but is Divine Mind;

all is God; this is the place of every soul. Here is rest unbroken: for how can that seek change, in which all is

well; what need that reach to, which holds all within itself; what increase can that desire, which stands utterly

achieved? All its content, thus, is perfect, that itself may be perfect throughout, as holding nothing that is less

than the divine, nothing that is less than intellective. Its knowing is not by search but by possession, its

blessedness inherent, not acquired; for all belongs to it eternally and it holds the authentic Eternity imitated

by Time which, circling round the Soul, makes towards the new thing and passes by the old. Soul deals with

thing after thing now Socrates; now a horse: always some one entity from among beings but the

IntellectualPrinciple is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is

pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for

nothing there has ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity well pleased, we might

say, to be as it is; and everything, in that entire content, is IntellectualPrinciple and Authentic Existence; and

the total of all is IntellectualPrinciple entire and Being entire. IntellectualPrinciple by its intellective act

establishes Being, which in turn, as the object of intellection, becomes the cause of intellection and of

existence to the IntellectualPrinciple though, of course, there is another cause of intellection which is also

Now while these two are coalescents, having their existence in common, and are never apart, still the unity

they form is twosided; there is IntellectualPrinciple as against Being, the intellectual agent as against the

object of intellection; we consider the intellective act and we have the IntellectualPrinciple; we think of the

Such difference there must be if there is to be any intellection; but similarly there must also be identity [since,

Thus the Primals [the first "Categories"] are seen to be: IntellectualPrinciple; Existence; Difference;

Identity: we must include also Motion and Rest: Motion provides for the intellectual act, Rest preserves

identity as Difference gives at once a Knower and a Known, for, failing this, all is one, and silent.

So too the objects of intellection [the ideal content of the Divine Mind] identical in virtue of the

selfconcentration of the principle which is their common ground must still be distinct each from another;

The Intellectual Kosmos thus a manifold, Number and Quantity arise: Quality is the specific character of each

5. As a manifold, then, this God, the IntellectualPrinciple, exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once

Bringing itself close to the divine Intellect, becoming, as it were, one with this, it seeks still further: What

Being, now, has engendered this God, what is the Simplex preceding this multiple; what the cause at once of

its existence and of its existing as a manifold; what the source of this Number, this Quantity?

Number, Quantity, is not primal: obviously before even duality, there must stand the unity.

The Dyad is a secondary; deriving from unity, it finds in unity the determinant needed by its native

indetermination: once there is any determination, there is Number, in the sense, of course, of the real [the

archetypal] Number. And the soul is such a number or quantity. For the Primals are not masses or

magnitudes; all of that gross order is later, real only to the sensethought; even in seed the effective reality is

not the moist substance but the unseen that is to say Number [as the determinant of individual being] and

Thus by what we call the Number and the Dyad of that higher realm, we mean Reason Principles and the

IntellectualPrinciple: but while the Dyad is, as regards that sphere, undetermined representing, as it were,

the underly [or Matter] of The One the later Number [or Quantity] that which rises from the Dyad

[IntellectualPrinciple] and The One is not Matter to the later existents but is their formingIdea, for all of

them take shape, so to speak, from the ideas rising within this. The determination of the Dyad is brought

about partly from its object The One and partly from itself, as is the case with all vision in the act of sight:

6. But how and what does the IntellectualPrinciple see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is

The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated

by the most ancient philosophers: from such a unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at

all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the Primal not remained

selfgathered so that there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we observe in existence and yet

In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is

always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. But if we seek

the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary selfgathered, tranquilly remote above all else we

begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the moment, the first

Everything moving has necessarily an object towards which it advances; but since the Supreme can have no

such object, we may not ascribe motion to it: anything that comes into being after it can be produced only as

a consequence of its unfailing selfintention; and, of course, we dare not talk of generation in time, dealing as

we are with eternal Beings: where we speak of origin in such reference, it is in the sense, merely, of cause

and subordination: origin from the Supreme must not be taken to imply any movement in it: that would make

the Being resulting from the movement not a second principle but a third: the Movement would be the second

Given this immobility in the Supreme, it can neither have yielded assent nor uttered decree nor stirred in any

What happened then? What are we to conceive as rising in the neighbourhood of that immobility?

It must be a circumradiation produced from the Supreme but from the Supreme unaltering and may be

compared to the brilliant light encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from that unchanging substance.

All existences, as long as they retain their character, produce about themselves, from their essence, in virtue

of the power which must be in them some necessary, outwardfacing hypostasis continuously attached to

them and representing in image the engendering archetypes: thus fire gives out its heat; snow is cold not

merely to itself; fragrant substances are a notable instance; for, as long as they last, something is diffused

Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally an eternal

being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor: what then are we to think of the AllPerfect but that it

can produce nothing less than the very greatest that is later than itself. The greatest, later than the divine

unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One

on which alone it leans while the First has no need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind

can be no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it

the soul, for example, being an utterance and act of the IntellectualPrinciple as that is an utterance and act of

The One. But in soul the utterance is obscured, for soul is an image and must look to its own original: that

Principle, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation thus becoming what it is and has that vision

not as from a distance but as the immediate next with nothing intervening, close to the One as Soul to it.

The offspring must seek and love the begetter; and especially so when begetter and begotten are alone in their

sphere; when, in addition, the begetter is the highest good, the offspring [inevitably seeking its Good] is

The IntellectualPrinciple stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the

first should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its quality, in other words that there be something in

its likeness as the sun's rays tell of the sun. Yet The One is not an IntellectualPrinciple; how then does it

Simply by the fact that in its selfquest it has vision: this very seeing is the IntellectualPrinciple. Any

perception of the external indicates either sensation or intellection, sensation symbolized by a line,

Of course the divisibility belonging to the circle does not apply to the IntellectualPrinciple; all, there too, is

The items of this potentiality the divine intellection brings out, so to speak, from the unity and knows them in

It has besides a consciousness, as it were, within itself of this same potentiality; it knows that it can of itself

beget an hypostasis and can determine its own Being by the virtue emanating from its prior; it knows that its

nature is in some sense a definite part of the content of that First; that it thence derives its essence, that its

strength lies there and that its Being takes perfection as a derivative and a recipient from the First. It sees that,

as a member of the realm of division and part, it receives life and intellection and all else it has and is, from

the undivided and partless, since that First is no member of existence, but can be the source of all on

condition only of being held down by no one distinctive shape but remaining the undeflected unity.

And so the First is not a thing among the things contained by the IntellectualPrinciple though the source of

all. In virtue of this source, things of the later order are essential beings; for from that fact there is

determination; each has its form: what has being cannot be envisaged as outside of limit; the nature must be

held fast by boundary and fixity; though to the Intellectual Beings this fixity is no more than determination

A being of this quality, like the IntellectualPrinciple, must be felt to be worthy of the allpure: it could not

derive from any other than from the first principle of all; as it comes into existence, all other beings must be

simultaneously engendered all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual realm. And it still

remains pregnant with this offspring; for it has, so to speak, drawn all within itself again, holding them lest

they fall away towards Matter to be "brought up in the House of Rhea" [in the realm of flux]. This is the

meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he

must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an IntellectualPrinciple manifest in some

product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the

[necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect,

perfect within itself, is Soul [the lifeprinciple carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind].

Now, even in the Divine the engendered could not be the very highest; it must be a lesser, an image; it will be

undetermined, as the Divine is, but will receive determination, and, so to speak, its shaping idea, from the

Yet any offspring of the IntellectualPrinciple must be a ReasonPrinciple; the thought of the Divine Mind

must be a substantial existence: such then is that [Soul] which circles about the Divine Mind, its light, its

image inseparably attached to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its

nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather,

generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath; of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still

8. This is the explanation of Plato's Triplicity, in the passage where he names as the Primals the Beings

gathered about the King of All, and establishes a Secondary containing the Secondaries, and a Third

He teaches, also, that there is an author of the Cause, that is of the IntellectualPrinciple, which to him is the

Creator who made the Soul, as he tells us, in the famous mixing bowl. This author of the causing principle, of

the divine mind, is to him the Good, that which transcends the IntellectualPrinciple and transcends Being:

often too he uses the term "The Idea" to indicate Being and the Divine Mind. Thus Plato knows the order of

generation from the Good, the IntellectualPrinciple; from the IntellectualPrinciple, the Soul. These

teachings are, therefore, no novelties, no inventions of today, but long since stated, if not stressed; our

doctrine here is the explanation of an earlier and can show the antiquity of these opinions on the testimony of

Earlier, Parmenides made some approach to the doctrine in identifying Being with IntellectualPrinciple

"Knowing and Being are one thing he says, and this unity is to him motionless in spite of the intellection he

attributes to it: to preserve its unchanging identity he excludes all bodily movement from it; and he compares

it to a huge sphere in that it holds and envelops all existence and that its intellection is not an outgoing act but

internal. Still, with all his affirmation of unity, his own writings lay him open to the reproach that his unity

The Platonic Parmenides is more exact; the distinction is made between the Primal One, a strictly pure Unity,

and a secondary One which is a OneMany and a third which is a Oneandmany; thus he too is in

9. Anaxagoras, again, in his assertion of a Mind pure and unmixed, affirms a simplex First and a sundered

Heraclitus, with his sense of bodily forms as things of ceaseless process and passage, knows the One as

In Empedocles, similarly, we have a dividing principle, "Strife," set against "Friendship" which is The One

Later there is Aristotle; he begins by making the First transcendent and intellective but cancels that primacy

by supposing it to have selfintellection. Further he affirms a multitude of other intellective beings as many

indeed as there are orbs in the heavens; one such principle as in over to every orb and thus his account of

the Intellectual Realm differs from Plato's and, failing reason, he brings in necessity; though whatever

reasons he had alleged there would always have been the objection that it would be more reasonable that all

the spheres, as contributory to one system, should look to a unity, to the First.

We are obliged also to ask whether to Aristotle's mind all Intellectual Beings spring from one, and that one

If from one, then clearly the Intellectual system will be analogous to that of the universe of sensesphere

encircling sphere, with one, the outermost, dominating all the First [in the Intellectual] will envelop the

entire scheme and will be an Intellectual [or Archetypal] Kosmos; and as in our universe the spheres are not

empty but the first sphere is thick with stars and none without them, so, in the Intellectual Kosmos, those

principles of Movement will envelop a multitude of Beings, and that world will be the realm of the greater

If on the contrary each is a principle, then the effective powers become a matter of chance; under what

compulsion are they to hold together and act with one mind towards that work of unity, the harmony of the

entire heavenly system? Again what can make it necessary that the material bodies of the heavenly system be

equal in number to the Intellectual moving principles, and how can these incorporeal Beings be numerically

For these reasons the ancient philosophers that ranged themselves most closely to the school of Pythagoras

and of his later followers and to that of Pherekudes, have insisted upon this Nature, some developing the

subject in their writings while others treated of it merely in unwritten discourses, some no doubt ignoring it

10. We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to the scheme of things:

There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose nature we have sought to establish in

so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at

Now just as these three exist for the system of Nature, so, we must hold, they exist for ourselves. I am not

speaking of the material order all that is separable but of what lies beyond the sense realm in the same way

as the Primals are beyond all the heavens; I mean the corresponding aspect of man, what Plato calls the

Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of

soul, but [above the lifeprinciple] there is the soul perfected as containing IntellectualPrinciple with its

double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily

organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated

this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. We may not

seek any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of all space: its distinct quality, its

separateness, its immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all of the bodily order. This is

why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the soul around it from without understand that phase of

soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual and of ourselves that the charioteer's head reaches

The admonition to sever soul from body is not, of course, to be understood spatially that separation stands

made in Nature the reference is to holding our rank, to use of our thinking, to an attitude of alienation from

the body in the effort to lead up and attach to the overworld, equally with the other, that phase of soul seated

here and, alone, having to do with body, creating, moulding, spending its care upon it.

11. Since there is a Soul which reasons upon the right and good for reasoning is an enquiry into the

rightness and goodness of this rather than that there must exist some permanent Right, the source and

foundation of this reasoning in our soul; how, else, could any such discussion be held? Further, since the

soul's attention to these matters is intermittent, there must be within us an IntellectualPrinciple acquainted

with that Right not by momentary act but in permanent possession. Similarly there must be also the principle

of this principle, its cause, God. This Highest cannot be divided and allotted, must remain intangible but not

bound to space, it may be present at many points, wheresoever there is anything capable of accepting one of

its manifestations; thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its term at the centre;

and to the centre the radii bring each their own. Within our nature is such a centre by which we grasp and are

linked and held; and those of us are firmly in the Supreme whose collective tendency is There.

12. Possessed of such powers, how does it happen that we do not lay hold of them, but for the most part, let

these high activities go idle some, even, of us never bringing them in any degree to effect?

The answer is that all the Divine Beings are unceasingly about their own act, the IntellectualPrinciple and its

Prior always selfintent; and so, too, the soul maintains its unfailing movement; for not all that passes in the

soul is, by that fact, perceptible; we know just as much as impinges upon the faculty of sense. Any activity

not transmitted to the sensitive faculty has not traversed the entire soul: we remain unaware because the

human being includes senseperception; man is not merely a part [the higher part] of the soul but the total.

None the less every being of the order of soul is in continuous activity as long as life holds, continuously

executing to itself its characteristic act: knowledge of the act depends upon transmission and perception. If

there is to be perception of what is thus present, we must turn the perceptive faculty inward and hold it to

attention there. Hoping to hear a desired voice, we let all others pass and are alert for the coming at last of

that most welcome of sounds: so here, we must let the hearings of sense go by, save for sheer necessity, and

1. The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its

possession running back, so to speak, to it or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be.

But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality?

It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that Being may be

brought about, the source must be no Being but Being's generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal

act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our

metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new: this product has turned again to its

begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an IntellectualPrinciple.

That station towards the one [the fact that something exists in presence of the One] establishes Being; that

vision directed upon the One establishes the IntellectualPrinciple; standing towards the One to the end of

vision, it is simultaneously IntellectualPrinciple and Being; and, attaining resemblance in virtue of this

This second outflow is a Form or Idea representing the Divine Intellect as the Divine Intellect represented its

This active power sprung from essence [from the IntellectualPrinciple considered as Being] is Soul.

Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless IntellectualPrinciple which itself sprang from its own

motionless prior but the soul's operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its

movement. It takes fulness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by adopting another, a

Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the human Soul appears to reach away as far

down as to the vegetal order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is within its province; but

it is not present entire; when it has reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus far

downwards it produces by its outgoing and its tendency towards the less good another hypostasis or form

of being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the Soul) is produced from the IntellectualPrinciple which yet

2. To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle

retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other hand every being is in

In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less

intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant

and brought it there; in soul entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part

or has come from the IntellectualPrinciple in the sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent

to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general.

But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or topmost boughs are lopped from some growing

thing, where goes the soul that was present in them? Simply, whence it came: soul never knew spatial

separation and therefore is always within the source. If you cut the root to pieces, or burn it, where is the life

No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it

is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some

one spot; if a Soulpower reascends, it is within the Soulpower preceding it; that in turn can be only in the

soulpower prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the IntellectualPrinciple. Of course nothing here

must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from

Soul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and

If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a

midrank life and has centred itself upon the midphase of its being. All in that midregion is

IntellectualPrinciple not wholly itself nothing else because deriving thence [and therefore of that name and

rank], yet not that because the IntellectualPrinciple in giving it forth is not merged into it.

There exists, thus, a life, as it were, of huge extension, a total in which each several part differs from its next,

all making a selfcontinuous whole under a law of discrimination by which the various forms of things arise

It engenders precisely the Kind in which it is thus present: how, is a question to be handled from another

1. Are we to think that a being knowing itself must contain diversity, that selfknowledge can be affirmed

only when some one phase of the self perceives other phases, and that therefore an absolutely simplex entity

No: a being that has no parts or phases may have this consciousness; in fact there would be no real

selfknowing in an entity presented as knowing itself in virtue of being a compound some single element in

it perceiving other elements as we may know our own form and entire bodily organism by

senseperception: such knowing does not cover the whole field; the knowing element has not had the

required cognisance at once of its associates and of itself; this is not the selfknower asked for; it is merely

Either we must exhibit the selfknowing of an uncompounded being and show how that is possible or

To abandon the belief is not possible in view of the many absurdities thus entailed.

It would be already absurd enough to deny this power to the soul or mind, but the very height of absurdity to

deny it to the nature of the IntellectualPrinciple, presented thus as knowing the rest of things but not

It is the province of sense and in some degree of understanding and judgement, but not of the

IntellectualPrinciple, to handle the external, though whether the IntellectualPrinciple holds the knowledge

of these things is a question to be examined, but it is obvious that the IntellectualPrinciple must have

knowledge of the Intellectual objects. Now, can it know those objects alone or must it not simultaneously

know itself, the being whose function it is to know just those things? Can it have selfknowledge in the sense

[dismissed above as inadequate] of knowing its content while it ignores itself? Can it be aware of knowing its

members and yet remain in ignorance of its own knowing self? Self and content must be simultaneously

2. We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed selfknowledge and what the knowing principle

The senseprinciple in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance only of the external; even in any

awareness of events within the body it occupies, this is still the perception of something external to a

principle dealing with those bodily conditions not as within but as beneath itself.

The reasoningprinciple in the Soul acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of

senseperception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the impressions, so to

speak, rising from the IntellectualPrinciple, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will

develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and latecoming impressions [those of sense] and adapts

them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before the act which may be described as the soul's

So far as this, the efficacy of the IntellectualPrinciple in the Soul certainly reaches; but is there also

introversion and selfcognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the Divine Mind?

If we accord selfknowing to this phase of the soul we make it an IntellectualPrinciple and will have to

show what distinguishes it from its prior; if we refuse it selfknowing, all our thought brings us step by step

to some principle which has this power, and we must discover what such selfknowing consists in. If, again,

we do allow selfknowledge in the lower we must examine the question of degree; for if there is no

difference of degree, then the reasoning principle in soul is the IntellectualPrinciple unalloyed.

We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has equally the power of turning inwards upon

itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior and inferior, which it

3. Sense sees a man and transmits the impression to the understanding. What does the understanding say? It

has nothing to say as yet; it accepts and waits; unless, rather, it questions within itself "Who is this?"

If it should go on to develop the impression received, it distinguishes various elements in what the

representative faculty has set before it; supposing it to say "Socrates, if the man is good," then, while it has

spoken upon information from the senses, its total pronouncement is its own; it contains within itself a

It is, itself, of the nature of the good and it has been strengthened still towards the perception of all that is

good by the irradiation of the IntellectualPrinciple upon it; for this pure phase of the soul welcomes to itself

But why may we not distinguish this understanding phase as IntellectualPrinciple and take soul to consist of

Because all the activities mentioned are within the scope of a reasoning faculty, and reasoning is

Why not, however, absolve the question by assigning selfcognisance to this phase?

Because we have allotted to soul the function of dealing in thought and in multiform action with the

external, and we hold that observation of self and of the content of self must belong to IntellectualPrinciple.

If any one says, "Still; what precludes the reasoning soul from observing its own content by some special

faculty?" he is no longer posting a principle of understanding or of reasoning but, simply, bringing in the

But what precludes the IntellectualPrinciple from being present, unalloyed, within the soul? Nothing, we

We cannot describe it as belonging to the soul though we do describe it as our IntellectualPrinciple,

something distinct from the understanding, advanced above it, and yet ours even though we cannot include it

among soulphases: it is ours and not ours; and therefore we use it sometimes and sometimes not, whereas

we always have use of the understanding; the IntellectualPrinciple is ours when we act by it, not ours when

But what is this acting by it? Does it mean that we become the IntellectualPrinciple so that our utterance is

We are not the IntellectualPrinciple; we represent it in virtue of that highest reasoning faculty which draws

Still; we perceive by means of the perceptive faculty and are, ourselves, the percipients: may we not say the

No: our reasoning is our own; we ourselves think the thoughts that occupy the understanding for this is

actually the We but the operation of the IntellectualPrinciple enters from above us as that of the sensitive

faculty from below; the We is the soul at its highest, the midpoint between two powers, between the

sensitive principle, inferior to us, and the intellectual principle superior. We think of the perceptive act as

integral to ourselves because our senseperception is uninterrupted; we hesitate as to the

IntellectualPrinciple both because we are not always occupied with it and because it exists apart, not a

principle inclining to us but one to which we incline when we choose to look upwards.

That correspondence may be brought about in two ways: either the radii from that centre are traced upon us to

be our law or we are filled full of the Divine Mind, which again may have become to us a thing seen and felt

Hence our selfknowing comes to the knowing of all the rest of our being in virtue of this thing patently

present; or by that power itself communicating to us its own power of selfknowing; or by our becoming

Thus the selfknower is a double person: there is the one that takes cognisance of the principle in virtue of

which understanding occurs in the soul or mind; and there is the higher, knowing himself by the

IntellectualPrinciple with which he becomes identical: this latter knows the self as no longer man but as a

being that has become something other through and through: he has thrown himself as one thing over into the

superior order, taking with him only that better part of the soul which alone is winged for the Intellectual Act

and gives the man, once established There, the power to appropriate what he has seen.

We can scarcely suppose this understanding faculty to be unaware that it has understanding; that it takes

cognisance of things external; that in its judgements it decides by the rules and standards within itself held

directly from the IntellectualPrinciple; that there is something higher than itself, something which,

moreover, it has no need to seek but fully possesses. What can we conceive to escape the selfknowledge of

a principle which admittedly knows the place it holds and the work it has to do? It affirms that it springs from

IntellectualPrinciple whose second and image it is, that it holds all within itself, the universe of things,

engraved, so to say, upon it as all is held There by the eternal engraver. Aware so far of itself, can it be

supposed to halt at that? Are we to suppose that all we can do is to apply a distinct power of our nature and

come thus to awareness of that IntellectualPrinciple as aware of itself? Or may we not appropriate that

principle which belongs to us as we to it and thus attain to awareness, at once, of it and of ourselves? Yes:

this is the necessary way if we are to experience the selfknowledge vested in the IntellectualPrinciple. And

a man becomes IntellectualPrinciple when, ignoring all other phases of his being, he sees through that only

and sees only that and so knows himself by means of the self in other words attains the selfknowledge

That would be a case of knower distinguished from known, and would not be selfknowing.

What, then, if the total combination were supposed to be of one piece, knower quite undistinguished from

known, so that, seeing any given part of itself as identical with itself, it sees itself by means of itself, knower

To begin with, the distinction in one self thus suggested is a strange phenomenon. How is the self to make the

partition? The thing cannot happen of itself. And, again, which phase makes it? The phase that decides to be

the knower or that which is to be the known? Then how can the knowing phase know itself in the known

when it has chosen to be the knower and put itself apart from the known? In such selfknowledge by

sundering it can be aware only of the object, not of the agent; it will not know its entire content, or itself as an

integral whole; it knows the phase seen but not the seeing phase and thus has knowledge of something else,

In order to perfect selfknowing it must bring over from itself the knowing phase as well: seeing subject and

seen objects must be present as one thing. Now if in this coalescence of seeing subject with seen objects, the

objects were merely representations of the reality, the subject would not possess the realities: if it is to

possess them it must do so not by seeing them as the result of any selfdivision but by knowing them,

At that, the object known must be identical with the knowing act [or agent], the IntellectualPrinciple,

therefore, identical with the Intellectual Realm. And in fact, if this identity does not exist, neither does truth;

the Principle that should contain realities is found to contain a transcript, something different from the

realities; that constitutes nonTruth; Truth cannot apply to something conflicting with itself; what it affirms it

Thus we find that the IntellectualPrinciple, the Intellectual Realm and Real Being constitute one thing,

which is the Primal Being; the primal IntellectualPrinciple is that which contains the realities or, rather,

But taking Primal Intellection and its intellectual object to be a unity, how does that give an Intellective

Being knowing itself? An intellection enveloping its object or identical with it is far from exhibiting the

All turns on the identity. The intellectual object is itself an activity, not a mere potentiality; it is not lifeless;

nor are the life and intellection brought into it as into something naturally devoid of them, some stone or

other dead matter; no, the intellectual object is essentially existent, the primal reality. As an active force, the

first activity, it must be, also itself, the noblest intellection, intellection possessing real being since it is

entirely true; and such an intellection, primal and primally existent, can be no other than the primal principle

of Intellection: for that primal principle is no potentiality and cannot be an agent distinct from its act and thus,

once more, possessing its essential being as a mere potentiality. As an act and one whose very being is an

act it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical

with that act; therefore the IntellectualPrinciple, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all

are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle

itself, it cannot but have selfknowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon

the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses selfknowing, thus, on every count; the act is

6. Thus we have shown that there exists that which in the strictest sense possesses selfknowing.

This selfknowing agent, perfect in the IntellectualPrinciple, is modified in the Soul.

The difference is that, while the soul knows itself as within something else, the IntellectualPrinciple knows

itself as selfdepending, knows all its nature and character, and knows by right of its own being and by

simple introversion. When it looks upon the authentic existences it is looking upon itself; its vision as its

effective existence, and this efficacy is itself since the IntellectualPrinciple and the Intellectual Act are one:

this is an integral seeing itself by its entire being, not a part seeing by a part.

But has our discussion issued in an IntellectualPrinciple having a persuasive activity [furnishing us with

No: it brings compulsion not persuasion; compulsion belongs to the IntellectualPrinciple, persuasion to the

soul or mind, and we seem to desire to be persuaded rather than to see the truth in the pure intellect.

As long as we were Above, collected within the Intellectual nature, we were satisfied; we were held in the

intellectual act; we had vision because we drew all into unity for the thinker in us was the

IntellectualPrinciple telling us of itself and the soul or mind was motionless, assenting to that act of its

prior. But now that we are once more here living in the secondary, the soul we seek for persuasive

Our way is to teach our soul how the IntellectualPrinciple exercises selfvision; the phase thus to be taught

is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent soul,

indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an IntellectualPrinciple or that it holds

its peculiar power through and from that Principle. This phase must be brought to understand by what means

it has knowledge of the thing it sees and warrant for what it affirms: if it became what it affirms, it would by

that fact possess selfknowing. All its vision and affirmation being in the Supreme or deriving from it There

where itself also is it will possess selfknowledge by its right as a ReasonPrinciple, claiming its kin and

The soul therefore [to attain selfknowledge] has only to set this image [that is to say, its highest phase]

alongside the veritable IntellectualPrinciple which we have found to be identical with the truths constituting

the objects of intellection, the world of Primals and Reality: for this IntellectualPrinciple, by very definition,

cannot be outside of itself, the Intellectual Reality: selfgathered and unalloyed, it is IntellectualPrinciple

through all the range of its being for unintelligent intelligence is not possible and thus it possesses of

necessity selfknowing, as a being immanent to itself and one having for function and essence to be purely

and solely IntellectualPrinciple. This is no doer; the doer, not selfintent but looking outward, will have

knowledge, in some kind, of the external, but, if wholly of this practical order, need have no selfknowledge;

where, on the contrary, there is no action and of course the pure IntellectualPrinciple cannot be straining

after any absent good the intention can be only towards the self; at once selfknowing becomes not merely

plausible but inevitable; what else could living signify in a being immune from action and existing in

But to admit its knowing God is to be compelled to admit its selfknowing. It will know what it holds from

God, what God has given forth or may; with this knowledge, it knows itself at the stroke, for it is itself one of

those given things in fact is all of them. Knowing God and His power, then, it knows itself, since it comes

from Him and carries His power upon it; if, because here the act of vision is identical with the object, it is

unable to see God clearly, then all the more, by the equation of seeing and seen, we are driven back upon that

selfseeing and selfknowing in which seeing and thing seen are undistinguishably one thing.

Repose, no doubt; but, to an IntellectualPrinciple, Repose is not an abdication from intellect; its Repose is

an Act, the act of abstention from the alien: in all forms of existence repose from the alien leaves the

characteristic activity intact, especially where the Being is not merely potential but fully realized.

In the IntellectualPrinciple, the Being is an Act and in the absence of any other object it must be

selfdirected; by this selfintellection it holds its Act within itself and upon itself; all that can emanate from

it is produced by this selfcentering and selfintention; first selfgathered, it then gives itself or gives

something in its likeness; fire must first be selfcentred and be fire, true to fire's natural Act; then it may

Once more, then; the IntellectualPrinciple is a selfintent activity, but soul has the double phase, one inner,

intent upon the IntellectualPrinciple, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the

likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by

virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces Idealforms

divine intellections perfectly wrought out so that all its creations are representations of the divine

Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images,

the nearer more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source.

8. Now comes the question what sort of thing does the IntellectualPrinciple see in seeing the Intellectual

We are not to look for an Intellectual realm reminding us of the colour or shape to be seen on material

objects: the intellectual antedates all such things; and even in our sphere the production is very different from

the ReasonPrinciple in the seeds from which it is produced. The seed principles are invisible and the beings

of the Intellectual still more characteristically so; the Intellectuals are of one same nature with the Intellectual

Realm which contains them, just as the ReasonPrinciple in the seed is identical with the soul, or

But the Soul (considered as apart from the IntellectualPrinciple) has no vision of what it thus contains, for it

is not the producer but, like the ReasonPrinciples also, an image of its source: that source is the brilliant, the

authentic, the primarily existent, the thing selfsprung and selfintent; but its image, soul, is a thing which

can have no permanence except by attachment, by living in that other; the very nature of an image is that, as a

secondary, it shall have its being in something else, if at all it exist apart from its original. Hence this image

(soul) has not vision, for it has not the necessary light, and, if it should see, then, as finding its completion

In the pure Intellectual there is nothing of this: the vision and the envisioned are a unity; the seen is as the

That which sees: and to see is the function of the IntellectualPrinciple. Even in our own sphere [we have a

parallel to this selfvision of a unity], our vision is light or rather becomes one with light, and it sees light for

it sees colours. In the intellectual, the vision sees not through some medium but by and through itself alone,

for its object is not external: by one light it sees another not through any intermediate agency; a light sees a

light, that is to say a thing sees itself. This light shining within the soul enlightens it; that is, it makes the soul

Think of the traces of this light upon the soul, then say to yourself that such, and more beautiful and broader

and more radiant, is the light itself; thus you will approach to the nature of the IntellectualPrinciple and the

Intellectual Realm, for it is this light, itself lit from above, which gives the soul its brighter life.

It is not the source of the generative life of the soul which, on the contrary, it draws inward, preserving it

Nor does it give the life of perception and sensation, for that looks to the external and to what acts most

vigorously upon the senses whereas one accepting that light of truth may be said no longer to see the visible,

This means in sum that the life the soul takes thence is an intellective life, a trace of the life in the [divine]

The life in the Divine Intellect is also an Act: it is the primal light outlamping to itself primarily, its own

torch; lightgiver and lit at once; the authentic intellectual object, knowing at once and known, seen to itself

and needing no other than itself to see by, selfsufficing to the vision, since what it sees it is; known to us by

that very same light, our knowledge of it attained through itself, for from nowhere else could we find the

means of telling of it. By its nature, its selfvision is the clearer but, using it as our medium, we too may

In the strength of such considerations we lead up our own soul to the Divine, so that it poses itself as an

image of that Being, its life becoming an imprint and a likeness of the Highest, its every act of thought

If the soul is questioned as to the nature of that IntellectualPrinciple the perfect and allembracing, the

primal selfknower it has but to enter into that Principle, or to sink all its activity into that, and at once it

shows itself to be in effective possession of those priors whose memory it never lost: thus, as an image of the

IntellectualPrinciple, it can make itself the medium by which to attain some vision of it; it draws upon that

within itself which is most closely resemblant, as far as resemblance is possible between divine Intellect and

9. In order, then, to know what the Divine Mind is, we must observe soul and especially its most Godlike

One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the body yourself, that is, from your

body next to put aside that soul which moulded the body, and, very earnestly, the system of sense with

desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left is the phase

of the soul which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that sun,

while it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes [that is, of Matter] the light playing about itself

Of course we do not pretend that the sun's light [as the analogy might imply] remains a selfgathered and

suncentred thing: it is at once outrushing and indwelling; it strikes outward continuously, lap after lap, until

it reaches us upon our earth: we must take it that all the light, including that which plays about the sun's orb,

has travelled; otherwise we would have a void expanse, that of the space which is material next to the sun's

orb. The Soul, on the contrary a light springing from the Divine Mind and shining about it is in closest

touch with that source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in likeness to that principle, it has no

place: the light of the sun is actually in the air, but the soul is clean of all such contact so that its immunity is

And by its own characteristic act, though not without reasoning process, it knows the nature of the

IntellectualPrinciple which, on its side, knows itself without need of reasoning, for it is ever selfpresent

whereas we become so by directing our soul towards it; our life is broken and there are many lives, but that

principle needs no changings of life or of things; the lives it brings to being are for others not for itself: it

cannot need the inferior; nor does it for itself produce the less when it possesses or is the all, nor the images

Anyone not of the strength to lay hold of the first soul, that possessing pure intellection, must grasp that

which has to do with our ordinary thinking and thence ascend: if even this prove too hard, let him turn to

account the sensitive phase which carries the ideal forms of the less fine degree, that phase which, too, with

One may even, if it seem necessary, begin as low as the reproductive soul and its very production and thence

make the ascent, mounting from those ultimate ideal principles to the ultimates in the higher sense, that is to

10. This matter need not be elaborated at present: it suffices to say that if the created were all, these ultimates

[the higher] need not exist: but the Supreme does include primals, the primals because the producers. In other

words, there must be, with the made, the making source; and, unless these are to be identical, there will be

need of some link between them. Similarly, this link which is the IntellectualPrinciple demands yet a

Transcendent. If we are asked why this Transcendent also should not have selfvision, our answer is that it

has no need of vision; but this we will discuss later: for the moment we go back, since the question at issue is

We repeat that the IntellectualPrinciple must have, actually has, selfvision, firstly because it has

multiplicity, next because it exists for the external and therefore must be a seeing power, one seeing that

external; in fact its very essence is vision. Given some external, there must be vision; and if there be nothing

external the IntellectualPrinciple [Divine Mind] exists in vain. Unless there is something beyond bare unity,

there can be no vision: vision must converge with a visible object. And this which the seer is to see can be

only a multiple, no undistinguishable unity; nor could a universal unity find anything upon which to exercise

any act; all, one and desolate, would be utter stagnation; in so far as there is action, there is diversity. If there

be no distinctions, what is there to do, what direction in which to move? An agent must either act upon the

extern or be a multiple and so able to act upon itself: making no advance towards anything other than itself, it

The intellective power, therefore, when occupied with the intellectual act, must be in a state of duality,

whether one of the two elements stand actually outside or both lie within: the intellectual act will always

comport diversity as well as the necessary identity, and in the same way its characteristic objects [the Ideas]

must stand to the IntellectualPrinciple as at once distinct and identical. This applies equally to the single

object; there can be no intellection except of something containing separable detail and, since the object is a

Reasonprinciple [a discriminated Idea] it has the necessary element of multiplicity. The

IntellectualPrinciple, thus, is informed of itself by the fact of being a multiple organ of vision, an eye

receptive of many illuminated objects. If it had to direct itself to a memberless unity, it would be dereasoned:

what could it say or know of such an object? The selfaffirmation of [even] a memberless unity implies the

repudiation of all that does not enter into the character: in other words, it must be multiple as a preliminary to

Then, again, in the assertion "I am this particular thing," either the "particular thing" is distinct from the

assertor and there is a false statement or it is included within it, and, at once, multiplicity is asserted:

If it be no more than a simple duality able to say "I and that other phase," there is already multiplicity, for

there is distinction and ground of distinction, there is number with all its train of separate things.

In sum, then, a knowing principle must handle distinct items: its object must, at the moment of cognition,

contain diversity; otherwise the thing remains unknown; there is mere conjunction, such a contact, without

affirmation or comprehension, as would precede knowledge, the intellect not yet in being, the impinging

Similarly the knowing principle itself cannot remain simplex, especially in the act of selfknowing: all silent

though its selfperception be, it is dual to itself. Of course it has no need of minute selfhandling since it has

nothing to learn by its intellective act; before it is [effectively] Intellect, it holds knowledge of its own

content. Knowledge implies desire, for it is, so to speak, discovery crowning a search; the utterly

undifferentiated remains selfcentred and makes no enquiry about that self: anything capable of analysing its

11. Thus the IntellectualPrinciple, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the

Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing

successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not

[fully realised] IntellectualPrinciple; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of

the multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment

within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold quality with which it has of its own act invested

If it had not possessed a previous impression of the Transcendent, it could never have grasped it, but this

impression, originally of unity, becomes an impression of multiplicity; and the IntellectualPrinciple, in

taking cognisance of that multiplicity, knows the Transcendent and so is realized as an eye possessed of its

It is now IntellectualPrinciple since it actually holds its object, and holds it by the act of intellection: before,

it was no more than a tendance, an eye blank of impression: it was in motion towards the transcendental; now

that it has attained, it has become IntellectualPrinciple henceforth absorbed; in virtue of this intellection it

holds the character of IntellectualPrinciple, of Essential Existence and of Intellectual Act where, previously,

not possessing the Intellectual Object, it was not Intellectual Perception, and, not yet having exercised the

The Principle before all these principles is no doubt the first principle of the universe, but not as immanent:

immanence is not for primal sources but for engendering secondaries; that which stands as primal source of

everything is not a thing but is distinct from all things: it is not, then, a member of the total but earlier than

all, earlier, thus, than the IntellectualPrinciple which in fact envelops the entire train of things.

Thus we come, once more, to a Being above the IntellectualPrinciple and, since the sequent amounts to no

less than the All, we recognise, again, a Being above the All. This assuredly cannot be one of the things to

which it is prior. We may not call it "Intellect"; therefore, too, we may not call it "the Good," if "the Good" is

to be taken in the sense of some one member of the universe; if we mean that which precedes the universe of

The IntellectualPrinciple is established in multiplicity; its intellection, selfsprung though it be, is in the

nature of something added to it [some accidental dualism] and makes it multiple: the utterly simplex, and

therefore first of all beings, must, then, transcend the IntellectualPrinciple; and, obviously, if this had

intellection it would no longer transcend the IntellectualPrinciple but be it, and at once be a multiple.

12. But why, after all, should it not be such a manifold as long as it remains one substantial existence, having

the multiplicity not of a compound being but of a unity with a variety of activities?

Now, no doubt, if these various activities are not themselves substantial existences but merely

manifestations of latent potentiality there is no compound; but, on the other hand, it remains incomplete

until its substantial existence be expressed in act. If its substantial existence consists in its Act, and this Act

constitutes multiplicity, then its substantial existence will be strictly proportioned to the extent of the

We allow this to be true for the IntellectualPrinciple to which we have allotted [the multiplicity of]

selfknowing; but for the first principle of all, never. Before the manifold, there must be The One, that from

But we will be answered for number, well and good, since the suite makes a compound; but in the real

beings why must there be a unit from which the multiplicity of entities shall proceed?

Because [failing such a unity] the multiplicity would consist of disjointed items, each starting at its own

But, they will tell us, the Activities in question do proceed from a unity, from the IntellectualPrinciple, a

By that they admit the existence of a simplex prior to the Activities; and they make the Activities perdurable

and class them as substantial existences [hypostases]; but as Hypostases they will be distinct from their

source, which will remain simplex; while its product will in its own nature be manifold and dependent upon

Now if these activities arise from some unexplained first activity in that principle, then it too contains the

manifold: if, on the contrary, they are the very earliest activities and the source and cause of any multiple

product and the means by which that Principle is able, before any activity occurs, to remain selfcentred, then

they are allocated to the product of which they are the cause; for this principle is one thing, the activities

going forth from it are another, since it is not, itself, in act. If this be not so, the first act cannot be the

IntellectualPrinciple: the One does not provide for the existence of an IntellectualPrinciple which

thereupon appears; that provision would be something [an Hypostasis] intervening between the One and the

IntellectualPrinciple, its offspring. There could, in fact, be no such providing in The One, for it was never

incomplete; and such provision could name nothing that ought to be provided. It cannot be thought to possess

only some part of its content, and not the whole; nor did anything exist to which it could turn in desire.

Clearly anything that comes into being after it, arises without shaking to its permanence in its own habit. It is

essential to the existence of any new entity that the First remain in selfgathered repose throughout:

otherwise, it moved before there was motion and had intellectual act before any intellection unless, indeed,

that first act [as motionless and without intelligence] was incomplete, nothing more than a tendency. And

The only reasonable explanation of act flowing from it lies in the analogy of light from a sun. The entire

intellectual order may be figured as a kind of light with the One in repose at its summit as its King: but this

manifestation is not cast out from it: we may think, rather, of the One as a light before the light, an eternal

irradiation resting upon the Intellectual Realm; this, not identical with its source, is yet not severed from it

nor of so remote a nature as to be less than RealBeing; it is no blind thing, but is seeing and knowing, the

The One, as transcending Intellect, transcends knowing: above all need, it is above the need of the knowing

which pertains solely to the Secondary Nature. Knowing is a unitary thing, but defined: the first is One, but

undefined: a defined One would not be the Oneabsolute: the absolute is prior to the definite.

13. Thus The One is in truth beyond all statement: any affirmation is of a thing; but the alltranscending,

resting above even the most august divine Mind, possesses alone of all true being, and is not a thing among

things; we can give it no name because that would imply predication: we can but try to indicate, in our own

feeble way, something concerning it: when in our perplexity we object, "Then it is without selfperception,

without selfconsciousness, ignorant of itself"; we must remember that we have been considering it only in

If we make it knowable, an object of affirmation, we make it a manifold; and if we allow intellection in it we

make it at that point indigent: supposing that in fact intellection accompanies it, intellection by it must be

Selfintellection which is the truest implies the entire perception of a total self formed from a variety

converging into an integral; but the Transcendent knows neither separation of part nor any such enquiry; if its

intellectual act were directed upon something outside, then, the Transcendent would be deficient and the

The wholly simplex and veritable selfsufficing can be lacking at no point: selfintellection begins in that

principle which, secondarily selfsufficing, yet needs itself and therefore needs to know itself: this principle,

by its selfpresence, achieves its sufficiency in virtue of its entire content [it is the all]: it becomes thus

competent from the total of its being, in the act of living towards itself and looking upon itself.

Consciousness, as the very word indicates, is a conperception, an act exercised upon a manifold: and even

intellection, earlier [nearer to the divine] though it is, implies that the agent turns back upon itself, upon a

manifold, then. If that agent says no more than "I am a being," it speaks [by the implied dualism] as a

discoverer of the extern; and rightly so, for being is a manifold; when it faces towards the unmanifold and

says, "I am that being," it misses both itself and the being [since the simplex cannot be thus divided into

knower and known]: if it is [to utter] truth it cannot indicate by "being" something like a stone; in the one

phrase multiplicity is asserted; for the being thus affirmed [even] the veritable, as distinguished from such a

mere container of some trace of being as ought not to be called a being since it stands merely as image to

Taken bare and single, no: but Being itself is manifold within itself, and whatever else you may name has

This accepted, it follows that anything that is to be thought of as the most utterly simplex of all cannot have

selfintellection; to have that would mean being multiple. The Transcendent, thus, neither knows itself nor is

No doubt we deal with it, but we do not state it; we have neither knowledge nor intellection of it.

We do not, it is true, grasp it by knowledge, but that does not mean that we are utterly void of it; we hold it

not so as to state it, but so as to be able to speak about it. And we can and do state what it is not, while we are

silent as to what it is: we are, in fact, speaking of it in the light of its sequels; unable to state it, we may still

Those divinely possessed and inspired have at least the knowledge that they hold some greater thing within

them though they cannot tell what it is; from the movements that stir them and the utterances that come from

them they perceive the power, not themselves, that moves them: in the same way, it must be, we stand

towards the Supreme when we hold the IntellectualPrinciple pure; we know the divine Mind within, that

which gives Being and all else of that order: but we know, too, that other, know that it is none of these, but a

nobler principle than anything we know as Being; fuller and greater; above reason, mind and feeling;

15. Conferring but how? As itself possessing them or not? How can it convey what it does not possess, and

yet if it does possess how is it simplex? And if, again, it does not, how is it the source of the manifold?

A single, unmanifold emanation we may very well allow how even that can come from a pure unity may be

a problem, but we may always explain it on the analogy of the irradiation from a luminary but a

The explanation is that what comes from the Supreme cannot be identical with it and assuredly cannot be

better than it what could be better than The One or the utterly transcendent? The emanation, then, must be

less good, that is to say, less selfsufficing: now what must that be which is less selfsufficing than The One?

Obviously the NotOne, that is to say, multiplicity, but a multiplicity striving towards unity; that is to say, a

All that is not One is conserved by virtue of the One, and from the One derives its characteristic nature: if it

had not attained such unity as is consistent with being made up of multiplicity we could not affirm its

existence: if we are able to affirm the nature of single things, this is in virtue of the unity, the identity even,

which each of them possesses. But the alltranscendent, utterly void of multiplicity, has no mere unity of

participation but is unity's self, independent of all else, as being that from which, by whatever means, all the

In virtue of the unity manifested in its variety it exhibits, side by side, both an allembracing identity and the

existence of the secondary: all the variety lies in the midst of a sameness, and identity cannot be separated

from diversity since all stands as one; each item in that content, by the fact of participating in life, is a

Only the Transcendent can be that; it is the great beginning, and the beginning must be a really existent One,

wholly and truly One, while its sequent, poured down in some way from the One, is all, a total which has

But in what way is it that source? In the sense, perhaps, of sustaining things as bestower of the unity of each

May we think, perhaps, that the First contained the universe as an indistinct total whose items are elaborated

to distinct existence within the Second by the ReasonPrinciple there? That Second is certainly an Activity;

But the nature of this contained potentiality would have to be explained: it cannot be that of Matter, a

receptivity, for thus the Source becomes passive the very negation of production.

How then does it produce what it does not contain? Certainly not at haphazard and certainly not by selection.

We have observed that anything that may spring from the One must be different from it. Differing, it is not

One, since then it would be the Source. If unity has given place to duality, from that moment there is

multiplicity; for here is variety side by side with identity, and this imports quality and all the rest.

We may take it as proved that the emanation of the Transcendent must be a NotOne something other than

pure unity, but that it is a multiplicity, and especially that it is such a multiplicity as is exhibited in the

sequent universe, this is a statement worthy of deliberation: some further enquiry must be made, also, as to

16. We have, of course, already seen that a secondary must follow upon the First, and that this is a power

immeasurably fruitful; and we indicated that this truth is confirmed by the entire order of things since there is

nothing, not even in the lowest ranks, void of the power of generating. We have now to add that, since things

engendered tend downwards and not upwards and, especially, move towards multiplicity, the first principle of

That which engenders the world of sense cannot itself be a senseworld; it must be the Intellect and the

Intellectual world; similarly, the prior which engenders the IntellectualPrinciple and the Intellectual world

cannot be either, but must be something of less multiplicity. The manifold does not rise from the manifold:

the intellectual multiplicity has its source in what is not manifold; by the mere fact of being manifold, the

All must be grouped under a unity which, as standing outside of all multiplicity and outside of any ordinary

Still, how can a ReasonPrinciple [the Intellectual], characteristically a manifold, a total, derive from what is

But how, failing such origin in the simplex, could we escape [what cannot be accepted] the derivation of a

And how does the secondarily good [the imaged Good] derive from The Good, the Absolute? What does it

Similarity to the prior is not enough, it does not help towards goodness; we demand similarity only to an

actually existent Good: the goodness must depend upon derivation from a Prior of such a nature that the

similarity is desirable because that Prior is good, just as the similarity would be undesirable if the Prior were

Does the similarity with the Prior consist, then, in a voluntary resting upon it?

It is rather that, finding its condition satisfying, it seeks nothing: the similarity depends upon the

allsufficiency of what it possesses; its existence is agreeable because all is present to it, and present in such

All life belongs to it, life brilliant and perfect; thus all in it is at once lifeprinciple and IntellectualPrinciple,

nothing in it aloof from either life or intellect: it is therefore selfsufficing and seeks nothing: and if it seeks

nothing this is because it has in itself what, lacking, it must seek. It has, therefore, its Good within itself,

either by being of that order in what we have called its life and intellect or in some other quality or

If this [secondary principle] were The Good [The Absolute], nothing could transcend these things, life and

intellect: but, given the existence of something higher, this IntellectualPrinciple must possess a life directed

towards that Transcendent, dependent upon it, deriving its being from it, living towards it as towards its

source. The First, then, must transcend this principle of life and intellect which directs thither both the life in

itself, a copy of the Reality of the First, and the intellect in itself which is again a copy, though of what

17. But what can it be which is loftier than that existence a life compact of wisdom, untouched by struggle

and error, or than this Intellect which holds the Universe with all there is of life and intellect?

If we answer "The Making Principle," there comes the question, "making by what virtue?" and unless we can

indicate something higher there than in the made, our reasoning has made no advance: we rest where we

We must go higher if it were only for the reason that the maker of all must have a selfsufficing existence

outside of all things since all the rest is patently indigent and that everything has participated in The One

What then is this in which each particular entity participates, the author of being to the universe and to each

Since it is the author of all that exists, and since the multiplicity in each thing is converted into a

selfsufficing existence by this presence of The One, so that even the particular itself becomes selfsufficing,

then clearly this principle, author at once of Being and of selfsufficingness, is not itself a Being but is above

May we stop, content, with that? No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring

forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell

if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if

only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every

truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm,

to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so

does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety?

All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to

make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have

had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we

may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light:

the light is the proof of the advent. Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it

sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and

not by the light of any other principle to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that

which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun's own light that we see the sun.

1. Anything existing after The First must necessarily arise from that First, whether immediately or as tracing

back to it through intervenients; there must be an order of secondaries and tertiaries, in which any second is

Standing before all things, there must exist a Simplex, differing from all its sequel, selfgathered not

interblended with the forms that rise from it, and yet able in some mode of its own to be present to those

others: it must be authentically a unity, not merely something elaborated into unity and so in reality no more

than unity's counterfeit; it will debar all telling and knowing except that it may be described as transcending

Being for if there were nothing outside all alliance and compromise, nothing authentically one, there would

be no Source. Untouched by multiplicity, it will be wholly selfsufficing, an absolute First, whereas any

notfirst demands its earlier, and any nonsimplex needs the simplicities within itself as the very foundations

There can be only one such being: if there were another, the two [as indiscernible] would resolve into one, for

Our OneFirst is not a body: a body is not simplex and, as a thing of process cannot be a First, the Source

cannot be a thing of generation: only a principle outside of body, and utterly untouched by multiplicity, could

Any unity, then, later than The First must be no longer simplex; it can be no more than a unity in diversity.

It must be an offspring of The First; for suppose it the product of chance, that First ceases to be the Principle

If The First is perfect, utterly perfect above all, and is the beginning of all power, it must be the most

powerful of all that is, and all other powers must act in some partial imitation of it. Now other beings, coming

to perfection, are observed to generate; they are unable to remain selfclosed; they produce: and this is true

not merely of beings endowed with will, but of growing things where there is no will; even lifeless objects

impart something of themselves, as far as they may; fire warms, snow chills, drugs have their own outgoing

efficacy; all things to the utmost of their power imitate the Source in some operation tending to eternity and

How then could the most perfect remain selfset the First Good, the Power towards all, how could it grudge

or be powerless to give of itself, and how at that would it still be the Source?

If things other than itself are to exist, things dependent upon it for their reality, it must produce since there is

no other source. And further this engendering principle must be the very highest in worth; and its immediate

2. If the IntellectualPrinciple were the engendering Source, then the engendered secondary, while less

perfect than the IntellectualPrinciple, would be close to it and similar to it: but since the engendering Source

Because [it is not a selfsufficing simplex]: the Act of the IntellectualPrinciple is intellection, which means

that, seeing the intellectual object towards which it has turned, it is consummated, so to speak, by that object,

being in itself indeterminate like sight [a vague readiness for any and every vision] and determined by the

intellectual object. This is why it has been said that "out of the indeterminate dyad and The One arise the

Thus it is not a simplex; it is manifold; it exhibits a certain composite quality within the Intellectual or

divine order, of course as the principle that sees the manifold. It is, further, itself simultaneously object and

agent of intellection and is on that count also a duality: and it possesses besides another object of intellection

In this way: the intellectual object is selfgathered [selfcompact] and is not deficient as the seeing and

knowing principle must be deficient, mean, as needing an object it is therefore no unconscious thing: all its

content and accompaniment are its possession; it is selfdistinguishing throughout; it is the seat of life as of

all things; it is, itself, that selfintellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to say, in a mode other

But if something comes to being within an entity which in no way looks outside itself and especially within

a being which is the sum of being that entity must be the source of the new thing: stable in its own identity,

it produces; but the product is that of an unchanged being: the producer is unchangeably the intellectual

object, the product is produced as the Intellectual Act, an Act taking intellection of its source the only object

that exists for it and so becoming IntellectualPrinciple, that is to say, becoming another intellectual being,

There is in everything the Act of the Essence and the Act going out from the Essence: the first Act is the

thing itself in its realized identity, the second Act is an inevitably following outgo from the first, an

Thus even in fire there is the warmth comported by its essential nature and there is the warmth going

instantaneously outward from that characterizing heat by the fact that the fire, remaining unchangeably fire,

So it is in the divine also: or rather we have there the earlier form of the double act: the divine remains in its

own unchanging being, but from its perfection and from the Act included in its nature there emanates the

secondary or issuing Act which as the output of a mighty power, the mightiest there is attains to Real

Being as second to that which stands above all Being. That transcendent was the potentiality of the All; this

And if this is all things, that must be above and outside of all, so, must transcend real being. And again, if that

secondary is all things, and if above its multiplicity there is a unity not ranking among those things, once

more this unity transcends Real Being and therefore transcends the IntellectualPrinciple as well. There is

thus something transcending IntellectualPrinciple, for we must remember that real being is no corpse, the

negation of life and of intellection, but is in fact identical with the IntellectualPrinciple. The

IntellectualPrinciple is not something taking cognisance of things as sensation deals with sense objects

existing independently of sense: on the contrary, it actually is the things it knows: the ideas constituting them

it has not borrowed: whence could it have taken them? No: it exists here together with the things of the

universe, identical with them, making a unity with them; and the collective knowledge [in the divine mind] of

1. The IntellectualPrinciple, the veritably and essentially intellective, can this be conceived as ever falling

Assuredly no: it would no longer be intelligent and therefore no longer IntellectualPrinciple: it must know

unceasingly and never forget; and its knowledge can be no guesswork, no hesitating assent, no acceptance

of an alien report. Nor can it call on demonstration or, we are told it may at times act by this or, I method, at

least there must be something patent to it in virtue of its own nature. In actual fact reason tells us that all its

knowledge is thus inherent to it, for there is no means by which to distinguish between the spontaneous

knowledge and the other. But, in any case, some knowledge, it is conceded, is inherent to it. Whence are we

to understand the certainty of this knowledge to come to it or how do its objects carry the conviction of their

Consider senseknowledge: its objects seem most patently certified, yet the doubt returns whether the

apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him; the decision

demands intelligence or reasoning. Besides, even granting that what the senses grasp is really contained in the

objects, none the less what is thus known by the senses is an image: sense can never grasp the thing itself;

Now, if the IntellectualPrinciple in its act that is in knowing the intellectual is to know these its objects as

alien, we have to explain how it makes contact with them: obviously it might never come upon them, and so

might never know them; or it might know them only upon the meeting: its knowing, at that, would not be an

enduring condition. If we are told that the IntellectualPrinciple and the Intellectual Objects are linked in a

Next, the intellections would be impressions, that is to say not native act but violence from without: now how

Intellection, again, becomes at this a mere handling of the external, exactly like senseperception. What then

distinguishes it unless that it deals with objects of less extension? And what certitude can it have that its

knowledge is true? Or what enables it to pronounce that the object is good, beautiful, or just, when each of

these ideas is to stand apart from itself? The very principles of judgement, by which it must be guided, would

Again; either the objects of the IntellectualPrinciple are senseless and devoid of life and intellect or they are

Now, if they are in possession of Intellect, that realm is a union of both and is Truth. This combined

Intellectual realm will be the Primal Intellect: we have only then to examine how this reality, conjoint of

IntellectualPrinciple and its object, is to be understood, whether as combining selfunited identity with yet

If on the contrary the objects of IntellectualPrinciple are without intelligence and life, what are they? They

cannot be premises, axioms or predicates: as predicates they would not have real existence; they would be

affirmations linking separate entities, as when we affirm that justice is good though justice and good are

If we are told that they are selfstanding entities the distinct beings Justice and Good then [supposing them

to be outside] the Intellectual Realm will not be a unity nor be included in any unity: all is sundered

individuality. Where, then, are they and what spatial distinction keeps them apart? How does the

IntellectualPrinciple come to meet with them as it travels round; what keeps each true to its character; what

gives them enduring identity; what conceivable shape or character can they have? They are being presented

to us as some collection of figures, in gold or some other material substance, the work of some unknown

sculptor or graver: but at once the IntellectualPrinciple which contemplates them becomes

senseperception; and there still remains the question how one of them comes to be Justice and another

But the great argument is that if we are to allow that these objects of Intellection are in the strict sense outside

the IntellectualPrinciple, which, therefore, must see them as external, then inevitably it cannot possess the

In all it looks upon, it sees falsely; for those objects must be the authentic things; yet it looks upon them

without containing them and in such knowledge holds only their images; that is to say, not containing the

authentic, adopting phantasms of the true, it holds the false; it never possesses reality. If it knows that it

possesses the false, it must confess itself excluded from the truth; if it fails of this knowledge also, imagining

itself to possess the truth which has eluded it, then the doubled falsity puts it the deeper into error.

It is thus, I suppose, that in senseperception we have belief instead of truth; belief is our lief; we satisfy

ourselves with something very different from the original which is the occasion of perception.

In fine, there would be on the hypothesis no truth in the IntellectualPrinciple. But such an

IntellectualPrinciple would not be truth, nor truly an IntellectualPrinciple. There would be no

2. Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects [the Ideas] outside of the IntellectualPrinciple, treating

them as impressions of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and so make its objects unknowable and

nonexistent and in the end annul the IntellectualPrinciple itself. We must provide for knowledge and for

truth; we must secure reality; being must become knowable essentially and not merely in that knowledge of

quality which could give us a mere image or vestige of the reality in lieu of possession, intimate association,

The only way to this is to leave nothing out side of the veritable IntellectualPrinciple which thus has

knowledge in the true knowing [that of identification with the object], cannot forget, need not go wandering

in search. At once truth is there, this is the seat of the authentic Existents, it becomes living and intellective:

these are the essentials of that most lofty Principle; and, failing them, where is its worth, its grandeur?

Only thus [by this inherence of the Ideas] is it dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith in the

truth of its knowledge: it is its entire self, selfperspicuous: it knows a prior by recognising its own source; it

knows a sequent to that prior by its selfidentity; of the reality of this sequent, of the fact that it is present and

Thus veritable truth is not accordance with an external; it is selfaccordance; it affirms and is nothing other

than itself and is nothing other; it is at once existence and selfaffirmation. What external, then, can call it to

the question, and from what source of truth could the refutation be brought? Any counter affirmation [of

truth] must fall into identity with the truth which first uttered itself; brought forward as new, it has to appear

before the Principle which made the earlier statement and to show itself identical with that: for there is no

3. Thus we have here one identical Principle, the Intellect, which is the universe of authentic beings, the

Truth: as such it is a great god or, better, not a god among gods but the Godhead entire. It is a god, a

secondary god manifesting before there is any vision of that other, the Supreme which rests over all,

enthroned in transcendence upon that splendid pediment, the Nature following close upon it.

The Supreme in its progress could never be borne forward upon some soulless vehicle nor even directly upon

the soul: it will be heralded by some ineffable beauty: before the great King in his progress there comes first

the minor train, then rank by rank the greater and more exalted, closer to the King the kinglier; next his own

honoured company until, last among all these grandeurs, suddenly appears the Supreme Monarch himself,

and all unless indeed for those who have contented themselves with the spectacle before his coming and

In that royal progress the King is of another order from those that go before him, but the King in the Supreme

is no ruler over externs; he holds that most just of governances, rooted in nature, the veritable kingship, for he

is King of Truth, holding sway by all reason over a dense offspring his own, a host that shares his divinity,

[Interpolation: Zeus (Universal Soul) is in this a symbol of him, Zeus who is not content with the

contemplation of his father (Kronos, divine Intellect) but looks to that father's father (to Ouranos, the

Transcendent) as what may be called the divine energy working to the establishment of a real being.]

4. We have said that all must be brought back to a unity: this must be an authentic unity, not belonging to the

order in which multiplicity is unified by participation in what is truly a One; we need a unity independent of

participation, not a combination in which multiplicity holds an equal place: we have exhibited, also, the

Intellectual Realm and the IntellectualPrinciple as more closely a unity than the rest of things, so that there

This purely One, essentially a unity untouched by the multiple, this we now desire to penetrate if in any way

Only by a leap can we reach to this One which is to be pure of all else, halting sharp in fear of slipping ever

so little aside and impinging on the dual: for if we fail of the centre, we are in a duality which does not even

include The authentic One but belongs on both sides, to the later order. The One does not bear to be

numbered in with anything else, with a one or a two or any such quantity; it refuses to take number because it

is measure and not the measured; it is no peer of other entities to be found among them; for thus, it and they

alike would be included in some container and this would be its prior, the prior it cannot have. Not even

essential [ideal or abstract] number can belong to The One and certainly not the still later number applying to

quantities; for essential number first appears as providing duration to the divine Intellection, while

quantitative number is that [still later and lower] which furnishes the Quantity found in conjunction with

other things or which provides for Quantity independent of things, if this is to be thought of as number at all.

The Principle which in objects having quantitative number looks to the unity from which they spring is a

copy [or lower phase] of the Principle which in the earlier order of number [in essential or ideal number]

looks to the veritable One; and it attains its existence without in the least degree dissipating or shattering that

prior unity: the dyad has come into being, but the precedent monad still stands; and this monad is quite

distinct within the dyad from either of the two constituent unities, since there is nothing to make it one rather

than the other: being neither, but simply that thing apart, it is present without being inherent.

But how are the two unities distinct and how is the dyad a unity, and is this unity the same as the unity by

Our answer must be that the unity is that of a participation in the primal unity with the participants remaining

distinct from that in which they partake; the dyad, in so far as it is one thing, has this participation, but in a

certain degree only; the unity of an army is not that of a single building; the dyad, as a thing of extension, is

Are we then to take it that the monads in the pentad and decad differ while the unity in the pentad is the same

Yes, in the sense in which, big and little, ship is one with ship, army with army, city with city; otherwise, no.

5. We return to our statement that The First remains intact even when other entities spring from it.

In the case of numbers, the unit remains intact while something else produces, and thus number arises in

dependence on the unit: much more then does the unit, The One, remain intact in the principle which is

before all beings; especially since the entities produced in its likeness, while it thus remains intact, owe their

And just as there is, primarily or secondarily, some form or idea from the monad in each of the successive

numbers the later still participating, though unequally, in the unit so the series of Beings following upon

The First bear, each, some form or idea derived from that source. In Number the participation establishes

Quantity; in the realm of Being, the trace of The One establishes reality: existence is a trace of The One our

What we know as Being, the first sequent upon The One, advanced a little outward, so to speak, then chose to

go no further, turned inward again and comes to rest and is now the reality and hearth [ousia and hestia] of

the universe. Pressing [with the rough breathing] on the word for Being [on] we have the word "hen" [one],

an indication that in our very form of speech we tell, as far as may be, that Being [the weaker] is that which

proceeds from [the stronger] The One. Thus both the thing that comes to be and Being itself are carriers of a

copy, since they are outflows from the power of The primal One: this power sees and in its emotion tries to

represent what it sees and breaks into speech "On"; "einai"; "ousia," "hestia" [Existent: Existence: Essence:

Hestia or Hearth], sounds which labour to express the essential nature of the universe produced by the travail

of the utterer and so to represent, as far as sounds may, the origin of reality.

This produced reality is an Ideal form for certainly nothing springing from the Supreme can be less and it

is not a particular form but the form of all, beside which there is no other; it follows that The First must be

without form, and, if without form, then it is no Being; Being must have some definition and therefore be

limited; but the First cannot be thought of as having definition and limit, for thus it would be not the Source

but the particular item indicated by the definition assigned to it. If all things belong to the produced, which of

them can be thought of as the Supreme? Not included among them, this can be described only as transcending

Note that the phrase transcending Being assigns no character, makes no assertion, allots no name, carries only

the denial of particular being; and in this there is no attempt to circumscribe it: to seek to throw a line about

that illimitable Nature would be folly, and anyone thinking to do so cuts himself off from any slightest and

As one wishing to contemplate the Intellectual Nature will lay aside all the representations of sense and so

may see what transcends the senserealm, in the same way one wishing to contemplate what transcends the

Intellectual attains by putting away all that is of the intellect, taught by the intellect, no doubt, that the

Its definition, in fact, could be only "the indefinable": what is not a thing is not some definite thing. We are in

agony for a true expression; we are talking of the untellable; we name, only to indicate for our own use as

best we may. And this name, The One, contains really no more than the negation of plurality: under the same

pressure the Pythagoreans found their indication in the symbol "Apollo" [a= not; pollon= of many] with its

repudiation of the multiple. If we are led to think positively of The One, name and thing, there would be more

truth in silence: the designation, a mere aid to enquiry, was never intended for more than a preliminary

affirmation of absolute simplicity to be followed by the rejection of even that statement: it was the best that

offered, but remains inadequate to express the Nature indicated. For this is a principle not to be conveyed by

any sound; it cannot be known on any hearing but, if at all, by vision; and to hope in that vision to see a form

There are two elements here; there is the form perceptible to the sense and there is the medium by which the

eye sees that form. This medium is itself perceptible to the eye, distinct from the form to be seen, but the

cause of the seeing; it is perceived at the one stroke in that form and on it and, hence, is not distinguished

from it, the eye being held entirely by the illuminated object. When on the contrary this medium presents

itself alone it is seen directly though even then actual sight demands some solid base; there must be

something besides the medium which, unless embracing some object, eludes perception; thus the light

inherent to the sun would not be perceived but for the solidity of the mass. If it is objected that the sun is light

entire, this would only be a proof of our assertion: no other visible form will contain light which must, then,

have no other property than that of visibility, and in fact all other visible objects are something more than

This vision sees, by another light, the objects illuminated by the First Principle: setting itself among them, it

sees veritably; declining towards the lower Nature, that upon which the light from above rests, it has less of

that vision. Passing over the visible and looking to the medium by which it sees, then it holds the Light and

But since the IntellectualPrinciple is not to see this light as something external we return to our analogy; the

eye is not wholly dependent upon an outside and alien light; there is an earlier light within itself, a more

brilliant, which it sees sometimes in a momentary flash. At night in the darkness a gleam leaps from within

the eye: or again we make no effort to see anything; the eyelids close; yet a light flashes before us; or we rub

the eye and it sees the light it contains. This is sight without the act, but it is the truest seeing, for it sees light

It is certainly thus that the IntellectualPrinciple, hiding itself from all the outer, withdrawing to the inmost,

seeing nothing, must have its vision not of some other light in some other thing but of the light within itself,

8. So that we are left wondering whence it came, from within or without; and when it has gone, we say, "It

was here. Yet no; it was beyond!" But we ought not to question whence; there is no whence, no coming or

going in place; now it is seen and now not seen. We must not run after it, but fit ourselves for the vision and

then wait tranquilly for its appearance, as the eye waits on the rising of the sun, which in its own time appears

above the horizon out of the ocean, as the poets say and gives itself to our sight.

This Principle, of which the sun is an image, where has it its dawning, what horizon does it surmount to

It stands immediately above the contemplating Intellect which has held itself at rest towards the vision,

looking to nothing else than the good and beautiful, setting its entire being to that in a perfect surrender, and

now tranquilly filled with power and taking a new beauty to itself, gleaming in the light of that presence.

This advent, still, is not by expectation: it is a coming without approach; the vision is not of something that

must enter but of something present before all else, before the Intellect itself made any movement. Yet it is

the Intellect that must move, to come and to go going because it has not known where it should stay and

And if the Intellect, too, could hold itself in that nowhere not that it is ever in place; it too is uncontained,

utterly unplaced it would remain for ever in the vision of its prior, or, indeed, not in vision but in identity,

all duality annulled. But it is Intellect [having a sphere of its own] and, when it is to see, it must see by that in

No doubt it is wonderful that The First should thus be present without any coming, and that, while it is

nowhere, nowhere is it not; but wonderful though this be in itself, the contrary would be more wonderful to

those who know. Of course neither this contrary nor the wonder at it can be entertained. But we must explain:

9. Everything brought into being under some principle not itself is contained either within its maker or, if

there is any intermediate, within that: having a prior essential to its being, it needs that prior always,

otherwise it would not be contained at all. It is the order of nature: The last in the immediately preceding

lasts, things of the order of the Firsts within their priorfirsts, and so thing within thing up to the very

That Source, having no prior, cannot be contained: uncontained by any of those other forms of being, each

held within the series of priors, it is orbed round all, but so as not to be pointed off to hold them part for part;

it possesses but is not possessed. Holding all though itself nowhere held it is omnipresent, for where its

presence failed something would elude its hold. At the same time, in the sense that it is nowhere held, it is not

present: thus it is both present and not present; not present as not being circumscribed by anything; yet, as

being utterly unattached, not inhibited from presence at any point. That inhibition would mean that the First

was determined by some other being; the later series, then, would be without part in the Supreme; God has

While the contained must be where its container is, what is uncontained by place is not debarred from any:

for, imagine a place where it is not and evidently some other place retains it; at once it is contained and there

But if the "nowhere" is to stand and the ascription of a "where," implying station in the extern, is to fall, then

nothing can be left void; and at once nothing void, yet no point containing God is sovereignly present

through all. We cannot think of something of God here and something else there, nor of all God gathered at

some one spot: there is an instantaneous presence everywhere, nothing containing and nothing left void,

Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it is not, itself, in a universe or in any place

what place was there before the universe came to be? its linked members form and occupy the whole. But

Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily substance is not a place to the

Soul; Soul is contained in IntellectualPrinciple and is the container of body. The IntellectualPrinciple in

turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in

nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First?

This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things nor directly within them; there is nothing

containing it; it contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way, that towards it all things have

their being, all dependent upon it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness according to

10. Still, do not, I urge you, look for The Good through any of these other things; if you do, you will see not

itself but its trace: you must form the idea of that which is to be grasped cleanly standing to itself not in any

combination, the unheld in which all have hold: for no other is such, yet one such there must be.

Now it is clear that we cannot possess ourselves of the power of this principle in its concentrated fulness: so

to do one must be identical with it: but some partial attainment is within our reach.

You who make the venture will throw forward all your being but you will never tell it entire for that, you

must yourself be the divine Intellect in Act and at your utmost success it will still pass from you or, rather,

you from it. In ordinary vision you may think to see the object entire: in this intellective act, all, less or more,

It is The Good since, being a power [being effective outwardly], it is the cause of the intelligent and

intellective life as of life and intellect: for these grow from it as from the source of essence and of existence,

the Source as being One, simplex and first because before it was nothing. All derives from this: it is the origin

of the primal movement which it does not possess and of the repose which is but its absence of need; for

neither rest nor movement can belong to that which has no place in which either could occur; centre, object,

ground, all are alike unknown to it, for it is before all. Yet its Being is not limited; what is there to set bounds

to it? Nor, on the other hand, is it infinite in the sense of magnitude; what place can there be to which it must

extend, or why should there be movement where there is no lacking? All its infinitude resides in its power: it

does not change and will not fail; and in it all that is unfailing finds duration.

11. It is infinite also by right of being a pure unity with nothing towards which to direct any partial content.

Absolutely One, it has never known measure and stands outside of number, and so is under no limit either in

regard to any extern or within itself; for any such determination would bring something of the dual into it.

Reason recognising it as such a nature, you may not hope to see it with mortal eyes, nor in any way that

would be imagined by those who make sense the test of reality and so annul the supremely real. For what

passes for the most truly existent is most truly nonexistent the thing of extension least real of all while

this unseen First is the source and principle of Being and sovereign over Reality.

You must turn appearances about or you will be left void of God. You will be like those at the festivals who

in their gluttony cram themselves with things which none going to the gods may touch; they hold these goods

to be more real than the vision of the God who is to be honoured and they go away having had no share in the

In these celebrations of which we speak, the unseen god leaves those in doubt of his existence who think

nothing patent but what may be known to the flesh: it happens as if a man slept a life through and took the

dream world in perfect trust; wake him, and he would refuse belief to the report of his open eyes and settle

12. Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object; eyes for one kind, ears for another: similarly some

things, we must believe, are to be known by the IntellectualPrinciple in us. We must not confuse intellection

with hearing or seeing; this would be trying to look with the ears or denying sound because it is not seen.

Certain people, we must keep in mind, have forgotten that to which, from the beginning onwards, their

longing and effort are pointed: for all that exists desires and aspires towards the Supreme by a compulsion of

The perception of Beauty and the awe and the stirring of passion towards it are for those already in some

degree knowing and awakened: but the Good, as possessed long since and setting up a natural tendency, is

inherently present to even those asleep and brings them no wonder when some day they see it, since it is no

occasional reminiscence but is always with them though in their drowse they are not aware of it: the love of

Beauty on the contrary sets up pain when it appears, for those that have seen it must pursue. This love of

Beauty then is later than the love of Good and comes with a more sophisticated understanding; hence we

know that Beauty is a secondary: the more primal appetition, not patent to sense, our movement towards our

Again; all that have possessed themselves of The Good feel it sufficient: they have attained the end: but

Beauty not all have known and those that have judge it to exist for itself and not for them, as in the charm of

Then, too, it is thought enough to appear loveable whether one is so or not: but no one wants his Good in

semblance only. All are seeking The First as something ranking before aught else, but they struggle

venomously for beauty as something secondary like themselves: thus some minor personage may perhaps

challenge equal honour with the King's righthand man on pretext of similar dependence, forgetting that,

The source of the error is that while both The Good and The Beautiful participate in the common source, The

One precedes both; and that, in the Supreme also, The Good has no need of The Beautiful, while the

The Good is gentle and friendly and tender, and we have it present when we but will. Beauty is all violence

and stupefaction; its pleasure is spoiled with pain, and it even draws the thoughtless away from The Good as

some attraction will lure the child from the father's side: these things tell of youth. The Good is the older not

in time but by degree of reality and it has the higher and earlier power, all power in fact, for the sequent

holds only a power subordinate and delegated of which the prior remains sovereign.

Not that God has any need of His derivatives: He ignores all that produced realm, never necessary to Him,

and remains identically what He was before He brought it into being. So too, had the secondary never existed,

He would have been unconcerned, exactly as He would not have grudged existence to any other universe that

might spring into being from Him, were any such possible; of course no other such could be since there is

But God never was the All; that would make Him dependent upon the universe: transcending all, He was able

13. The Supreme, as the Absolute Good and not merely a good being or thing, can contain nothing, since

Anything it could contain must be either good to it or not good; but in the supremely and primally Good there

can be nothing not good; nor can the Absolute Good be a container to the Good: containing, then, neither the

good nor the not good it contains nothing and, containing nothing, it is alone: it is void of all but itself.

If the rest of being either is good without being the absolute good or is not good, while on the other hand

the Supreme contains neither what is good nor what is not good, then, containing nothing, it is The Good by

Thus we rob it of its very being as The Absolute Good if we ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or

goodness. The only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no quality or content there but to

permit only the "It is" in which we pretend to no affirmation of nonexistent attribute: there is an ignorant

praise which, missing the true description, drags in qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy

must guard against attaching to the Supreme what is later and lower: moving above all that order, it is the

For, once more, the nature of the Good is not such as to make it all things or a thing among all: that would

range it under the same classification with them all and it would differ, thus, only by its individual quality,

some specialty, some addition. At once it becomes not a unity but a duality; there is one common element not

good and another element that is good; but a combination so made up of good and not good cannot be the

purely good, the primarily good; the primarily good must be that principle in which the better element has

more effectively participated and so attained its goodness. Any good thing has become so by communion; but

that in which it has communion is not a thing among the things of the all; therefore the Good is not a thing of

Since there is this Good in any good thing the specific difference by which the combination becomes good

it must enter from elsewhere than the world of things: that source must be a Good absolute and isolated.

Thus is revealed to us the Primarily existent, the Good, above all that has being, good unalloyed, containing

Certainly neither Being nor Beauty springs from evil or from the neutral; the maker, as the more

1. There is a principle having intellection of the external and another having selfintellection and thus further

Even the first mentioned is not without an effort towards the pure unity of which it is not so capable: it does

In the selfintellective, there is not even this distinction of being: selfconversing, the subject is its own

object, and thus takes the double form while remaining essentially a unity. The intellection is the more

This principle is the primally intellective since there can be no intellection without duality in unity. If there is

no unity, perceiving principle and perceived object will be different, and the intellection, therefore, not

primal: a principle concerned with something external cannot be the primally intellective since it does not

possess the object as integrally its own or as itself; if it does possess the object as itself the condition of true

intellection the two are one. Thus [in order to primal intellection] there must be a unity in duality, while a

pure unity with no counterbalancing duality can have no object for its intellection and ceases to be

intellective: in other words the primally intellective must be at once simplex and something else.

But the surest way of realizing that its nature demands this combination of unity and duality is to proceed

upwards from the Soul, where the distinction can be made more dearly since the duality is exhibited more

We can imagine the Soul as a double light, a lesser corresponding to the soul proper, a purer representing its

intellective phase; if now we suppose this intellective light equal to the light which is to be its object, we no

longer distinguish between them; the two are recognised as one: we know, indeed, that there are two, but as

we see them they have become one: this gives us the relation between the intellective subject and the object

of intellection [in the duality and unity required by that primal intellection]: in our thought we have made the

two into one; but on the other hand the one thing has become two, making itself into a duality at the moment

of intellection, or, to be more exact, being dual by the fact of intellection and single by the fact that its

2. Thus there is the primally intellective and there is that in which intellection has taken another mode; but

this indicates that what transcends the primarily intellective has no intellection; for, to have intellection, it

must become an IntellectualPrinciple, and, if it is to become that, it must possess an intellectual object and,

as primarily intellective, it must possess that intellectual object as something within itself.

But it is not inevitable that every intellectual object should both possess the intellective principle in itself and

exercise intellection: at that, it would be not merely object but subject as well and, besides, being thus dual,

could not be primal: further, the intellectual principle that is to possess the intellectual object could not cohere

unless there existed an essence purely intellectual, something which, while standing as intellectual object to

the intellectual principle, is in its own essence neither an agent nor an object of intellection. The intellectual

object points to something beyond itself [to a percipient]; and the intellectual agent has its intellection in vain

unless by seizing and holding an object since, failing that, it can have no intellection but is consummated

There must have been something standing consummate independently of any intellectual act, something

perfect in its own essence: thus that in which this completion is inherent must exist before intellection; in

other words it has no need of intellection, having been always selfsufficing: this, then, will have no

Thus we arrive at: a principle having no intellection, a principle having intellection primarily, a principle

It may be added that, supposing The First to be intellective, it thereby possesses something [some object,

some attribute]: at once it ceases to be a first; it is a secondary, and not even a unity; it is a many; it is all of

which it takes intellectual possession; even though its intellection fell solely upon its own content, it must still

3. We may be told that nothing prevents an identity being thus multiple. But there must be a unity underlying

the aggregate: a manifold is impossible without a unity for its source or ground, or at least, failing some

unity, related or unrelated. This unity must be numbered as first before all and can be apprehended only as

When we recognize it, resident among the mass of things, our business is to see it for what it is present to

the items but essentially distinguished from them and, while not denying it there, to seek this underly of all

no longer as it appears in those other things but as it stands in its pure identity by itself. The identity resident

in the rest of things is no doubt close to authentic identity but cannot be it; and, if the identity of unity is to be

It may be suggested that its existence takes substantial form only by its being resident among outside things:

but, at this, it is itself no longer simplex nor could any coherence of manifolds occur. On the one hand things

could take substantial existence only if they were in their own virtue simplex. On the other hand, failing a

simplex, the aggregate of multiples is itself impossible: for the simplex individual thing could not exist if

there were no simplex unity independent of the individual, [a principle of identity] and, not existing, much

less could it enter into composition with any other such: it becomes impossible then for the compound

universe, the aggregate of all, to exist; it would be the coming together of things that are not, things not

Once there is any manifold, there must be a precedent unity: since any intellection implies multiplicity in the

intellective subject, the nonmultiple must be without intellection; that nonmultiple will be the First:

intellection and the IntellectualPrinciple must be characteristic of beings coming later.

4. Another consideration is that if The Good [and First] is simplex and without need, it can neither need the

intellective act nor possess what it does not need: it will therefore not have intellection. (Interpolation or

Again; an IntellectualPrinciple is distinct from The Good and takes a certain goodness only by its

Yet again: In any dual object there is the unity [the principle of identity] side by side with the rest of the

thing; an associated member cannot be the unity of the two and there must be a selfstanding unity [within

the duality] before this unity of members can exist: by the same reasoning there must be also the supreme

unity entering into no association whatever, something which is unitysimplex by its very being, utterly

How could anything be present in anything else unless in virtue of a source existing independently of

association? The simplex [or absolute] requires no derivation; but any manifold, or any dual, must be

We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light

from the sun: Soul carries the IntellectualPrinciple as something imparted and lending the light which

makes it essentially intellective; IntellectualPrinciple carries the light as its own though it is not purely the

light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth

the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the IntellectualPrinciple takes

How can this highest have need of any other? It is not to be identified with any of the things that enter into

5. And again: the multiple must be always seeking its identity, desiring selfaccord and selfawareness: but

what scope is there within what is an absolute unity in which to move towards its identity or at what term

may it hope for selfknowing? It holds its identity in its very essence and is above consciousness and all

intellective act. Intellection is not a primal either in the fact of being or in the value of being; it is secondary

and derived: for there exists The Good; and this moves towards itself while its sequent is moved and by that

movement has its characteristic vision. The intellective act may be defined as a movement towards The Good

in some being that aspires towards it; the effort produces the fact; the two are coincident; to see is to have

desired to see: hence again the Authentic Good has no need of intellection since itself and nothing else is its

The intellective act is a movement towards the unmoved Good: thus the selfintellection in all save the

Absolute Good is the working of the imaged Good within them: the intellectual principle recognises the

likeness, sees itself as a good to itself, an object of attraction: it grasps at that manifestation of The Good and,

in holding that, holds selfvision: if the state of goodness is constant, it remains constantly selfattractive and

selfintellective. The selfintellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The

Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act; and, in all that exists, the Act is towards The Good.

6. If this reasoning is valid, The Good has no scope whatever for intellection which demands something

attractive from outside. The Good, then, is without Act. What Act indeed, could be vested in Activity's self?

No activity has yet again an activity; and whatever we may add to such Activities as depend from something

else, at least we must leave the first Activity of them all, that from which all depend, as an uncontaminated

That primal Activity, then, is not an intellection, for there is nothing upon which it could Exercise intellection

since it is The First; besides, intellection itself does not exercise the intellective act; this belongs to some

principle in which intellection is vested. There is, we repeat, duality in any thinking being; and the First is

But all this may be made more evident by a clearer recognition of the twofold principle at work wherever

When we affirm the reality of the Real Beings and their individual identity of being and declare that these

Real Beings exist in the Intellectual Realm, we do not mean merely that they remain unchangeably

selfidentical by their very essence, as contrasted with the fluidity and instability of the senserealm; the

senserealm itself may contain the enduring. No; we mean rather that these principles possess, as by their

own virtue, the consummate fulness of being. The Essence described as the primally existent cannot be a

shadow cast by Being, but must possess Being entire; and Being is entire when it holds the form and idea of

intellection and of life. In a Being, then, the existence, the intellection, the life are present as an aggregate.

When a thing is a Being, it is also an IntellectualPrinciple, when it is an IntellectualPrinciple it is a Being;

intellection and Being are coexistents. Therefore intellection is a multiple not a unitary and that which does

not belong to this order can have no Intellection. And if we turn to the partial and particular, there is the

Intellectual form of man, and there is man, there is the Intellectual form of horse and there is horse, the

Thus all is dual: the unit is a duality and yet again the dual reverts to unity.

That, however, which stands outside all this category can be neither an individual unity nor an aggregate of

all the duals or in any way a duality. How the duals rose from The One is treated elsewhere.

What stands above Being stands above intellection: it is no weakness in it not to know itself, since as pure

unity it contains nothing which it needs to explore. But it need not even spend any knowing upon things

outside itself: this which was always the Good of all gives them something greater and better than its

knowledge of them in giving them in their own identity to cling, in whatever measure be possible, to a

1. We have to examine the question whether there exists an ideal archetype of individuals, in other words

whether I and every other human being go back to the Intellectual, every [living] thing having origin and

If Socrates, Socrates' soul, is external then the Authentic Socrates to adapt the term must be There; that is

to say, the individual soul has an existence in the Supreme as well as in this world. If there is no such

permanent endurance and what was Socrates may with change of time become another soul and be

Pythagoras or someone else then the individual Socrates has not that existence in the Divine.

But if the Soul of the individual contains the ReasonPrinciples of all that it traverses, once more all men

have their [archetypic] existence There: and it is our doctrine that every soul contains all the

ReasonPrinciples that exist in the Kosmos: since then the Kosmos contains the ReasonPrinciples not

merely of man, but also of all individual living things, so must the Soul. Its content of ReasonPrinciples,

then, must be limitless, unless there be a periodical renovation bounding the boundlessness by the return of a

But if [in virtue of this periodic return] each archetype may be reproduced by numerous existents, what need

is there that there be distinct ReasonPrinciples and archetypes for each existent in any one period? Might

not one [archetypal] man suffice for all, and similarly a limited number of souls produce a limitless number

No: one ReasonPrinciple cannot account for distinct and differing individuals: one human being does not

suffice as the exemplar for many distinct each from the other not merely in material constituents but by

innumerable variations of ideal type: this is no question of various pictures or images reproducing an original

Socrates; the beings produced differ so greatly as to demand distinct ReasonPrinciples. The entire

soulperiod conveys with it all the requisite ReasonPrinciples, and so too the same existents appear once

There is no need to baulk at this limitlessness in the Intellectual; it is an infinitude having nothing to do with

number or part; what we may think of it as its outgoing is no other than its characteristic Act.

2. But individuals are brought into being by the union of the ReasonPrinciples of the parents, male and

female: this seems to do away with a definite ReasonPrinciple for each of the offspring: one of the parents

the male let us say is the source; and the offspring is determined not by ReasonPrinciples differing from

No: a distinct ReasonPrinciple may be the determinant for the child since the parent contains all: they would

And so of the differences among children of the same parents: it is a matter of varying dominance: either the

offspring whether it so appears or not has been mainly determined by, now, the male, now, the female or,

while each principle has given itself entire and lies there within, yet it effectively moulds one portion of the

And how [by the theory of a divine archetype of each individual] are the differences caused by place to be

Is the differentiating element to be found in the varying resistance of the material of the body?

No: if this were so, all men with the exception of one only would be untrue to nature.

Difference everywhere is a good, and so there must be differing archetypes, though only to evil could be

attribute any power in Matter to thwart nature by overmastering the perfect ReasonPrinciples, hidden but

Still, admitting the diversity of the Reasonprinciples, why need there by as many as there are men born in

each Period, once it is granted that different beings may take external manifestation under the presence of the

Under the presence of all; agreed: but with the dominance of the very same? That is still open to question.

May we not take it that there may be identical reproduction from one Period to another but not in the same

3. In the case of twin birth among human beings how can we make out the ReasonPrinciples to be different;

But this would mean that after all there are not as many Reason Principles as separate beings?

As many as there are of differing beings, differing by something more than a mere failure in complete

And why may not this [sharing of archetype] occur also in beings untouched by differentiation, if indeed

A craftsman even in constructing an object identical with a model must envisage that identity in a mental

differentiation enabling him to make a second thing by bringing in some difference side by side with the

identity: similarly in nature, where the thing comes about not by reasoning but in sole virtue of

ReasonPrinciples, that differentiation must be included in the archetypal idea, though it is not in our power

If production is undetermined in regard to Quantity, each thing has its distinct ReasonPrinciple: if there is a

measured system the Quantity has been determined by the unrolling and unfolding of the ReasonPrinciples

Thus when the universe has reached its term, there will be a fresh beginning, since the entire Quantity which

the Kosmos is to exhibit, every item that is to emerge in its course, all is laid up from the first in the Being

Are we, then, looking to the brute realm, to hold that there are as many ReasonPrinciples as distinct

Why not? There is nothing alarming about such limitlessness in generative forces and in ReasonPrinciples,

As in Soul [principle of Life] so in Divine Mind [principle of Idea] there is this infinitude of recurring

1. It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the

beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that

Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told,

how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation.

Let us go to the realm of magnitudes: Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned,

quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman's hands into some statue of god

or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor's art has

Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist's hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not

as stone for so the crude block would be as pleasant but in virtue of the form or idea introduced by the art.

This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it

not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art. The beauty, therefore, exists in a far

higher state in the art; for it does not come over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not

transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not

integrally and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the

Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or ReasonPrinciple

of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the

seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any

comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much

the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less

Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effect can be: the musical does

not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives

Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin

with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognise that they give no bare

reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore,

that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus

Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must

2. But let us leave the arts and consider those works produced by Nature and admitted to be naturally

beautiful which the creations of art are charged with imitating, all reasoning life and unreasoning things alike,

but especially the consummate among them, where the moulder and maker has subdued the material and

given the form he desired. Now what is the beauty here? It has nothing to do with the blood or the menstrual

process: either there is also a colour and form apart from all this, or there is nothing unless sheer ugliness or a

Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battlesought; or of all those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite;

or of Aphrodite herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty; or of any of these gods

In all these is it not the Idea, something of that realm but communicated to the produced from within the

producer just as in works of art, we held, it is communicated from the arts to their creations? Now we can

surely not believe that, while the made thing and the Idea thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet the

Idea not so alloyed but resting still with the creator the Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity is not

If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then the creating principle, being without extension,

could not be beautiful: but beauty cannot be made to depend upon magnitude since, whether in a large object

or a small, the one Idea equally moves and forms the mind by its inherent power. A further indication is that

as long as the object remains outside us we know nothing of it; it affects us by entry; but only as an Idea can

it enter through the eyes which are not of scope to take an extended mass: we are, no doubt, simultaneously

possessed of the magnitude which, however, we take in not as mass but by an elaboration upon the presented

Then again the principle producing the beauty must be, itself, ugly, neutral or beautiful: ugly, it could not

produce the opposite; neutral, why should its product be the one rather than the other? The Nature, then,

which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the

inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we

are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it.

But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and that the beauty is not in the concrete object is

manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly in soul or mind. And it is

precisely here that the greater beauty lies, perceived whenever you look to the wisdom in a man and delight

in it, not wasting attention on the face, which may be hideous, but passing all appearance by and catching

only at the inner comeliness, the truly personal; if you are still unmoved and cannot acknowledge beauty

under such conditions, then looking to your own inner being you will find no beauty to delight you and it will

be futile in that state to seek the greater vision, for you will be questing it through the ugly and impure.

This is why such matters are not spoken of to everyone; you, if you are conscious of beauty within,

3. Thus there is in the NaturePrinciple itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms

and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. In the

proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the soul and bringing to it a light

from that greater light which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting upon the

quality of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself

alone, and thus is not even to be called a ReasonPrinciple but is the creative source of the very first

This prior, then, is the IntellectualPrinciple, the veritable, abiding and not fluctuant since not taking

intellectual quality from outside itself. By what image thus, can we represent it? We have nowhere to go but

to what is less. Only from itself can we take an image of it; that is, there can be no representation of it, except

in the sense that we represent gold by some portion of gold purified, either actually or mentally, if it be

impure insisting at the same time that this is not the total thinggold, but merely the particular gold of a

particular parcel. In the same way we learn in this matter from the purified Intellect in ourselves or, if you

For assuredly all the Gods are august and beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech. And what makes them so?

Intellect; and especially Intellect operating within them [the divine sun and stars] to visibility. It is not

through the loveliness of their corporeal forms: even those that have body are not gods by that beauty; it is in

virtue of Intellect that they, too, are gods, and as gods beautiful. They do not veer between wisdom and folly:

in the immunity of Intellect unmoving and pure, they are wise always, allknowing, taking cognisance not of

the human but of their own being and of all that lies within the contemplation of Intellect. Those of them

whose dwelling is in the heavens, are ever in this meditation what task prevents them? and from afar they

look, too, into that further heaven by a lifting of the head. The Gods belonging to that higher Heaven itself,

they whose station is upon it and in it, see and know in virtue of their omnipresence to it. For all There is

heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal and plant and man; all is the heavenly content of that

heaven: and the Gods in it, despising neither men nor anything else that is there where all is of the heavenly

4. To "live at ease" is There; and, to these divine beings, verity is mother and nurse, existence and sustenance;

all that is not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in all: for all is transparent, nothing

dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light. And

each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is

all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the glory. Each of them is great; the small is great; the sun, There, is

all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and sun. While some one manner of being is dominant in

Movement There is pure [as selfcaused] for the moving principle is not a separate thing to complicate it as it

So, too, Repose is not troubled, for there is no admixture of the unstable; and the Beauty is all beauty since it

is not merely resident [as an attribute or addition] in some beautiful object. Each There walks upon no alien

soil; its place is its essential self; and, as each moves, so to speak, towards what is Above, it is attended by the

very ground from which it starts: there is no distinguishing between the Being and the Place; all is Intellect,

the Principle and the ground on which it stands, alike. Thus we might think that our visible sky [the ground or

place of the stars], lit, as it is, produces the light which reaches us from it, though of course this is really

produced by the stars [as it were, by the Principles of light alone, not also by the ground as the analogy would

In our realm all is part rising from part and nothing can be more than partial; but There each being is an

eternal product of a whole and is at once a whole and an individual manifesting as part but, to the keen vision

The myth of Lynceus seeing into the very deeps of the earth tells us of those eyes in the divine. No weariness

overtakes this vision, which yet brings no such satiety as would call for its ending; for there never was a void

to be filled so that, with the fulness and the attainment of purpose, the sense of sufficiency be induced: nor is

there any such incongruity within the divine that one Being there could be repulsive to another: and of course

all There are unchangeable. This absence of satisfaction means only a satisfaction leading to no distaste for

that which produces it; to see is to look the more, since for them to continue in the contemplation of an

infinite self and of infinite objects is but to acquiesce in the bidding of their nature.

Life, pure, is never a burden; how then could there be weariness There where the living is most noble? That

very life is wisdom, not a wisdom built up by reasonings but complete from the beginning, suffering no lack

which could set it enquiring, a wisdom primal, unborrowed, not something added to the Being, but its very

essence. No wisdom, thus, is greater; this is the authentic knowing, assessor to the divine Intellect as

projected into manifestation simultaneously with it; thus, in the symbolic saying, Justice is assessor to Zeus.

[Perfect wisdom] for all the Principles of this order, dwelling There, are as it were visible images protected

from themselves, so that all becomes an object of contemplation to contemplators immeasurably blessed. The

greatness and power of the wisdom There we may know from this, that is embraces all the real Beings, and

has made all, and all follow it, and yet that it is itself those beings, which sprang into being with it, so that all

is one, and the essence There is wisdom. If we have failed to understand, it is that we have thought of

knowledge as a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our

sciences of the senserealm. But in case this should be questioned, we may leave our own sciences for the

present, and deal with the knowing in the Supreme at which Plato glances where he speaks of "that

knowledge which is not a stranger in something strange to it" though in what sense, he leaves us to examine

and declare, if we boast ourselves worthy of the discussion. This is probably our best startingpoint.

5. All that comes to be, work of nature or of craft, some wisdom has made: everywhere a wisdom presides at

No doubt the wisdom of the artist may be the guide of the work; it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom

exhibited in the arts; but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in Nature which is embodied in

himself; and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold

Now, if we could think of this as the primal wisdom, we need look no further, since, at that, we have

discovered a principle which is neither a derivative nor a "stranger in something strange to it." But if we are

told that, while this ReasonPrinciple is in Nature, yet Nature itself is its source, we ask how Nature came to

possess it; and, if Nature derived it from some other source, we ask what that other source may be; if, on the

contrary, the principle is selfsprung, we need look no further: but if we are referred to the

IntellectualPrinciple we must make clear whether the IntellectualPrinciple engendered the wisdom: if we

learn that it did, we ask whence: if from itself, then inevitably, it is itself Wisdom.

The true Wisdom, then [found to be identical with the IntellectualPrinciple] is Real Being; and Real Being

is Wisdom; it is wisdom that gives value to Real Being; and Being is Real in virtue of its origin in wisdom. It

follows that all forms of existence not possessing wisdom are, indeed, Beings in right of the wisdom which

went to their forming but, as not in themselves possessing it, are not Real Beings.

We cannot therefore think that the divine Beings of that sphere, or the other supremely blessed There, need

look to our apparatus of science: all of that realm, all is noble image, such images as we may conceive to lie

within the soul of the wise but There not as inscription but as authentic existence. The ancients had this in

6. Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of

nature indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the

writingforms that take in the detail of words and sentences those characters that represent sounds and

convey the propositions of reasoning and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple inscriptions a

separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth.

For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity,

not as aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears,

in another form of being, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in an outward stage

and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder rises how a generated world can be so

For, one who knows must declare his wonder that this Wisdom, while not itself containing the causes by

which Being exists and takes such excellence, yet imparts them to the entities produced in Being's realm.

This excellence whose necessity is scarcely or not at all manifest to search, exists, if we could but find it out,

What I say may be considered in one chief thing, and thence applied to all the particular entities:

7. Consider the universe: we are agreed that its existence and its nature come to it from beyond itself; are we,

now, to imagine that its maker first thought it out in detail the earth, and its necessary situation in the

middle; water and, again, its position as lying upon the earth; all the other elements and objects up to the sky

in due place and order; living beings with their appropriate forms as we know them, their inner organs and

their outer limbs and that having thus appointed every item beforehand, he then set about the execution?

Such designing was not even possible; how could the plan for a universe come to one that had never looked

outward? Nor could he work on material gathered from elsewhere as our craftsmen do, using hands and tools;

One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else; of that prior since there is no obstacle, all

being continuous within the realm of reality there has suddenly appeared a sign, an image, whether given

forth directly or through the ministry of soul or of some phase of soul, matters nothing for the moment: thus

the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine world, in greater beauty There because There

From the beginning to end all is gripped by the Forms of the Intellectual Realm: Matter itself is held by the

Ideas of the elements and to these Ideas are added other Ideas and others again, so that it is hard to work

down to crude Matter beneath all that sheathing of Idea. Indeed since Matter itself is in its degree, an Idea

the lowest all this universe is Idea and there is nothing that is not Idea as the archetype was. And all is made

silently, since nothing had part in the making but Being and Idea further reason why creation went without

Thus nothing stood in the way of the Idea, and even now it dominates, despite all the clash of things: the

creation is not hindered on its way even now; it stands firm in virtue of being All. To me, moreover, it seems

that if we ourselves were archetypes, Ideas, veritable Being, and the Idea with which we construct here were

our veritable Essence, then our creative power too would toillessly effect its purpose: as man now stands, he

does not produce in his work a true image of himself: become man, he has ceased to be the All: ceasing to be

man we read "he soars aloft and administers the Kosmos entire"; restored to the All he is maker of the All.

But to our immediate purpose it is possible to give a reason why the earth is set in the midst and why it is

round and why the ecliptic runs precisely as it does, but, looking to the creating principle, we cannot say that

because this was the way therefore things were so planned: we can say only that because the All is what it is,

therefore there is a total of good; the causing principle, we might put it, reached the conclusion before all

formal reasoning and not from any premises, not by sequence or plan but before either, since all of that order

Since there is a Source, all the created must spring from it and in accordance with it; and we are rightly told

not to go seeking the causes impelling a Source to produce, especially when this is the perfectly sufficient

Source and identical with the Term: a Source which is Source and Term must be the AllUnity, complete in

8. This then is Beauty primally: it is entire and omnipresent as an entirety; and therefore in none of its parts or

members lacking in beauty; beautiful thus beyond denial. Certainly it cannot be anything [be, for example,

Beauty] without being wholly that thing; it can be nothing which it is to possess partially or in which it utterly

If this principle were not beautiful, what other could be? Its prior does not deign to be beautiful; that which is

the first to manifest itself Form and object of vision to the intellect cannot but be lovely to see. It is to

indicate this that Plato, drawing on something well within our observation, represents the Creator as

approving the work he has achieved: the intention is to make us feel the lovable beauty of the autotype and of

the Divine Idea; for to admire a representation is to admire the original upon which it was made.

It is not surprising if we fail to recognise what is passing within us: lovers, and those in general that admire

beauty here, do not stay to reflect that it is to be traced, as of course it must be, to the Beauty There. That the

admiration of the Demiurge is to be referred to the Ideal Exemplar is deliberately made evident by the rest of

the passage: "He admired; and determined to bring the work into still closer likeness with the Exemplar": he

makes us feel the magnificent beauty of the Exemplar by telling us that the Beauty sprung from this world is,

And indeed if the divine did not exist, the transcendently beautiful, in a beauty beyond all thought, what

could be lovelier than the things we see? Certainly no reproach can rightly be brought against this world save

9. Let us, then, make a mental picture of our universe: each member shall remain what it is, distinctly apart;

yet all is to form, as far as possible, a complete unity so that whatever comes into view shall show as if it

were the surface of the orb over all, bringing immediately with it the vision, on the one plane, of the sun and

of all the stars with earth and sea and all living things as if exhibited upon a transparent globe.

Bring this vision actually before your sight, so that there shall be in your mind the gleaming representation of

a sphere, a picture holding sprung, themselves, of that universe and repose or some at rest, some in motion.

Keep this sphere before you, and from it imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of spatial

differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter, taking care not merely to attenuate it: call on God, maker of

the sphere whose image you now hold, and pray Him to enter. And may He come bringing His own Universe

with all the Gods that dwell in it He who is the one God and all the gods, where each is all, blending into a

unity, distinct in powers but all one god in virtue of that one divine power of many facets.

More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for, in the coming to be of all those, this, the one, has

suffered no diminishing. He and all have one existence while each again is distinct. It is distinction by state

without interval: there is no outward form to set one here and another there and to prevent any from being an

entire identity; yet there is no sharing of parts from one to another. Nor is each of those divine wholes a

power in fragment, a power totalling to the sum of the measurable segments: the divine is one allpower,

reaching out to infinity, powerful to infinity; and so great is God that his very members are infinites. What

Great, too, is this firmament of ours and all the powers constellated within it, but it would be greater still,

unspeakably, but that there is inbound in it something of the petty power of body; no doubt the powers of fire

and other bodily substances might themselves be thought very great, but in fact, it is through their failure in

the true power that we see them burning, destroying, wearing things away, and slaving towards the

production of life; they destroy because they are themselves in process of destruction, and they produce

The power in that other world has merely Being and Beauty of Being. Beauty without Being could not be,

nor Being voided of Beauty: abandoned of Beauty, Being loses something of its essence. Being is desirable

because it is identical with Beauty; and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate which is

the cause of the other, where the nature is one? The very figment of Being needs some imposed image of

Beauty to make it passable and even to ensure its existence; it exists to the degree in which it has taken some

share in the beauty of Idea; and the more deeply it has drawn on this, the less imperfect it is, precisely

because the nature which is essentially the beautiful has entered into it the more intimately.

10. This is why Zeus, although the oldest of the gods and their sovereign, advances first [in the Phaidros

myth] towards that vision, followed by gods and demigods and such souls as are of strength to see. That

Being appears before them from some unseen place and rising loftily over them pours its light upon all

things, so that all gleams in its radiance; it upholds some beings, and they see; the lower are dazzled and turn

away, unfit to gaze upon that sun, the trouble falling the more heavily on those most remote.

Of those looking upon that Being and its content, and able to see, all take something but not all the same

vision always: intently gazing, one sees the fount and principle of Justice, another is filled with the sight of

Moral Wisdom, the original of that quality as found, sometimes at least, among men, copied by them in their

degree from the divine virtue which, covering all the expanse, so to speak, of the Intellectual Realm is seen,

The gods see, each singly and all as one. So, too, the souls; they see all There in right of being sprung,

themselves, of that universe and therefore including all from beginning to end and having their existence

There if only by that phase which belongs inherently to the Divine, though often too they are There entire,

This vision Zeus takes, and it is for such of us, also, as share his love and appropriate our part in the Beauty

There, the final object of all seeing, the entire beauty upon all things; for all There sheds radiance, and floods

those that have found their way thither so that they too become beautiful; thus it will often happen that men

climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will themselves appear so, borrowing colour from

the place on which they move. The colour flowering on that other height we speak of is Beauty; or rather all

There is light and beauty, through and through, for the beauty is no mere bloom upon the surface.

To those that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account; but those drunken with

this wine, filled with the nectar, all their soul penetrated by this beauty, cannot remain mere gazers: no longer

is there a spectator outside gazing on an outside spectacle; the cleareyed hold the vision within themselves,

though, for the most part, they have no idea that it is within but look towards it as to something beyond them

All that one sees as a spectacle is still external; one must bring the vision within and see no longer in that

mode of separation but as we know ourselves; thus a man filled with a god possessed by Apollo or by one

of the Muses need no longer look outside for his vision of the divine being; it is but finding the strength to

11. Similarly any one, unable to see himself, but possessed by that God, has but to bring that divine within

before his consciousness and at once he sees an image of himself, himself lifted to a better beauty: now let

him ignore that image, lovely though it is, and sink into a perfect selfidentity, no such separation remaining;

at once he forms a multiple unity with the God silently present; in the degree of his power and will, the two

become one; should he turn back to the former duality, still he is pure and remains very near to the God; he

This conversion brings gain: at the first stage, that of separation, a man is aware of self; but, retreating

inwards, he becomes possessor of all; he puts sense away behind him in dread of the separated life and

becomes one in the Divine; if he plans to see in separation, he sets himself outside.

The novice must hold himself constantly under some image of the Divine Being and seek in the light of a

clear conception; knowing thus, in a deep conviction, whither he is going into what a sublimity he

penetrates he must give himself forthwith to the inner and, radiant with the Divine Intellections [with which

he is now one], be no longer the seer but, as that place has made him, the seen.

Still, we will be told, one cannot be in beauty and yet fail to see it. The very contrary: to see the divine as

something external is to be outside of it; to become it is to be most truly in beauty: since sight deals with the

external, there can here be no vision unless in the sense of identification with the object.

And this identification amounts to a selfknowing, a selfconsciousness, guarded by the fear of losing the

It must be remembered that sensations of the ugly and evil impress us more violently than those of what is

agreeable and yet leave less knowledge as the residue of the shock: sickness makes the rougher mark, but

health, tranquilly present, explains itself better; it takes the first place, it is the natural thing, it belongs to our

being; illness is alien, unnatural and thus makes itself felt by its very incongruity, while the other conditions

are native and we take no notice. Such being our nature, we are most completely aware of ourselves when we

This is why in that other sphere, when we are deepest in that knowledge by intellection, we are aware of

none; we are expecting some impression on sense, which has nothing to report since it has seen nothing and

never could in that order see anything. The unbelieving element is sense; it is the other, the

IntellectualPrinciple, that sees; and if this too doubted, it could not even credit its own existence, for it can

12. We have told how this vision is to be procured, whether by the mode of separation or in identity: now,

The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a

painless labour and rejoiced in what he has brought into being, proud of his children keeping all closely by

Of this offspring all beautiful, but most beautiful those that have remained within only one has become

manifest without; from him [Zeus, sovereign over the visible universe] the youngest born, we may gather, as

from some image, the greatness of the Father and of the Brothers that remain within the Father's house.

Still the manifested God cannot think that he has come forth in vain from the father; for through him another

universe has arisen, beautiful as the image of beauty, and it could not be' lawful that Beauty and Being should

This second Kosmos at every point copies the archetype: it has life and being in copy, and has beauty as

springing from that diviner world. In its character of image it holds, too, that divine perpetuity without which

it would only at times be truly representative and sometimes fail like a construction of art; for every image

whose existence lies in the nature of things must stand during the entire existence of the archetype.

Hence it is false to put an end to the visible sphere as long as the Intellectual endures, or to found it upon a

That teaching shirks the penetration of such a making as is here involved: it fails to see that as long as the

Supreme is radiant there can be no failing of its sequel but, that existing, all exists. And since the necessity

of conveying our meaning compels such terms the Supreme has existed for ever and for ever will exist.

13. The God fettered [as in the Kronos Myth] to an unchanging identity leaves the ordering of this universe to

his son (to Zeus), for it could not be in his character to neglect his rule within the divine sphere, and, as

though sated with the AuthenticBeauty, seek a lordship too recent and too poor for his might. Ignoring this

lower world, Kronos [IntellectualPrinciple] claims for his own father [Ouranoo, the Absolute, or One] with

all the upwardtending between them: and he counts all that tends to the inferior, beginning from his son

[Zeus, the AllSoul], as ranking beneath him. Thus he holds a mid position determined on the one side by the

differentiation implied in the severance from the very highest and, on the other, by that which keeps him

apart from the link between himself and the lower: he stands between a greater father and an inferior son. But

since that father is too lofty to be thought of under the name of Beauty, the second God remains the primally

Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in

nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original. Since then the AllSoul to use the more

familiar term since Aphrodite herself is so beautiful, what name can we give to that other? If Soul is so

lovely in its own right, of what quality must that prior be? And since its being is derived, what must that

power be from which the Soul takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent?

We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another

order; our selfknowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in selfignorance we are ugly.

Do these considerations suffice to a clear understanding of the Intellectual Sphere, or must we make yet

1. All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the Intellectual.

Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them elect to abide by that order and, their life

throughout, make its concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of sense are their good and

evil; they feel they have done all if they live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other. And

those of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their philosophy; they are like the heavier birds

which have incorporated much from the earth and are so weighted down that they cannot fly high for all the

Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul urges them from the pleasant

to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any surer ground, they fall

back in virtue's name, upon those actions and options of the lower from which they sought to escape.

But there is a third order those godlike men who, in their mightier power, in the keenness of their sight,

have clear vision of the splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and fog of earth and hold firmly

to that other world, looking beyond all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man

It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by

inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in

things whose beauty is of the soul such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom and

thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the Soul, thence to whatever be above that

again, until the uttermost is reached. The First, the Principle whose beauty is selfspringing: this attained,

But how is the ascent to be begun? Whence comes the power? In what thought is this love to find its guide?

The guiding thought is this: that the beauty perceived on material things is borrowed.

The pattern giving beauty to the corporeal rests upon it as Idea to its Matter and the substrate may change and

from being pleasant become distasteful, a sign, in all reason, that the beauty comes by participation.

Two causes in their degree; the participation in beauty and the power of Soul, the maker, which has imprinted

We ask then is soul, of itself, a thing of beauty: we find it is not since differences are manifest, one Soul wise

The question thus becomes, "What principle is the giver of wisdom to the soul? and the only answer is "The

IntellectualPrinciple," the veritably intellectual, wise without intermission and therefore beautiful of itself.

No; we must look still inward beyond the Intellectual, which, from our point of approach, stands before the

Supreme Beginning, in whose forecourt, as it were, it announces in its own being the entire content of the

Good, that prior of all, locked in unity, of which this is the expression already touched by multiplicity.

3. We will have to examine this Nature, the Intellectual, which our reasoning identifies as the authentically

existent and the veritable essential: but first we must take another path and make certain that such a principle

Perhaps it is ridiculous to set out enquiring whether an IntellectualPrinciple has place in the total of being:

but there may be some to hesitate even as to this and certainly there will be the question whether it is as we

describe it, whether it is a separate existence, whether it actually is the real beings, whether it is the seat of the

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; handwrought or compacted by

nature, nothing is simplex. Now the handwrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of

these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea

from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound

bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human

being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be

a compound of Matter and shaping principle since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless you will

enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or

whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else the

IntellectualPrinciple in it representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the

Applying the same method to the total of things, here too we discover the IntellectualPrinciple and this we

set down as veritably the maker and creator of the All. The underly has adopted, we see, certain shapes by

which it becomes fire, water, air, earth; and these shapes have been imposed upon it by something else. This

other is Soul which, hovering over the Four [the elements], imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for

which it has itself received from the IntellectualPrinciple as the soul or mind of the craftsman draws upon

The IntellectualPrinciple is in one phase the Form of the soul, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of

the shape the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given imparting to soul nearly the authentic reality

A main reason is that the IntellectualPrinciple is at once something other and something more powerful than

Soul and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is certainly not true, as people

imagine, that the soul, brought to perfection, produces Intellect. How could that potentiality come to actuality

unless there be, first, an effective principle to induce the actualization which, left to chance, might never

The Firsts must be supposed to exist in actuality, looking to nothing else, selfcomplete. Anything

incomplete must be sequent upon these, and take its completion from the principles engendering it which,

like fathers, labour in the improvement of an offspring born imperfect: the produced is a Matter to the

And if, further, soul is passible while something impassible there must be or by the mere passage of time all

Again there must be something prior to Soul because Soul is in the world and there must be something

outside a world in which, all being corporeal and material, nothing has enduring reality: failing such a prior,

These and many other considerations establish the necessary existence of an IntellectualPrinciple prior to

5. This IntellectualPrinciple, if the term is to convey the truth, must be understood to be not a principle

merely potential and not one maturing from unintelligence to intelligence that would simply send us

seeking, once more, a necessary prior but a principle which is intelligence in actuality and in eternity.

Now a principle whose wisdom is not borrowed must derive from itself any intellection it may make; and

anything it may possess within itself it can hold only from itself: it follows that, intellective by its own

resource and upon its own content, it is itself the very things on which its intellection acts.

For supposing its essence to be separable from its intellection and the objects of its intellection to be not

itself, then its essence would be unintellectual; and it would be intellectual not actually but potentially. The

intellection and its object must then be inseparable however the habit induced by our conditions may tempt

What then is its characteristic Act and what the intellection which makes knower and known here identical?

Clearly, as authentic Intellection, it has authentic intellection of the authentically existent, and establishes

Consider: It must perceive them either somewhere else or within itself as its very self: the somewhere else is

impossible where could that be? they are therefore itself and the content of itself.

Its objects certainly cannot be the things of sense, as people think; no First could be of the senseknown

order; for in things of sense the Idea is but an image of the authentic, and every Idea thus derivative and

Further, if the IntellectualPrinciple is to be the maker of this All, it cannot make by looking outside itself to

what does not yet exist. The Authentic Beings must, then, exist before this All, no copies made on a model

but themselves archetypes, primals, and the essence of the IntellectualPrinciple.

We may be told that ReasonPrinciples suffice [to the subsistence of the All]: but then these, clearly, must be

eternal; and if eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an IntellectualPrinciple such as we have indicated,

a principle earlier than condition, than nature, than soul, than anything whose existence is potential for

The IntellectualPrinciple, therefore, is itself the authentic existences, not a knower knowing them in some

sphere foreign to it. The Authentic Beings, thus, exist neither before nor after it: it is the primal legislator to

Being or, rather, is itself the law of Being. Thus it is true that "Intellectual and Being are identical"; in the

immaterial the knowledge of the thing is the thing. And this is the meaning of the dictum "I sought myself,"

For none of the Beings is outside the IntellectualPrinciple or in space; they remain for ever in themselves,

accepting no change, no decay, and by that are the authentically existent. Things that arise and fall away draw

on real being as something to borrow from; they are not of the real; the true being is that on which they draw.

It is by participation that the senseknown has the being we ascribe to it; the underlying nature has taken its

shape from elsewhere; thus bronze and wood are shaped into what we see by means of an image introduced

by sculpture or carpentry; the craft permeates the materials while remaining integrally apart from the material

and containing in itself the reality of statue or couch. And it is so, of course, with all corporeal things.

This universe, characteristically participant in images, shows how the image differs from the authentic

beings: against the variability of the one order, there stands the unchanging quality of the other, selfsituate,

not needing space because having no magnitude, holding an existent intellective and selfsufficing. The

bodykind seeks its endurance in another kind; the IntellectualPrinciple, sustaining by its marvellous Being,

the things which of themselves must fall, does not itself need to look for a staying ground.

6. We take it, then, that the IntellectualPrinciple is the authentic existences and contains them all not as in

a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct:

similarly the mind holds many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of them merged

into any other, each acting its own part at call quite independently, every conception coming out from the

inner total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a closer unity, that the IntellectualPrinciple is

all Being in one total and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a distinct power which, however, the

total IntellectualPrinciple includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This relation may be

illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in one

kernel; yet in that unit there is eyeprinciple, and there is handprinciple, each of which is revealed as a

separate power by its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the seed is a ReasonPrinciple one

and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for

example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the

generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher. This power is sometimes designated as Nature

in the seedlife; its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as light from fire, it converts and

shapes the matter of things, not by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but by

7. Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can

scarcely be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surfaceknowing; it is of later origin than

the objects since it is a reflection from them: but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the

intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning soul from the

IntellectualPrinciple and has no dealing with anything in sense. Being true knowledge it actually is

everything of which it takes cognisance; it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual

object since it carries the IntellectualPrinciple which actually is the primals and is always selfpresent and is

in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote for all such

experience belongs to soul but always selfgathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern

Not by its thinking God does God come to be; not by its thinking Movement does Movement arise. Hence it

is an error to call the Ideas intellections in the sense that, upon an intellectual act in this Principle, one such

Idea or another is made to exist or exists. No: the object of this intellection must exist before the intellective

act [must be the very content not the creation of the IntellectualPrinciple]. How else could that Principle

8. If, then, the Intellection is an act upon the inner content [of a perfect unity], that content is at once the Idea

An IntellectualPrinciple and an Intellective Essence, no concept distinguishable from the

IntellectualPrinciple, each actually being that Principle. The IntellectualPrinciple entire is the total of the

Ideas, and each of them is the [entire] IntellectualPrinciple in a special form. Thus a science entire is the

total of the relevant considerations each of which, again, is a member of the entire science, a member not

This IntellectualPrinciple, therefore, is a unity while by that possession of itself it is, tranquilly, the eternal

If the IntellectualPrinciple were envisaged as preceding Being, it would at once become a principle whose

expression, its intellectual Act, achieves and engenders the Beings: but, since we are compelled to think of

existence as preceding that which knows it, we can but think that the Beings are the actual content of the

knowing principle and that the very act, the intellection, is inherent to the Beings, as fire stands equipped

from the beginning with fireact; in this conception, the Beings contain the IntellectualPrinciple as one and

the same with themselves, as their own activity. Thus, Being is itself an activity: there is one activity, then, in

Being, therefore, and the IntellectualPrinciple are one Nature: the Beings, and the Act of that which is, and

the IntellectualPrinciple thus constituted, all are one: and the resultant Intellections are the Idea of Being

It is our separating habit that sets the one order before the other: for there is a separating intellect, of another

order than the true, distinct from the intellect, inseparable and unseparating, which is Being and the universe

9. What, then, is the content inevitably separated by our minds of this one IntellectualPrinciple? For there

is no resource but to represent the items in accessible form just as we study the various articles constituting

This universe is a living thing capable of including every form of life; but its Being and its modes are derived

from elsewhere; that source is traced back to the IntellectualPrinciple: it follows that the allembracing

archetype is in the IntellectualPrinciple, which, therefore, must be an intellectual Kosmos, that indicated by

Given the ReasonPrinciple [the outgoing divine Idea] of a certain living thing and the Matter to harbour this

seedprinciple, the living thing must come into being: in the same way once there exists an intellective

Nature, all powerful, and with nothing to check it since nothing intervenes between it and that which is of a

nature to receive it inevitably the higher imprints form and the lower accepts, it. The recipient holds the Idea

10. All, then, that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the Supreme. But what is not present as

Idea, does not. Thus of things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not contained in the arts;

lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reasonprinciple or

is a marring of the achieved form by accident. To that Intellectual Kosmos belong qualities, accordant with

Nature, and quantities; number and mass; origins and conditions; all actions and experiences not against

nature; movement and repose, both the universals and the particulars: but There time is replaced by eternity

In that Intellectual Kosmos, where all is one total, every entity that can be singled out is an intellective

essence and a participant in life: thus, identity and difference, movement and rest with the object resting or

moving, essence and quality, all have essential existence. For every real being must be in actuality not merely

This suggests the question whether the Intellectual Kosmos contains the forms only of the things of sense or

of other existents as well. But first we will consider how it stands with artistic creations: there is no question

of an ideal archetype of evil: the evil of this world is begotten of need, privation, deficiency, and is a

condition peculiar to Matter distressed and to what has come into likeness with Matter.

The imitative arts painting, sculpture, dancing, pantomimic gesturing are, largely, earthbased; on an

earthly base; they follow models found in sense, since they copy forms and movements and reproduce seen

symmetries; they cannot therefore be referred to that higher sphere except indirectly, through the

On the other hand any skill which, beginning with the observation of the symmetry of living things, grows to

the symmetry of all life, will be a portion of the Power There which observes and meditates the symmetry

reigning among all beings in the Intellectual Kosmos. Thus all music since its thought is upon melody and

rhythm must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm of the Ideal Realm.

The crafts, such as building and carpentry which give us Matter in wrought forms, may be said, in that they

draw on pattern, to take their principles from that realm and from the thinking There: but in that they bring

these down into contact with the senseorder, they are not wholly in the Intellectual: they are founded in

man. So agriculture, dealing with material growths: so medicine watching over physical health; so the art

which aims at corporeal strength and wellbeing: power and wellbeing mean something else There, the

Oratory and generalship, administration and sovereignty under any forms in which their activities are

associated with Good and when they look to that possess something derived thence and building up their

Geometry, the science of the Intellectual entities, holds place There: so, too, philosophy, whose high concern

12. It should however be added that if the Idea of man exists in the Supreme, there must exist the Idea of

reasoning man and of man with his arts and crafts; such arts as are the offspring of intellect Must be There.

It must be observed that the Ideas will be of universals; not of Socrates but of Man: though as to man we may

enquire whether the individual may not also have place There. Under the heading of individuality there is to

be considered the repetition of the same feature from man to man, the simian type, for example, and the

aquiline: the aquiline and the simian must be taken to be differences in the Idea of Man as there are different

types of the animal: but Matter also has its effect in bringing about the degree of aquilinity. Similarly with

difference of complexion, determined partly by the ReasonPrinciple, partly by Matter and by diversity of

13. It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as

AbsoluteMan differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an AbsoluteSoul differing from Soul

It must be stated at the outset that we cannot take all that is here to be image of archetype, or Soul to be an

image of AbsoluteSoul: one soul, doubtless, ranks higher than another, but here too, though perhaps not as

Every soul, authentically a soul, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves

there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the Supreme, as in the senseworld,

but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. For those Beings are not set apart in

some defined place; wherever there is a soul that has risen from body, there too these are: the world of sense

is one where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. Whatever the freed soul attains to here, that it is There.

Thus, if by the content of the senseworld we mean simply the visible objects, then the Supreme contains not

only what is in the realm of sense but more: if in the content of the kosmos we mean to include Soul and the

14. There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this Principle must be the

source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly?

The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes to be, why the

IntellectualPrinciple is all and whence it springs, these matters demand another approach.

But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea whether

there is an Idea of filth and mud it is to be observed that all that the IntellectualPrinciple derived from The

First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the

IntellectualPrinciple but to the Soul which, drawing upon the IntellectualPrinciple, takes from Matter

But all this will be more clearly brought out, when we turn to the problem of the production of multiplicity

from unity. Compounds, we shall see as owing existence to hazard and not to the IntellectualPrinciple,

having been fused into objects of sense by their own impulse are not to be included under Ideas.

The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul's inability to bring some other thing to being

something in the order of nature, which, else, it would but producing where it may. In the matter of the arts

and crafts, all that are to be traced to the needs of human nature are laid up in the Absolute Man.

And before the particular Soul there is another Soul, a universal, and, before that, an AbsoluteSoul, which is

the Life existing in the IntellectualPrinciple before Soul came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life

1. Philosophy at a very early stage investigated the number and character of the Existents. Various theories

resulted: some declared for one Existent, others for a finite number, others again for an infinite number, while

as regards the nature of the Existents one, numerically finite, or numerically infinite there was a similar

disagreement. These theories, in so far as they have been adequately examined by later workers, may be

passed over here; our attention must be directed upon the results of those whose examination has led them to

These thinkers rejected pure unity on the ground of the plurality observed even in the Intellectual world; they

rejected an infinite number as not reconcilable with the facts and as defying knowledge: considering the

foundations of being to be "genera" rather than elements strictly so called, they concluded for a finite number.

But here again there is a divergence of views. To some the genera are firstprinciples; to others they indicate

Let us begin with the wellknown tenfold division of the Existents, and consider whether we are to

understand ten genera ranged under the common name of Being, or ten categories. That the term Being has

But a graver problem confronts us at the outset: Are the ten found alike in the Intellectual and in the Sensible

realms? Or are all found in the Sensible and some only in the Intellectual? All in the Intellectual and some in

At this point it would be natural to investigate which of the ten belong to both spheres, and whether the

Existents of the Intellectual are to be ranged under one and the same genus with the Existents in the Sensible,

or whether the term "Existence" [or Substance] is equivocal as applied to both realms. If the equivocation

exists, the number of genera will be increased: if there is no equivocation, it is strange to find the one same

"Existence" applying to the primary and to the derivative Existents when there is no common genus

These thinkers are however not considering the Intellectual realm in their division, which was not intended to

Take Substance, for Substance must certainly be our startingpoint: what are the grounds for regarding

It has been remarked that Substance cannot be a single entity common to both the Intellectual and the

Sensible worlds. We may add that such community would entail the existence of something prior to

Intellectual and Sensible Substances alike, something distinct from both as predicated of both; and this prior

would be neither body nor unembodied; for it were one or the other, body would be unembodied, or the

This conclusion must not however prevent our seeking in the actual substance of the Sensible world an

element held in common by Matter, by Form and by their Composite, all of which are designated as

substances, though it is not maintained that they are Substance in an equal degree; Form is usually held to be

Substance in a higher degree than Matter, and rightly so, in spite of those who would have Matter to be the

There is further the distinction drawn between what are known as First and Second Substances. But what is

their common basis, seeing that the First are the source from which the Second derive their right to be called

But, in sum, it is impossible to define Substance: determine its property, and still you have not attained to its

essence. Even the definition, "That which, numerically one and the same, is receptive of contraries," will

3. But perhaps we should rather speak of some single category, embracing Intellectual Substance, Matter,

Form, and the Composite of Matter and Form. One might refer to the family of the Heraclids as a unity in the

sense, not of a common element in all its members, but of a common origin: similarly, Intellectual Substance

would be Substance in the first degree, the others being substances by derivation and in a lower degree.

But what is the objection to including everything in a single category, all else of which existence is predicated

being derived from that one thing, Existence or Substance? Because, granted that things be no more than

modifications of Substance, there is a distinct grading of substances themselves. Moreover, the single

category does not put us in a position to build on Substance, or to grasp it in its very truth as the plausible

Supposing we grant that all things known as substances are homogeneous as possessing something denied to

the other genera, what precisely is this something, this individuality, this subject which is never a predicate,

this thing not present in any thing as in a subject, this thing which does not owe its essential character to any

other thing, as a quality takes character from a body and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to

The Second Substance is, it is true, a predicate. But predication in this case signifies a different relation from

that just considered; it reveals the genus inherent in the subject and the subject's essential character, whereas

The properties adduced may indeed be allowed to distinguish Substance from the other Existents. They afford

a means of grouping substances together and calling them by a common name. They do not however

establish the unity of a genus, and they do not bring to light the concept and the nature of Substance.

These considerations are sufficient for our purpose: let us now proceed to investigate the nature of Quantity.

4. We are told that number is Quantity in the primary sense, number together with all continuous magnitude,

space and time: these are the standards to which all else that is considered as Quantity is referred, including

motion which is Quantity because its time is quantitative though perhaps, conversely, the time takes its

If it is maintained that the continuous is a Quantity by the fact of its continuity, then the discrete will not be a

Quantity. If, on the contrary, the continuous possesses Quantity as an accident, what is there common to both

Suppose we concede that numbers are quantities: we are merely allowing them the name of quantity; the

On the other hand, line and surface and body are not called quantities; they are called magnitudes: they

become known as quantities only when they are rated by numbertwo yards, three yards. Even the natural

body becomes a quantity when measured, as does the space which it occupies; but this is quantity accidental,

not quantity essential; what we seek to grasp is not accidental quantity but Quantity independent and

essential, QuantityAbsolute. Three oxen is not a quantity; it is their number, the three, that is Quantity; for

in three oxen we are dealing with two categories. So too with a line of a stated length, a surface of a given

area; the area will be a quantity but not the surface, which only comes under that category when it constitutes

Are we then to consider numbers, and numbers only, as constituting the category of Quantity? If we mean

numbers in themselves, they are substances, for the very good reason that they exist independently. If we

mean numbers displayed in the objects participant in number, the numbers which give the count of the

objects ten horses or ten oxen, and not ten units then we have a paradoxical result: first, the numbers in

themselves, it would appear, are substances but the numbers in objects are not; and secondly, the numbers

inhere in the objects as measures [of extension or weight], yet as standing outside the objects they have no

measuring power, as do rulers and scales. If however their existence is independent, and they do not inhere in

the objects, but are simply called in for the purpose of measurement, the objects will be quantities only to the

So with the numbers themselves: how can they constitute the category of Quantity? They are measures; but

how do measures come to be quantities or Quantity? Doubtless in that, existing as they do among the

Existents and not being adapted to any of the other categories, they find their place under the influence of

verbal suggestion and so are referred to the socalled category of Quantity. We see the unit mark off one

measurement and then proceed to another; and number thus reveals the amount of a thing, and the mind

It follows that in measuring it is not measuring essence; it pronounces its "one" or "two," whatever the

character of the objects, even summing contraries. It does not take count of condition hot, handsome; it

Number then, whether regarded in itself or in the participant objects, belongs to the category of Quantity, but

the participant objects do not. "Three yards long" does not fall under the category of Quantity, but only the

Why then are magnitudes classed as quantities? Not because they are so in the strict sense, but because they

approximate to Quantity, and because objects in which magnitudes inhere are themselves designated as

quantities. We call a thing great or small from its participation in a high number or a low. True, greatness and

smallness are not claimed to be quantities, but relations: but it is by their apparent possession of quantity that

they are thought of as relations. All this, however, needs more careful examination.

In sum, we hold that there is no single genus of Quantity. Only number is Quantity, the rest [magnitudes,

space, time, motion] quantities only in a secondary degree. We have therefore not strictly one genus, but one

We have however to enquire in what sense the abstract numbers are substances. Can it be that they are also in

a manner quantitative? Into whatever category they fall, the other numbers [those inherent in objects] can

have nothing in common with them but the name. 5. Speech, time, motion in what sense are these

Let us begin with speech. It is subject to measurement, but only in so far as it is sound; it is not a quantity in

its essential nature, which nature is that it be significant, as noun and verb are significant. The air is its

To be more precise, we may define speech as an impact [made upon the outer air by the breath], though it is

not so much the impact as the impression which the impact produces and which, as it were, imposes Form

[upon the air]. Speech, thus, is rather an action than a quantity an action with a significance. Though

perhaps it would be truer to say that while this motion, this impact, is an action, the countermotion is an

experience [or Passion]; or each may be from different points of view either an action or an experience: or we

may think of speech as action upon a substrate [air] and experience within that substrate.

If however voice is not characteristically impact, but is simply air, two categories will be involved: voice is

significant, and the one category will not be sufficient to account for this significance without associating

With regard to time, if it is to be thought of as a measure, we must determine what it is that applies this

measure. It must clearly be either Soul or the Present Moment. If on the contrary we take time to be

something measured and regard it as being of such and such extension a year, for example then we may

consider it as a quantity: essentially however time is of a different nature; the very fact that we can attribute

this or that length to it shows us that it is not length: in other words, time is not Quantity. Quantity in the

strict sense is the Quantity not inbound with things; if things became quantities by mere participation in

Equality and inequality must be regarded as properties of QuantityAbsolute, not of the participants, or of

them not essentially but only accidentally: such participants as "three yards' length," which becomes a

quantity, not as belonging to a single genus of Quantity, but by being subsumed under the one head, the one

6. In considering Relation we must enquire whether it possesses the community of a genus, or whether it may

Above all, has Relation for example, that of right and left, double and half any actuality? Has it, perhaps,

actuality in some cases only, as for instance in what is termed "posterior" but not in what is termed "prior"?

What meaning, then, are we to attach to double and half and all other cases of less and more; to habit and

disposition, reclining, sitting, standing; to father, son, master, slave; to like, unlike, equal, unequal; to active

and passive, measure and measured; or again to knowledge and sensation, as related respectively to the

Knowledge, indeed, may be supposed to entail in relation to the known object some actual entity

corresponding to that object's Ideal Form, and similarly with sensation as related to the senseobject. The

active will perform some constant function in relation to the passive, as will the measure in relation to the

But what will emerge from the relation of like to like? Nothing will emerge. Likeness is the inherence of

qualitative identity; its entire content is the quality present in the two objects.

From equality, similarly, nothing emerges. The relation merely presupposes the existence of a quantitative

identity; is nothing but our judgement comparing objects essentially independent and concluding, "This and

that have the same magnitude, the same quality; this has produced that; this is superior to that."

Again, what meaning can sitting and standing have apart from sitter and stander? The term "habit" either

implies a having, in which case it signifies possession, or else it arises from something had, and so denotes

What then in these instances can be the meaning of correlatives apart from our conception of their

juxtaposition? "Greater" may refer to very different magnitudes; "different" to all sorts of objects: the

Right and left, before and behind, would seem to belong less to the category of Relation than to that of

Situation. Right means "situated at one point," left means "situated at another." But the right and left are in

7. Now if we do not mean anything by Relation but are victims of words, none of the relations mentioned can

Suppose however that we do possess ourselves of objective truth when in comparing two points of time we

pronounce one prior, or posterior, to the other, that priority does entail something distinct from the objects to

which it refers; admit an objective truth behind the relation of left and right: does this apply also to

magnitudes, and is the relation exhibiting excess and deficiency also something distinct from the quantities

Now one thing is double of another quite apart from our speech or thought; one thing possesses and another is

possessed before we notice the fact; equals do not await our comparison but and this applies to Quality as

well as Quantity rest upon an identity existing between the objects compared: in all the conditions in which

we assert Relation the mutual relation exists over and above the objects; we perceive it as already existent;

our knowledge is directed upon a thing, there to be known a clear testimony to the reality of Relation.

In these circumstances we can no longer put the question of its existence. We have simply to distinguish:

sometimes the relation subsists while the objects remain unaltered and even apart; sometimes it depends upon

their combination; sometimes, while they remain unchanged, the relation utterly ceases, or, as happens with

right and near, becomes different. These are the facts which chiefly account for the notion that Relation has

Our task, thus, is to give full value to this elusive character of Relation, and, then to enquire what there is that

is constant in all these particular cases and whether this constant is generic or accidental; and having found

It need hardly be said that we are not to affirm Relation where one thing is simply an attribute of another, as a

habit is an attribute of a soul or of a body; it is not Relation when a soul belongs to this individual or dwells

in that body. Relation enters only when the actuality of the relationships is derived from no other source than

Relation itself; the actuality must be, not that which is characteristic of the substances in question, but that

which is specifically called relative. Thus double with its correlative, half gives actuality neither to two yards'

length or the number two, nor to one yard's length or the number one; what happens is that, when these

quantities are viewed in their relation, they are found to be not merely two and one respectively, but to

produce the assertion and to exhibit the fact of standing one to the other in the condition of double and half.

Out of the objects in a certain conjunction this condition of being double and half has issued as something

distinct from either; double and half have emerged as correlatives, and their being is precisely this of mutual

dependence; the double exists by its superiority over the half, and the half by its inferiority; there is no

It is another question whether they endure simultaneously. Take the case of father and son, and such

relationships; the father dies, but the other is still his son, and so with brothers. Moreover, we see likeness

8. But we are digressing: we must resume our enquiry into the cause of dissimilarity among relations. Yet we

must first be informed what reality, common to all cases, is possessed by this Existence derived from mutual

Now the common principle in question cannot be a body. The only alternative is that, if it does exist, it be

something bodiless, either in the objects thus brought together or outside of them.

Further, if Relation always takes the same form, the term is univocal [and specific differentiation is

impossible]; if not, that is if it differs from case to case, the term is equivocal, and the same reality will not

How then shall we distinguish relations? We may observe that some things have an inactive or dormant

relation, with which their actuality is entirely simultaneous; others, combining power and function with their

relation, have the relation in some mode always even though the mode be merely that of potentiality, but

attain to actual being only in contact with their correlatives. Or perhaps all distinctions may be reduced to that

between producer and product, where the product merely gives a name to the producer of its actuality: an

example of this is the relation of father to son, though here both producer and product have a sort of actuality,

Are we thus, then, to divide Relation, and thereby reject the notion of an identical common element in the

different kinds of Relation, making it a universal rule that the relation takes a different character in either

correlative? We must in this case recognise that in our distinction between productive and nonproductive

relations we are overlooking the equivocation involved in making the terms cover both action and passion, as

though these two were one, and ignoring the fact that production takes a different form in the two

correlatives. Take the case of equality, producing equals: nothing is equal without equality, nothing identical

without identity. Greatness and smallness both entail a presence the presence of greatness and smallness

respectively. When we come to greater and smaller, the participants in these relations are greater and smaller

9. It follows that in the cases specified above agent, knowledge and the rest the relation must be considered

as in actual operation, and the Act and the ReasonPrinciple in the Act must be assumed to be real: in all

other cases there will be simply participation in an IdealForm, in a ReasonPrinciple.

If Reality implied embodiment, we should indeed be forced to deny Reality to these conditions called

relative; if however we accord the preeminent place to the unembodied and to the ReasonPrinciples, and at

the same time maintain that relations are ReasonPrinciples and participate in IdealForms, we are bound to

seek their causes in that higher sphere. Doubleness, it is clear, is the cause of a thing being double, and from

Some correlatives owe their designations to the same Form, others to opposite Forms; it is thus that two

objects are simultaneously double and half of each other, and one great and the other small. It may happen

that both correlatives exist in one objectlikeness and unlikeness, and, in general, identity and difference, so

The question arises here whether sharing in the same Form could make one man depraved and another more

depraved. In the case of total depravity, clearly the two are made equal by the absence of a Form. Where

there is a difference of degree, the one has participated in a Form which has failed to predominate, the other

in a Form which has failed still more: or, if we choose the negative aspect, we may think of them both as

Sensation may be regarded as a Form of double origin [determined both by the senseorgan and by the

Habit is an Act directed upon something had [some experience produced by habit] and binding it as it were

with the subject having [experiencing], as the Act of production binds producer and product.

Measurement is an Act of the measurer upon the measured object: it too is therefore a kind of

Now if the condition of being related is regarded as a Form having a generic unity, Relation must be allowed

to be a single genus owing its reality to a ReasonPrinciple involved in all instances. If however the

ReasonPrinciples [governing the correlatives] stand opposed and have the differences to which we have

referred, there may perhaps not be a single genus, but this will not prevent all relatives being expressed in

But even if the cases of which we have spoken can be subsumed under a single head, it is nevertheless

impossible to include in a single genus all that goes with them in the one common category: for the category

includes negations and derivatives not only, for example, double but also its negative, the resultant

doubleness and the act of doubling. But we cannot include in one genus both the thing and its negative

double and notdouble, relative and notrelative any more than in dealing with the genus animal we can

insert in it the nonanimal. Moreover, doubleness and doubling have only the relation to double that whiteness

10. As regards Quality, the source of what we call a "quale," we must in the first place consider what nature it

possesses in accordance with which it produces the "qualia," and whether, remaining one and the same in

virtue of that common ground, it has also differences whereby it produces the variety of species. If there is no

common ground and the term Quality involves many connotations, there cannot be a single genus of Quality.

What then will be the common ground in habit, disposition, passive quality, figure, shape? In light, thick and

If we hold this common ground to be a power adapting itself to the forms of habits, dispositions and physical

capacities, a power which gives the possessor whatever capacities he has, we have no plausible explanation

of incapacities. Besides, how are figure and the shape of a given thing to be regarded as a power?

Moreover, at this, Being will have no power qua Being but only when Quality has been added to it; and the

activities of those substances which are activities in the highest degree, will be traceable to Quality, although

they are autonomous and owe their essential character to powers wholly their own!

Perhaps, however, qualities are conditioned by powers which are posterior to the substances as such [and so

do not interfere with their essential activities]. Boxing, for example, is not a power of man qua man;

reasoning is: therefore reasoning, on this hypothesis, is not quality but a natural possession of the mature

human being; it therefore is called a quality only by analogy. Thus, Quality is a power which adds the

The differences distinguishing substances from each other are called qualities only by analogy; they are, more

strictly, Acts and ReasonPrinciples, or parts of ReasonPrinciples, and though they may appear merely to

Qualities in the true sense those, that is, which determine qualia being in accordance with our definition

powers, will in virtue of this common ground be a kind of ReasonPrinciple; they will also be in a sense

But how can they all be powers? Beauty or health of soul or body, very well: but surely not ugliness, disease,

It may be urged that these are qualities in so far as qualia are also named after them: but may not the qualia be

so called by analogy, and not in the strict sense of the single principle? Not only may the term be understood

in the four ways [of Aristotle], but each of the four may have at least a twofold significance.

In the first place, Quality is not merely a question of action and passion, involving a simple distinction

between the potentially active [quality] and the passive: health, disposition and habit, disease, strength and

weakness are also classed as qualities. It follows that the common ground is not power, but something we

Again, not all qualities can be regarded as ReasonPrinciples: chronic disease cannot be a ReasonPrinciple.

Perhaps, however, we must speak in such cases of privations, restricting the term "Quantities" to IdealForms

and powers. Thus we shall have, not a single genus, but reference only to the unity of a category. Knowledge

will be regarded as a Form and a power, ignorance as a privation and powerlessness.

On the other hand, powerlessness and disease are a kind of Form; disease and vice have many powers though

But how can a mere failure be a power? Doubtless the truth is that every quality performs its own function

independently of a standard; for in no case could it produce an effect outside of its power.

Even beauty would seem to have a power of its own. Does this apply to triangularity?

Perhaps, after all, it is not a power we must consider, but a disposition. Thus, qualities will be determined by

the forms and characteristics of the object qualified: their common element, then, will be Form and ideal

But then, how do we account for the powers? We may doubtless remark that even the natural boxer is so by

being constituted in a particular way; similarly, with the man unable to box: to generalize, the quality is a

characteristic nonessential. Whatever is seen to apply alike to Being and to nonBeing, as do heat and

whiteness and colours generally, is either different from Being is, for example, an Act of Being or else is

some secondary of Being, derived from it, contained in it, its image and likeness.

But if Quality is determined by formation and characteristic and ReasonPrinciple, how explain the various

cases of powerlessness and deformity? Doubtless we must think of Principles imperfectly present, as in the

case of deformity. And disease how does that imply a ReasonPrinciple? Here, no doubt, we must think of a

But it is not necessary that all qualities involve a ReasonPrinciple; it suffices that over and above the various

kinds of disposition there exist a common element distinct from Substance, and it is what comes after the

But triangularity is a quality of that in which it is present; it is however no longer triangularity as such, but

the triangularity present in that definite object and modified in proportion to its success in shaping that object.

11. But if these considerations are sound, why has Quality more than one species? What is the ground for

distinguishing between habit and disposition, seeing that no differentia of Quality is involved in permanence

and nonpermanence? A disposition of any kind is sufficient to constitute a quality; permanence is a mere

external addition. It might however be urged that dispositions are but incomplete "forms" if the term may

pass habits being complete ones. But incomplete, they are not qualities; if already qualities, the permanence

How do physical powers form a distinct species? If they are classed as qualities in virtue of being powers,

power, we have seen, is not a necessary concomitant of qualities. If, however, we hold that the natural boxer

owes his quality to a particular disposition, power is something added and does not contribute to the quality,

Another point: why is natural ability to be distinguished from that acquired by learning? Surely, if both are

qualities, they cannot be differentiae of Quality: gained by practice or given in nature, it is the same ability;

the differentia will be external to Quality; it cannot be deduced from the Ideal Form of boxing. Whether some

qualities as distinguished from others are derived from experience is immaterial; the source of the quality

makes no difference none, I mean, pointing to variations and differences of Quality.

A further question would seem to be involved: If certain qualities are derived from experience but here is a

discrepancy in the manner and source of the experience, how are they to be included in the same species?

And again, if some create the experience, others are created by it, the term Quality as applied to both classes

And what part is played by the individual form? If it constitutes the individual's specific character, it is not a

quality; if, however, it is what makes an object beautiful or ugly after the specific form has been determined,

Rough and smooth, tenuous and dense may rightly be classed as qualities. It is true that they are not

determined by distances and approximations, or in general by even or uneven dispositions, of parts; though,

Knowledge of the meaning of "light" and "heavy" will reveal their place in the classification. An ambiguity

will however be latent in the term "light," unless it be determined by comparative weight: it would then

implicate leanness and fineness, and involve another species distinct from the four [of Aristotle].

12. If then we do not propose to divide Quality in this [fourfold] manner, what basis of division have we?

We must examine whether qualities may not prove to be divisible on the principle that some belong to the

body and others to the soul. Those of the body would be subdivided according to the senses, some being

attributed to sight, others to hearing and taste, others to smell and touch. Those of the soul would presumably

be allotted to appetite, emotion, reason; though, again, they may be distinguished by the differences of the

activities they condition, in so far as activities are engendered by these qualities; or according as they are

beneficial or injurious, the benefits and injuries being duly classified. This last is applicable also to the

classification of bodily qualities, which also produce differences of benefit and injury: these differences must

be regarded as distinctively qualitative; for either the benefit and injury are held to be derived from Quality

A point for consideration is how the quale, as conditioned by Quality, can belong to the same category:

Further, if "boxer" is in the category of Quality, why not "agent" as well? And with agent goes "active." Thus

"active" need not go into the category of Relation; nor again need "passive," if "patient" is a quale. Moreover,

agent" is perhaps better assigned to the category of Quality for the reason that the term implies power, and

power is Quality. But if power as such were determined by Substance [and not by Quality], the agent, though

ceasing to be a quale, would not necessarily become a relative. Besides, "active" is not like "greater": the

greater, to be the greater, demands a less, whereas "active" stands complete by the mere possession of its

It may however be urged that while the possession of that character makes it a quale, it is a relative in so far

as it directs upon an external object the power indicated by its name. Why, then, is not "boxer" a relative, and

"boxing" as well? Boxing is entirely related to an external object; its whole theory presupposes this external.

And in the case of the other arts or most of them investigation would probably warrant the assertion that in

so far as they affect the soul they are qualities, while in so far as they look outward they are active and as

being directed to an external object are relatives. They are relatives in the other sense also that they are

Can it then be held that there is any distinct reality implied in activity, seeing that the active is something

distinct only according as it is a quale? It may perhaps be held that the tendency towards action of living

beings, and especially of those having freewill, implies a reality of activity [as well as a reality of Quality].

But what is the function of the active in connection with those nonliving powers which we have classed as

qualities? Doubtless to recruit any object it encounters, making the object a participant in its content.

But if one same object both acts and is acted upon, how do we then explain the active? Observe also that the

greater in itself perhaps a fixed three yards' length will present itself as both greater and less according to

It will be objected that greater and less are due to participation in greatness and smallness; and it might be

inferred that a thing is active or passive by participation in activity or passivity.

This is the place for enquiring also whether the qualities of the Sensible and Intellectual realms can be

included under one head a question intended only for those who ascribe qualities to the higher realm as well

as the lower. And even if Ideal Forms of qualities are not posited, yet once the term "habit" is used in

reference to Intellect, the question arises whether there is anything common to that habit and the habit we

Wisdom too is generally admitted to exist There. Obviously, if it shares only its name with our wisdom, it is

not to be reckoned among things of this sphere; if, however, the import is in both cases the same, then

Quality is common to both realms unless, of course, it be maintained that everything There, including even

This question, however, applies to all the categories: are the two spheres irreconcilable, or can they be

If "yesterday," "tomorrow," "last year" and similar terms denote parts of time, why should they not be

included in the same genus as time? It would seem only reasonable to range under time the past, present and

future, which are its species. But time is referred to Quantity; what then is the need for a separate category of

If we are told that past and future including under past such definite dates as yesterday and last year which

must clearly be subordinate to past time and even the present "now" are not merely time but time when, we

reply, in the first place, that the notion of time when involves time; that, further, if "yesterday" is

timegoneby, it will be a composite, since time and goneby are distinct notions: we have two categories

But suppose that Date is defined not as time but as that which is in time; if by that which is in time is meant

the subject Socrates in the proposition "Socrates existed last year" that subject is external to the notion of

Consider, however, the proposition "Socrates or some action exists at this time"; what can be the meaning

here other than "in a part of time"? But if, admitted that Date is "a part of time," it be felt that the part requires

definition and involves something more than mere time, that we must say the part of time gone by, several

notions are massed in the proposition: we have the part which qua part is a relative; and we have "goneby"

which, if it is to have any import at all, must mean the past: but this "past," we have shown, is a species of

It may be urged that "the past" is in its nature indefinite, while "yesterday" and "last year" are definite. We

reply, first, that we demand some place in our classification for the past: secondly, that "yesterday," as

definite past, is necessarily definite time. But definite time implies a certain quantity of time: therefore, if

time is quantitative, each of the terms in question must signify a definite quantity.

Again, if by "yesterday" we are expected to understand that this or that event has taken Place at a definite

time gone by, we have more notions than ever. Besides, if we must introduce fresh categories because one

thing acts in another as in this case something acts in time we have more again from its acting upon

another in another. This point will be made plain by what follows in our discussion of Place.

14. The Academy and the Lyceum are places, and parts of Place, just as "above," "below," "here" are species

If then "above," "below," "the middle" are places Delphi, for example, is the middle [of the earth] and

"nearthemiddle" is also a place Athens, and of course the Lyceum and the other places usually cited, are

near the middle what need have we to go further and seek beyond Place, admitting as we do that we refer in

If, however, we have in mind the presence of one thing in another, we are not speaking of a single entity, we

Another consideration: when we say that a man is here, we present a relation of the man to that in which he

is, a relation of the container to the contained. Why then do we not class as a relative whatever may be

Besides, how does "here" differ from "at Athens"? The demonstrative "here" admittedly signifies place; so,

Again, if "at Athens" means "is at Athens," then the "is" as well as the place belongs to the predicate; but this

Furthermore, if "in time," "in place" are to be ranged under a category other than that applying to time and

place, why not a separate category for "in a vessel"? Why not distinct categories for "in Matter," "in a

subject," "a part in a whole," "a whole in its parts," "a genus in its species," "a species in a genus"? We are

The quantum has been regarded as a single genus on the ground that Quantity and Number are attributes of

Substance and posterior to it; the quale has been regarded as another genus because Quality is an attribute of

Substance: on the same principle it is maintained that since activity is an attribute of Substance, Action

Does then the action constitute the genus, or the activity from which the action springs, in the same way as

Quality is the genus from which the quale is derived? Perhaps activity, action and agent should all be

embraced under a single head? But, on the one hand, the action unlike activity tends to comport the agent;

and on the other, it signifies being in some activity and therefore BeinginAct [actual as distinct from

potential Being]. Consequently the category will be one of Act rather than of Action.

Act moreover incontestably manifests itself in Substance, as was found to be the case with Quality: it is

connected with Substance as being a form of motion. But Motion is a distinct genus: for, seeing that Quality

is a distinct attribute of Substance, and Quality a distinct attribute, and Relative takes its being from the

relation of one substance to another, there can be no reason why Motion, also an attribute of Substance,

16. If it be urged that Motion is but imperfect Act, there would be no objection to giving priority to Act and

subordinating to it Motion with its imperfection as a species: Act would thus be predicated of Motion, but

Motion is thought of as imperfect, not because it is not an Act, but because, entirely an Act, it yet entails

repetition [lacks finality]. It repeats, not in order that it may achieve actuality it is already actual but that it

may attain a goal distinct from itself and posterior: it is not the motion itself that is then consummated but the

result at which it aims. Walking is walking from the outset; when one should traverse a racecourse but has

not yet done so, the deficiency lies not in the walking not in the motion but in the amount of walking

accomplished; no matter what the amount, it is walking and motion already: a moving man has motion and a

cutter cuts before there is any question of Quantity. And just as we can speak of Act without implying time,

so we can of Motion, except in the sense of motion over a defined area; Act is timeless, and so is Motion pure

Are we told that Motion is necessarily in time, inasmuch as it involves continuity? But, at this, sight, never

ceasing to see, will also be continuous and in time. Our critic, it is true, may find support in that principle of

proportion which states that you may make a division of no matter what motion, and find that neither the

motion nor its duration has any beginning but that the division may be continued indefinitely in the direction

of the motion's origin: this would mean that a motion just begun has been in progress from an infinity of time,

Such then is the result of separating Act from Motion: Act, we aver, is timeless; yet we are forced to maintain

not only that time is necessary to quantitative motion, but, unreservedly, that Motion is quantitative in its very

nature; though indeed, if it were a case of motion occupying a day or some other quantity of time, the

exponents of this view would be the first to admit that Quantity is present to Motion only by way of accident.

In sum, just as Act is timeless, so there is no reason why Motion also should not primarily be timeless, time

attaching to it only in so far as it happens to have such and such an extension.

Timeless change is sanctioned in the expression, "as if change could not take place all at once"; if then

change is timeless, why not Motion also? Change, be it noted, is here distinguished from the result of

17. We may be told that neither Act nor Motion requires a genus for itself, but that both revert to Relation,

Act belonging to the potentially active, Motion to the potentially motive. Our reply is that Relation produces

relatives as such, and not the mere reference to an external standard; given the existence of a thing, whether

attributive or relative, it holds its essential character prior to any relationship: so then must Act and Motion,

and even such an attribute as habit; they are not prevented from being prior to any relationship they may

occupy, or from being conceivable in themselves. Otherwise, everything will be relative; for anything you

But, to return to activity proper and the action, is there any reason why these should be referred to Relation?

If however activity is referred to Relation and the action made a distinct genus, why is not Motion referred to

Relation and the movement made a distinct genus? Why not bisect the unity, Motion, and so make Action

and Passion two species of the one thing, ceasing to consider Action and Passion as two genera?

First: Are both Acts and motions to be included in the category of Action, with the distinction that Acts are

momentary while Motions, such as cutting, are in time? Or will both be regarded as motions or as involving

Secondly: Will all activities be related to passivity, or will some for example, walking and speaking be

Thirdly: Will all those related to passivity be classed as motions and the independent as Acts, or will the two

classes overlap? Walking, for instance, which is an independent, would, one supposes, be a motion; thinking,

which also does not essentially involve "passivity," an Act: otherwise we must hold that thinking and walking

are not even actions. But if they are not in the category of Action, where then in our classification must they

It may perhaps be urged that the act of thinking, together with the faculty of thought, should be regarded as

relative to the thought object; for is not the faculty of sensation treated as relative to the sensible object? If

then, we may ask, in the analogue the faculty of sensation is treated as relative to the sensible object, why not

the sensory act as well? The fact is that even sensation, though related to an external object, has something

besides that relation: it has, namely, its own status of being either an Act or a Passion. Now the Passion is

separable from the condition of being attached to some object and caused by some object: so, then, is the Act

a distinct entity. Walking is similarly attached and caused, and yet has besides the status of being a motion. It

follows that thought, in addition to its relationship, will have the status of being either a motion or an Act.

19. We have to ask ourselves whether there are not certain Acts which without the addition of a timeelement

will be thought of as imperfect and therefore classed with motions. Take for instance living and life. The life

of a definite person implies a certain adequate period, just as his happiness is no merely instantaneous thing.

Life and happiness are, in other words, of the nature ascribed to Motion: both therefore must be treated as

motions, and Motion must be regarded as a unity, a single genus; besides the quantity and quality belonging

We may further find desirable to distinguish bodily from psychic motions or spontaneous motions from those

induced by external forces, or the original from the derivative, the original motions being activities, whether

But surely the motions having external tendency are actually identical with those of external derivation: the

cutting issuing from the cutter and that effected in the object are one, though to cut is not the same as to be

Perhaps however the cutting issuing from the cutter and that which takes place in the cut object are in fact not

one, but "to cut" implies that from a particular Act and motion there results a different motion in the object

cut. Or perhaps the difference [between Action and Passion] lies not in the fact of being cut, but in the

distinct emotion supervening, pain for example: passivity has this connotation also.

But when there is no pain, what occurs? Nothing, surely, but the Act of the agent upon the patient object: this

is all that is meant in such cases by Action. Action, thus, becomes twofold: there is that which occurs in the

external, and that which does not. The duality of Action and Passion, suggested by the notion that Action

Even writing, though taking place upon an external object, does not call for passivity, since no effect is

produced, upon the tablet beyond the Act of the writer, nothing like pain; we may be told that the tablet has

Again, in the case of walking there is the earth trodden upon, but no one thinks of it as having experienced

Passion [or suffering]. Treading on a living body, we think of suffering, because we reflect not upon the

walking but upon the ensuing pain: otherwise we should think of suffering in the case of the tablet as well.

It is so in every case of Action: we cannot but think of it as knit into a unity with its opposite, Passion. Not

that this later "Passion" is the opposite of Action in the way in which being burned is the opposite of burning:

by Passion in this sense we mean the effect supervening upon the combined facts of the burning and the being

Suppose this Passion to be treated as of itself producing pain: have we not still the duality of agent and

patient, two results from the one Act? The Act may no longer include the will to cause pain; but it produces

something distinct from itself, a paincausing medium which enters into the object about to experience pain:

this medium, while retaining its individuality, produces something yet different, the feeling of pain.

What does this suggest? Surely that the very medium the act of hearing, for instance is, even before it

produces pain or without producing pain at all, a Passion of that into which it enters.

But hearing, with sensation in general, is in fact not a Passion. Yet to feel pain is to experience a Passion a

20. But though not opposed, it is still different from Action and cannot belong to the same genus as activity;

though if they are both Motion, it will so belong, on the principle that alteration must be regarded as

Does it follow that whenever alteration proceeds from Quality, it will be activity and Action, the quale

remaining impassive? It may be that if the quale remains impassive, the alteration will be in the category of

Action; whereas if, while its energy is directed outwards, it also suffers as in beating it will cease to belong

to that category: or perhaps there is nothing to prevent its being in both categories at one and the same

If then an alteration be conditioned by Passivity alone, as is the case with rubbing, on what ground is it

assigned to Action rather than to Passivity? Perhaps the Passivity arises from the fact that a counterrubbing

is involved. But are we, in view of this countermotion, to recognize the presence of two distinct motions?

How then can this one motion be both Action and Passion? We must suppose it to be Action in proceeding

from an object, and Passion in being directly upon another though it remains the same motion throughout.

Suppose however Passion to be a different motion from Action: how then does its modification of the patient

object change that patient's character without the agent being affected by the patient? For obviously an agent

cannot be passive to the operation it performs upon another. Can it be that the fact of motion existing

If the whiteness of the swan, produced by its ReasonPrinciple, is given at its birth, are we to affirm Passion

of the swan on its passing into being? If, on the contrary, the swan grows white after birth, and if there is a

cause of that growth and the corresponding result, are we to say that the growth is a Passion? Or must we

One thing confers beauty and another takes it: is that which takes beauty to be regarded as patient? If then the

source of beauty tin, suppose should deteriorate or actually disappear, while the recipient copper

Take the learner: how can he be regarded as passive, seeing that the Act of the agent passes into him [and

becomes his Act]? How can the Act, necessarily a simple entity, be both Act and Passion? No doubt the Act

is not in itself a Passion; nonetheless, the learner coming to possess it will be a patient by the fact of his

appropriation of an experience from outside: he will not, of course, be a patient in the sense of having himself

performed no Act; learning like seeing is not analogous to being struck, since it involves the acts of

21. How, then, are we to recognise Passivity, since clearly it is not to be found in the Act from outside which

the recipient in turn makes his own? Surely we must look for it in cases where the patient remains without

Imagine a case where an agent improves, though its Act tends towards deterioration. Or, say, a a man's

activity is guided by evil and is allowed to dominate another's without restraint. In these cases the Act is

What then is the real distinction between Action and Passion? Is it that Action starts from within and is

directed upon an outside object, while Passion is derived from without and fulfilled within? What, then, are

we to say of such cases as thought and opinion which originate within but are not directed outwards? Again,

the Passion "being heated" rises within the self, when that self is provoked by an opinion to reflection or to

anger, without the intervention of any external. Still it remains true that Action, whether selfcentred or with

How then do we explain desire and other forms of aspiration? Aspiration must be a motion having its origin

in the object aspired to, though some might disallow "origin" and be content with saying that the motion

aroused is subsequent to the object; in what respect, then, does aspiring differ from taking a blow or being

Perhaps, however, we should divide aspirations into two classes, those which follow intellect being described

as Actions, the merely impulsive being Passions. Passivity now will not turn on origin, without or within

within there can only be deficiency; but whenever a thing, without itself assisting in the process, undergoes

an alteration not directed to the creation of Being but changing the thing for the worse or not for the better,

If however "being heated" means "acquiring heat," and is sometimes found to contribute to the production of

Being and sometimes not, passivity will be identical with impassivity: besides, "being heated" must then have

The fact is, however, that "being heated," even when it contributes to Being, involves the presence of a

patient [distinct from the being produced]. Take the case of the bronze which has to be heated and so is a

patient; the being is a statue, which is not heated except accidentally [by the accident of being contained in

the bronze]. If then the bronze becomes more beautiful as a result of being heated and in the same proportion,

it certainly becomes so by passivity; for passivity must, clearly, take two forms: there is the passivity which

tends to alteration for better or for worse, and there is the passivity which has neither tendency.

22. Passivity, thus, implies the existence within of a motion functioning somehow or other in the direction of

alteration. Action too implies motion within, whether the motion be aimless or whether it be driven by the

impulse comported by the term "Action" to find its goal in an external object. There is Motion in both Action

and Passion, but the differentia distinguishing Action from Passion keeps Action impassive, while Passion is

recognised by the fact that a new state replaces the old, though nothing is added to the essential character of

the patient; whenever Being [essential Being] is produced, the patient remains distinct.

Thus, what is Action in one relation may be Passion in another. One same motion will be Action from the

point of view of A, Passion from that of B; for the two are so disposed that they might well be consigned to

the category of Relation at any rate in the cases where the Action entails a corresponding Passion: neither

correlative is found in isolation; each involves both Action and Passion, though A acts as mover and B is

Again, A gives motion to B, B receives it, so that we have a giving and a receiving in a word, a relation.

But a recipient must possess what it has received. A thing is admitted to possess its natural colour: why not

its motion also? Besides, independent motions such as walking and thought do, in fact, involve the possession

We are reminded to enquire whether thought in the form of providence constitutes Action; to be subject to

providence is apparently Passion, for such thought is directed to an external, the object of the providential

arrangement. But it may well be that neither is the exercise of providence an action, even though the thought

is concerned with an external, nor subjection to it a Passion. Thought itself need not be an action, for it does

not go outward towards its object but remains selfgathered. It is not always an activity; all Acts need not be

definable as activities, for they need not produce an effect; activity belongs to Act only accidentally.

Does it follow that if a man as he walks produces footprints, he cannot be considered to have performed an

action? Certainly as a result of his existing something distinct from himself has come into being. Yet perhaps

we should regard both action and Act as merely accidental, because he did not aim at this result: it would be

23. As for Possession, if the term is used comprehensively, why are not all its modes to be brought under one

category? Possession, thus, would include the quantum as possessing magnitude, the quale as possessing

colour; it would include fatherhood and the complementary relationships, since the father possesses the son

If, on the contrary, the category of Possession comprises only the things of the body, such as weapons and

shoes, we first ask why this should be so, and why their possession produces a single category, while burning,

cutting, burying or casting them out do not give another or others. If it is because these things are carried on

the person, then one's mantle lying on a couch will come under a different category from that of the mantle

covering the person. If the ownership of possession suffices, then clearly one must refer to the one category

of Possession all objects identified by being possessed, every case in which possession can be established; the

If however Possession is not to be predicated of Quality because Quality stands recognised as a category, nor

of Quantity because the category of Quantity has been received, nor of parts because they have been assigned

to the category of Substance, why should we predicate Possession of weapons, when they too are comprised

in the accepted category of Substance? Shoes and weapons are clearly substances.

How, further, is "He possesses weapons," signifying as it does that the action of arming has been performed

by a subject, to be regarded as an entirely simple notion, assignable to a single category?

Again, is Possession to be restricted to an animate possessor, or does it hold good even of a statue as

possessing the objects above mentioned? The animate and inanimate seem to possess in different ways, and

the term is perhaps equivocal. Similarly, "standing" has not the same connotation as applied to the animate

Besides, how can it be reasonable for what is found only in a limited number of cases to form a distinct

24. There remains Situation, which like Possession is confined to a few instances such as reclining and

Even so, the term is not used without qualification: we say "they are placed in such and such a manner," "he

is situated in such and such a position." The position is added from outside the genus.

In short, Situation signifies "being in a place"; there are two things involved, the position and the place: why

Moreover, if sitting signifies an Act, it must be classed among Acts; if a Passion, it goes under the category to

Reclining is surely nothing but "lying up," and tallies with "lying down" and "lying midway." But if the

reclining belongs thus to the category of Relation, why not the recliner also? For as "on the right" belongs to

the Relations, so does "the thing on the right"; and similarly with "the thing on the left."

25. There are those who lay down four categories and make a fourfold division into Substrates, Qualities,

States, and Relative States, and find in these a common Something, and so include everything in one genus.

Against this theory there is much to be urged, but particularly against this posing of a common Something

and a single allembracing genus. This Something, it may be submitted, is unintelligible to themselves, is

indefinable, and does not account either for bodies or for the bodiless. Moreover, no room is left for a

differentia by which this Something may be distinguished. Besides, this common Something is either existent

or nonexistent: if existent, it must be one or other of its [four] species; if nonexistent, the existent is

classed under the nonexistent. But the objections are countless; we must leave them for the present and

To the first genus are assigned Substrates, including Matter, to which is given a priority over the others; so

that what is ranked as the first principle comes under the same head with things which must be posterior to it

First, then: the prior is made homogeneous with the subsequent. Now this is impossible: in this relation the

subsequent owes its existence to the prior, whereas among things belonging to one same genus each must

have, essentially, the equality implied by the genus; for the very meaning of genus is to be predicated of the

species in respect of their essential character. And that Matter is the basic source of all the rest of things, this

Secondly: since they treat the Substrate as one thing, they do not enumerate the Existents; they look instead

for principles of the Existents. There is however a difference between speaking of the actual Existents and of

If Matter is taken to be the only Existent, and all other things as modifications of Matter, it is not legitimate to

set up a single genus to embrace both the Existent and the other things; consistency requires that Being

[Substance] be distinguished from its modifications and that these modifications be duly classified.

Even the distinction which this theory makes between Substrates and the rest of things is questionable. The

Substrate is [necessarily] one thing and admits of no differentia except perhaps in so far as it is split up like

one mass into its various parts; and yet not even so, since the notion of Being implies continuity: it would be

26. But the error in this theory is fundamental. To set Matter the potential above everything, instead of

recognising the primacy of actuality, is in the highest degree perverse. If the potential holds the primacy

among the Existents, its actualization becomes impossible; it certainly cannot bring itself into actuality: either

the actual exists previously, and so the potential is not the firstprinciple, or, if the two are to be regarded as

existing simultaneously, the firstprinciples must be attributed to hazard. Besides, if they are simultaneous,

why is not actuality given the primacy? Why is the potential more truly real than the actual?

Supposing however that the actual does come later than the potential, how must the theory proceed?

Obviously Matter does not produce Form: the unqualified does not produce Quality, nor does actuality take

its origin in the potential; for that would mean that the actual was inherent in the potential, which at once

Furthermore, God becomes a secondary to Matter, inasmuch as even he is regarded as a body composed of

Matter and Form though how he acquires the Form is not revealed. If however he be admitted to exist apart

from Matter in virtue of his character as a principle and a rational law [logos], God will be bodiless, the

Creative Power bodiless. If we are told that he is without Matter but is composite in essence by the fact of

Again, how can Matter be a firstprinciple, seeing that it is body? Body must necessarily be a plurality, since

all bodies are composite of Matter and Quality. If however body in this case is to be understood in some

If the possession of three dimensions is given as the characteristic of body, then we are dealing simply with

mathematical body. If resistance is added, we are no longer considering a unity: besides, resistance is a

And whence is this resistance supposed to come? Whence the three dimensions? What is the source of their

existence? Matter is not comprised in the concept of the threedimensional, nor the threedimensional in the

concept of Matter; if Matter partakes thus of extension, it can no longer be a simplex.

Again, whence does Matter derive its unifying power? It is assuredly not the Absolute Unity, but has only

We inevitably conclude that Mass or Extension cannot be ranked as the first of things; NonExtension and

Unity must be prior. We must begin with the One and conclude with the Many, proceed to magnitude from

that which is free from magnitude: a One is necessary to the existence of a Many, NonMagnitude to that of

Magnitude. Magnitude is a unity not by being UnityAbsolute, but by participation and in an accidental

mode: there must be a primary and absolute preceding the accidental, or the accidental relation is left

The manner of this relation demands investigation. Had this been undertaken, the thinkers of this school

would probably have lighted upon that Unity which is not accidental but essential and underived.

27. On other grounds also, it is indefensible not to have reserved the high place for the true firstprinciple of

things but to have set up in its stead the formless, passive and lifeless, the irrational, dark and indeterminate,

and to have made this the source of Being. In this theory God is introduced merely for the sake of

appearance: deriving existence from Matter he is a composite, a derivative, or, worse, a mere state of Matter.

Another consideration is that, if Matter is a substrate, there must be something outside it, which, acting on it

and distinct from it, makes it the substrate of what is poured into it. But if God is lodged in Matter and by

being involved in Matter is himself no more than a substrate, he will no longer make Matter a substrate nor be

himself a substrate in conjunction with Matter. For of what will they be substrates, when that which could

make them substrates is eliminated? This socalled substrate turns out to have swallowed up all that is; but a

substrate must be relative, and relative not to its content but to something which acts upon it as upon a datum.

Again, the substrate comports a relation to that which is not substrate; hence, to something external to it:

there must, then, be something apart from the substrate. If nothing distinct and external is considered

necessary, but the substrate itself can become everything and adopt every character, like the versatile dancer

in the pantomime, it ceases to be a substrate: it is, essentially, everything. The mime is not a substrate of the

characters he puts on; these are in fact the realisation of his own personality: similarly, if the Matter with

which this theory presents us comports in its own being all the realities, it is no longer the substrate of all: on

the contrary, the other things can have no reality whatever, if they are no more than states of Matter in the

Then, those other things not existing, Matter will not be a substrate, nor will it have a place among the

Existents; it will be Matter bare, and for that reason not even Matter, since Matter is a relative. The relative is

relative to something else: it must, further, be homogeneous with that something else: double is relative to

How then can an Existent be relative to a Nonexistent, except accidentally? But the TrueExistent, or

Matter, is related (to what emerges from it) as Existent to NonExistent. For if potentiality is that which

holds the promise of existence and that promise does not constitute Reality, the potentiality cannot be a

Reality. In sum, these very teachers who deprecate the production of Realities from Nonrealities, themselves

produce Nonreality from Reality; for to them the universe as such is not a Reality.

But is it not a paradox that, while Matter, the Substrate, is to them an existence, bodies should not have more

claim to existence, the universe yet more, and not merely a claim grounded on the reality of one of its parts?

It is no less paradoxical that the living form should owe existence not to its soul but to its Matter only, the

soul being but an affection of Matter and posterior to it. From what source then did Matter receive

ensoulment? Whence, in short, is soul's entity derived? How does it occur that Matter sometimes turns into

bodies, while another part of it turns into Soul? Even supposing that Form might come to it from elsewhere,

that accession of Quality to Matter would account not for Soul, but simply for organized body soulless. If, on

the contrary, there is something which both moulds Matter and produces Soul, then prior to the produced

28. Many as are the objections to this theory, we pass on for fear of the ridicule we might incur by arguing

against a position itself so manifestly ridiculous. We may be content with pointing out that it assigns the

primacy to the Nonexistent and treats it as the very summit of Existence: in short, it places the last thing

first. The reason for this procedure lies in the acceptance of senseperception as a trustworthy guide to

This philosophy began by identifying the Real with body; then, viewing with apprehension the

transmutations of bodies, decided that Reality was that which is permanent beneath the superficial changes

which is much as if one regarded space as having more title to Reality than the bodies within it, on the

principle that space does not perish with them. They found a permanent in space, but it was a fault to take

mere permanence as in itself a sufficient definition of the Real; the right method would have been to consider

what properties must characterize Reality, by the presence of which properties it has also that of unfailing

permanence. Thus if a shadow had permanence, accompanying an object through every change, that would

not make it more real than the object itself. The sensible universe, as including the Substrate and a multitude

of attributes, will thus have more claim to be Reality entire than has any one of its component entities (such

as Matter): and if the sensible were in very truth the whole of Reality, Matter, the mere base and not the total,

Most surprising of all is that, while they make senseperception their guarantee of everything, they hold that

the Real cannot be grasped by sensation; for they have no right to assign to Matter even so much as

resistance, since resistance is a quality. If however they profess to grasp Reality by Intellect, is it not a strange

Intellect which ranks Matter above itself, giving Reality to Matter and not to itself? And as their "Intellect"

has, thus, no RealExistence, how can it be trustworthy when it speaks of things higher than itself, things to

But an adequate treatment of this entity [Matter] and of substrates will be found elsewhere.

29. Qualities must be for this school distinct from Substrates. This in fact they acknowledge by counting

them as the second category. If then they form a distinct category, they must be simplex; that is to say they

are not composite; that is to say that as qualities, pure and simple, they are devoid of Matter: hence they are

If however they hold Qualities to be composite, that is a strange classification which first contrasts simple

and composite qualities, then proceeds to include them in one genus, and finally includes one of the two

species [simple] in the other [composite]; it is like dividing knowledge into two species, the first comprising

Again, if they identify Qualities with qualifications of Matter, then in the first place even their Seminal

Principles [Logoi] will be material and will not have to reside in Matter to produce a composite, but prior to

the composite thus produced they will themselves be composed of Matter and Form: in other words, they will

not be Forms or Principles. Further, if they maintain that the Seminal Principles are nothing but Matter in a

certain state, they evidently identify Qualities with States, and should accordingly classify them in their

fourth genus. If this is a state of some peculiar kind, what precisely is its differentia? Clearly the state by its

association with Matter receives an accession of Reality: yet if that means that when divorced from Matter it

is not a Reality, how can State be treated as a single genus or species? Certainly one genus cannot embrace

And what is this state implanted in Matter? It is either real, or unreal: if real, absolutely bodiless: if unreal, it

is introduced to no purpose; Matter is all there is; Quality therefore is nothing. The same is true of State, for

Matter then is the sole Reality. But how do we come to know this? Certainly not from Matter itself. How,

then? From Intellect? But Intellect is merely a state of Matter, and even the "state" is an empty qualification.

We are left after all with Matter alone competent to make these assertions, to fathom these problems. And if

its assertions were intelligent, we must wonder how it thinks and performs the functions of Soul without

possessing either Intellect or Soul. If, then, it were to make foolish assertions, affirming itself to be what it is

not and cannot be, to what should we ascribe this folly? Doubtless to Matter, if it was in truth Matter that

spoke. But Matter does not speak; anyone who says that it does proclaims the predominance of Matter in

himself; he may have a soul, but he is utterly devoid of Intellect, and lives in ignorance of himself and of the

It may seem strange that States should be set up as a third class or whatever class it is since all States are

referable to Matter. We shall be told that there is a difference among States, and that a State as in Matter has

definite characteristics distinguishing it from all other States and further that, whereas Qualities are States of

Matter, States properly socalled belong to Qualities. But if Qualities are nothing but States of Matter, States

[in the strict sense of the term] are ultimately reducible to Matter, and under Matter they must be classed.

Further, how can States constitute a single genus, when there is such manifold diversity among them? How

can we group together three yards long" and "white" Quantity and Quality respectively? Or again Time and

Place? How can "yesterday," "last year," "in the Lyceum," "in the Academy," be States at all? How can Time

be in any sense a State? Neither is Time a State nor the events in Time, neither the objects in Space nor Space

And how can Action be a State? One acting is not in a state of being but in a state of Action, or rather in

Action simply: no state is involved. Similarly, what is predicated of the patient is not a state of being but a

But it would seem that State was the right category at least for cases of Situation and Possession: yet

Possession does not imply possession of some particular state, but is Possession absolute.

As for the Relative State, if the theory does not include it in the same genus as the other States, another

question arises: we must enquire whether any actuality is attributed to this particular type of relation, for to

It is, moreover, absurd that an entity which depends upon the prior existence of other entities should be

classed in the same genus with those priors: one and two must, clearly, exist, before half and double can.

The various speculations on the subject of the Existents and the principles of the Existents, whether they have

entailed an infinite or a finite number, bodily or bodiless, or even supposed the Composite to be the Authentic

Existent, may well be considered separately with the help of the criticisms made by the ancients upon them.

1. We have examined the proposed "ten genera": we have discussed also the theory which gathers the total of

things into one genus and to this subordinates what may be thought of as its four species. The next step is,

naturally, to expound our own views and to try to show the agreement of our conclusions with those of Plato.

Now if we were obliged to consider Being as a unity, the following questions would be unnecessary:

Is there one genus embracing everything, or are there genera which cannot be subsumed under such a unity?

Are there firstprinciples? Are firstprinciples to be identified with genera, or genera with firstprinciples?

Or is it perhaps rather the case that while not all genera are firstprinciples, all firstprinciples are at the same

time genera? Or is the converse true? Or again, do both classes overlap, some principles being also genera,

and some genera also principles? And do both the sets of categories we have been examining imply that only

some principles are genera and some genera principles? or does one of them presuppose that all that belongs

Since, however, we affirm that Being is not a unity the reason for this affirmation is stated by Plato and

others these questions become imperative, once we are satisfied as to the number of genera to be posited

The subject of our enquiry, then, is the Existent or Existents, and it presents immediately two problems

What do we mean by the Existent? This is naturally the first question to be examined.

What is that which, often taken for Being [for the Existent], is in our view Becoming and never really Being?

Note however that these concepts are not to be taken as distinguished from each other in the sense of

belonging to a genus, Something, divided into Being and Becoming; and we must not suppose that Plato took

this view. It would be absurd to assign Being to the same genus as nonBeing: this would be to make one

genus of Socrates and his portrait. The division here [between what has Being and what is in Becoming]

means a definite markingoff, a setting asunder, leading to the assertion that what takes the appearance of

Being is not Being and implying that the nature of True Being has been quite misapprehended. Being, we are

taught, must have the attribute of eternity, must be so constituted as never to belie its own nature.

This, then, is the Being of which we shall treat, and in our investigation we shall assume that it is not a unity:

subsequently we ask leave to say something on the nature of Becoming and on what it is that comes to be,

2. In asserting that Being is not a unity, we do not mean to imply a definite number of existences; the number

may well be infinite: we mean simply that it is many as well as one, that it is, so to speak, a diversified unity,

It follows that either the unity so regarded is a unity of genus under which the Existents, involving as they do

plurality as well as unity, stand as species; or that while there are more genera than one, yet all are

subordinate to a unity; or there may be more genera than one, though no one genus is subordinate to any

other, but all with their own subordinates whether these be lesser genera, or species with individuals for

their subordinates all are elements in one entity, and from their totality the Intellectual realm that which we

If this last is the truth, we have here not merely genera, but genera which are at the same time principles of

Being. They are genera because they have subordinates other genera, and successively species and

individuals; they are also principles, since from this plurality Being takes its rise, constituted in its entirety

Suppose, however, a greater number of origins which by their mere totality comprised, without possessing

any subordinates, the whole of Being; these would be firstprinciples but not genera: it would be as if one

constructed the sensible world from the four elements fire and the others; these elements would be first

principles, but they would not be genera, unless the term "genus" is to be used equivocally.

But does this assertion of certain genera which are at the same time firstprinciples imply that by combining

the genera, each with its subordinates, we find the whole of Being in the resultant combination? But then,

taken separately, their existence will not be actual but only potential, and they will not be found in isolation.

Suppose, on the other hand, we ignore the genera and combine the particulars: what then becomes of the

ignored genera? They will, surely, exist in the purity of their own isolation, and the mixtures will not destroy

For the moment we take it as agreed that there are genera as distinct from principles of Being and that, on

another plane, principles [elements] are opposed to compounds. We are thus obliged to show in what relation

we speak of genera and why we distinguish them instead of summing them under a unity; for otherwise we

imply that their coalescence into a unity is fortuitous, whereas it would be more plausible to dispense with

If all the genera could be species of Being, all individuals without exception being immediately subordinate

to these species, then such a unification becomes feasible. But that supposition bespeaks annihilation for the

genera: the species will no longer be species; plurality will no longer be subordinated to unity; everything

must be the unity, unless there exist some thing or things outside the unity. The One never becomes many as

the existence of species demands unless there is something distinct from it: it cannot of itself assume

plurality, unless we are to think of it as being broken into pieces like some extended body: but even so, the

force which breaks it up must be distinct from it: if it is itself to effect the breaking up or whatever form the

For these and many other reasons we must abstain from positing a single genus, and especially because

neither Being nor Substance can be the predicate of any given thing. If we do predicate Being, it is only as an

accidental attribute; just as when we predicate whiteness of a substance, we are not predicating the Absolute

3. We assert, then, a plurality of Existents, but a plurality not fortuitous and therefore a plurality deriving

But even admitting this derivation from a unity a unity however not predicated of them in respect of their

essential being there is, surely, no reason why each of these Existents, distinct in character from every other,

Is, then, this unity external to the genera thus produced, this unity which is their source though it cannot be

predicated of them in respect of their essence? it is indeed external; the One is beyond; it cannot, therefore, be

included among the genera: it is the [transcendent] source, while they stand side by side as genera. Yet surely

the one must somehow be included [among the genera]? No: it is the Existents we are investigating, not that

We pass on, then, to consider that which is included, and find to our surprise the cause included with the

things it causes: it is surely strange that causes and effects should be brought into the same genus.

But if the cause is included with its effects only in the sense in which a genus is included with its

subordinates, the subordinates being of a different order, so that it cannot be predicated of them whether as

their genus or in any other relation, these subordinates are obviously themselves genera with subordinates of

their own: you may, for example, be the cause of the operation of walking, but the walking is not subordinate

to you in the relation of species to genus; and if walking had nothing prior to it as its genus, but had

Perhaps, however, it must be utterly denied that unity is even the cause of other things; they should be

considered rather as its parts or elements if the terms may be allowed, their totality constituting a single

entity which our thinking divides. All unity though it be, it goes by a wonderful power out into everything; it

appears as many and becomes many when there is a motion; the fecundity of its nature causes the One to be

no longer one, and we, displaying what we call its parts, consider them each as a unity and make them into

"genera," unaware of our failure to see the whole at once. We display it, then, in parts, though, unable to

restrain their natural tendency to coalesce, we bring these parts together again, resign them to the whole and

All this will become clearer in the light of further consideration when, that is to say, we have ascertained the

number of the genera; for thus we shall also discover their causes. It is not enough to deny; we must advance

4. If we had to ascertain the nature of body and the place it holds in the universe, surely we should take some

sample of body, say stone, and examine into what constituents it may be divided. There would be what we

think of as the substrate of stone, its quantity in this case, a magnitude; its quality for example, the colour

of stone. As with stone, so with every other body: we should see that in this thing, body, there are three

distinguishable characteristics the pseudosubstance, the quantity, the quality though they all make one

and are only logically trisected, the three being found to constitute the unit thing, body. If motion were

equally inherent in its constitution, we should include this as well, and the four would form a unity, the single

The same method must be applied in examining the Intellectual Substance and the genera and firstprinciples

But we must begin by subtracting what is peculiar to body, its comingtobe, its sensible nature, its

magnitude that is to say, the characteristics which produce isolation and mutual separation. It is an

Intellectual Being we have to consider, an Authentic Existent, possessed of a unity surpassing that of any

Now the wonder comes how a unity of this type can be many as well as one. In the case of body it was easy

to concede unitywithplurality; the one body is divisible to infinity; its colour is a different thing from its

shape, since in fact they are separated. But if we take Soul, single, continuous, without extension, of the

highest simplicity as the first effort of the mind makes manifest how can we expect to find multiplicity

here too? We believed that the division of the living being into body and soul was final: body indeed was

manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt,

Let us examine this soul, presented to us from the Intellectual realm as body from the Sensible. How is its

unity a plurality? How is its plurality a unity? Clearly its unity is not that of a composite formed from diverse

This problem attacked and solved, the truth about the genera comprised in Being will thereby, as we asserted,

Bodies those, for example, of animals and plants are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and

magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this

unity must be either UnityAbsolute or some unity less thoroughgoing and complete, but necessarily more

complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to

reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from

Reality. Since, thus, bodies take their rise from unity, but not "unity" in the sense of the complete unity or

UnityAbsolute for this could never yield discrete plurality it remains that they be derived from a unity

Pluralized. But the creative principle [in bodies] is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity.

We then ask whether the plurality here consists of the ReasonPrinciples of the things of process. Or is this

unity not something different from the mere sum of these Principles? Certainly Soul itself is one

ReasonPrinciple, the chief of the ReasonPrinciples, and these are its Act as it functions in accordance with

its essential being; this essential being, on the other hand, is the potentiality of the ReasonPrinciples. This is

the mode in which this unity is a plurality, its plurality being revealed by the effect it has upon the external.

But, to leave the region of its effect, suppose we take it at the higher noneffecting part of Soul; is not

plurality of powers to be found in this part also? The existence of this higher part will, we may presume, be at

But is this existence to be taken as identical with that of the stone? Surely not. Being in the case of the stone

is not Being pure and simple, but stonebeing: so here; Soul's being denotes not merely Being but

Is then that "being" distinct from what else goes to complete the essence [or substance] of Soul? Is it to be

identified with Bring [the Absolute], while to some differentia of Being is ascribed the production of Soul?

No doubt Soul is in a sense Being, and this is not as a man "is" white, but from the fact of its being purely an

essence: in other words, the being it possesses it holds from no source external to its own essence.

6. But must it not draw on some source external to its essence, if it is to be conditioned, not only by Being,

but by being an entity of a particular character? But if it is conditioned by a particular character, and this

character is external to its essence, its essence does not comprise all that makes it Soul; its individuality will

Furthermore, what being will it have when we separate it from its other components? The being of a stone?

No: the being must be a form of Being appropriate to a source, so to speak, and a firstprinciple, or rather

must take the forms appropriate to all that is comprised in Soul's being: the being here must, that is, be life,

One, in the sense of being one ReasonPrinciple? No; it is the substrate of Soul that is one, though one in

such a way as to be also two or more as many as are the Primaries which constitute Soul. Either, then, it is

But if life is a thing possessed, the essence of the possessor is not inextricably bound up with life. If, on the

Soul, then, is one and many as many as are manifested in that oneness one in its nature, many in those

other things. A single Existent, it makes itself many by what we may call its motion: it is one entire, but by its

striving, so to speak, to contemplate itself, it is a plurality; for we may imagine that it cannot bear to be a

single Existent, when it has the power to be all that it in fact is. The cause of its appearing as many is this

contemplation, and its purpose is the Act of the Intellect; if it were manifested as a bare unity, it could have

no intellection, since in that simplicity it would already be identical with the object of its thought.

We have found Substance [Essence] and life simultaneously present in Soul. Now, this Substance is a

common property of Soul, but life, common to all souls, differs in that it is a property of Intellect also.

Having thus introduced Intellect and its life we make a single genus of what is common to all life, namely,

Motion. Substance and the Motion, which constitutes the highest life, we must consider as two genera; for

even though they form a unity, they are separable to thought which finds their unity not a unity; otherwise, it

Observe also how in other things Motion or life is clearly separated from Being a separation impossible,

doubtless, in True Being, but possible in its shadow and namesake. In the portrait of a man much is left out,

and above all the essential thing, life: the "Being" of sensible things just such a shadow of True Being, an

abstraction from that Being complete which was life in the Archetype; it is because of this incompleteness

that we are able in the Sensible world to separate Being from life and life from Being.

Being, then, containing many species, has but one genus. Motion, however, is to be classed as neither a

subordinate nor a supplement of Being but as its concomitant; for we have not found Being serving as

substrate to Motion. Motion is being Act; neither is separated from the other except in thought; the two

No doubt we observe Motion and Being separately, Motion as contained in Being and Being as involved in

Motion, and in the individual they may be mutually exclusive; but the dualism is an affirmation of our

Now Motion, thus manifested in conjunction with Being, does not alter Being's nature unless to complete its

essential character and it does retain for ever its own peculiar nature: at once, then, we are forced to

introduce Stability. To reject Stability would be more unreasonable than to reject Motion; for Stability is

associated in our thought and conception with Being even more than with Motion; unalterable condition,

unchanging mode, single ReasonPrinciple these are characteristics of the higher sphere.

Stability, then, may also be taken as a single genus. Obviously distinct from Motion and perhaps even its

contrary, that it is also distinct from Being may be shown by many considerations. We may especially

observe that if Stability were identical with Being, so also would Motion be, with equal right. Why identity in

the case of Stability and not in that of Motion, when Motion is virtually the very life and Act both of

Substance and of Absolute Being? However, on the very same principle on which we separated Motion from

Being with the understanding that it is the same and not the same that they are two and yet one we also

separate Stability from Being, holding it, yet, inseparable; it is only a logical separation entailing the

inclusion among the Existents of this other genus. To identify Stability with Being, with no difference

between them, and to identify Being with Motion, would be to identify Stability with Motion through the

8. We cannot indeed escape positing these three, Being, Motion, Stability, once it is the fact that the Intellect

discerns them as separates; and if it thinks of them at all, it posits them by that very thinking; if they are

thought, they exist. Things whose existence is bound up with Matter have no being in the Intellect: these

three principles are however free of Matter; and in that which goes free of Matter to be thought is to be.

We are in the presence of Intellect undefiled. Fix it firmly, but not with the eyes of the body. You are looking

upon the hearth of Reality, within it a sleepless light: you see how it holds to itself, and how it puts apart

things that were together, how it lives a life that endures and keeps a thought acting not upon any future but

upon that which already is, upon an eternal present a thought selfcentred, bearing on nothing outside of

Now in the Act of Intellect there are energy and motion; in its selfintellection Substance and Being. In

virtue of its Being it thinks, and it thinks of itself as Being, and of that as Being, upon which it is, so to speak,

pivoted. Not that its Act selfdirected ranks as Substance, but Being stands as the goal and origin of that Act,

the object of its contemplation though not the contemplation itself: and yet this Act too involves Being, which

is its motive and its term. By the fact that its Being is actual and not merely potential, Intellect bridges the

dualism [of agent and patient] and abjures separation: it identifies itself with Being and Being with itself.

Being, the most firmly set of all things, that in virtue of which all other things receive Stability, possesses this

Stability not as from without but as springing within, as inherent. Stability is the goal of intellection, a

Stability which had no beginning, and the state from which intellection was impelled was Stability, though

Stability gave it no impulsion; for Motion neither starts from Motion nor ends in Motion. Again, the

FormIdea has Stability, since it is the goal of Intellect: intellection is the Form's Motion.

Thus all the Existents are one, at once Motion and Stability; Motion and Stability are genera allpervading,

and every subsequent is a particular being, a particular stability and a particular motion.

We have caught the radiance of Being, and beheld it in its three manifestations: Being, revealed by the Being

within ourselves; the Motion of Being, revealed by the motion within ourselves; and its Stability revealed by

ours. We accommodate our being, motion, stability to those [of the Archetypal], unable however to draw any

distinction but finding ourselves in the presence of entities inseparable and, as it were, interfused. We have,

however, in a sense, set them a little apart, holding them down and viewing them in isolation; and thus we

have observed Being, Stability, Motion these three, of which each is a unity to itself; in so doing, have we

not regarded them as being different from each other? By this posing of three entities, each a unity, we have,

Again, inasmuch as we restore them to an allembracing unity, identifying all with unity, do we not see in

Thus, in addition to the other three [Being, Motion, Stability], we are obliged to posit the further two, Identity

and Difference, so that we have in all five genera. In so doing, we shall not withhold Identity and Difference

from the subsequents of the Intellectual order; the thing of Sense has, it is clear, a particular identity and a

particular difference, but Identity and Difference have the generic status independently of the particular.

They will, moreover, be primary genera, because nothing can be predicated of them as denoting their

essential nature. Nothing, of course we mean, but Being; but this Being is not their genus, since they cannot

be identified with any particular being as such. Similarly, Being will not stand as genus to Motion or

Stability, for these also are not its species. Beings [or Existents] comprise not merely what are to be regarded

as species of the genus Being, but also participants in Being. On the other hand, Being does not participate in

the other four principles as its genera: they are not prior to Being; they do not even attain to its level.

9. The above considerations to which others, doubtless, might be added suffice to show that these five are

primary genera. But that they are the only primary genera, that there are no others, how can we be confident

of this? Why do we not add unity to them? Quantity? Quality? Relation, and all else included by our various

As for unity: If the term is to mean a unity in which nothing else is present, neither Soul nor Intellect nor

anything else, this can be predicated of nothing, and therefore cannot be a genus. If it denotes the unity

present in Being, in which case we predicate Being of unity, this unity is not primal.

Besides, unity, containing no differences, cannot produce species, and not producing species, cannot be a

genus. You cannot so much as divide unity: to divide it would be to make it many. Unity, aspiring to be a

Again, you must add to it to divide it into species; for there can be no differentiae in unity as there are in

Substance. The mind accepts differences of Being, but differences within unity there cannot be. Every

differentia introduces a duality destroying the unity; for the addition of any one thing always does away with

It may be contended that the unity which is implicit in Being and in Motion is common to all other things,

and that therefore Being and unity are inseparable. But we rejected the idea that Being is a genus comprising

all things, on the ground that these things are not beings in the sense of the Absolute Being, but beings in

another mode: in the same way, we assert, unity is not a genus, the Primary Unity having a character distinct

Admitted that not everything suffices to produce a genus, it may yet be urged that there is an Absolute or

Primary Unity corresponding to the other primaries. But if Being and unity are identified, then since Being

has already been included among the genera, it is but a name that is introduced in unity: if, however, they are

both unity, some principle is implied: if there is anything in addition [to this principle], unity is predicated of

this added thing; if there is nothing added, the reference is again to that unity predicated of nothing. If

however the unity referred to is that which accompanies Being, we have already decided that it is not unity in

But is there any reason why this less complete unity should not still possess Primary Being, seeing that even

its posterior we rank as Being, and "Being" in the sense of the Primary Being? The reason is that the prior of

this Being cannot itself be Being or else, if the prior is Being, this is not Primary Being: but the prior is

Again, even taking it as bound up with Being: If it is a consequent of Being, then it is a consequent of

everything, and therefore the latest of things: but the genus takes priority. If it is simultaneous with Being, it

is simultaneous with everything: but a genus is not thus simultaneous. If it is prior to Being, it is of the nature

of a Principle, and therefore will belong only to Being; but if it serves as Principle to Being, it is not its

genus: if it is not genus to Being, it is equally not a genus of anything else; for that would make Being a

In sum, the unity exhibited in Being on the one hand approximates to UnityAbsolute and on the other tends

to identify itself with Being: Being is a unity in relation to the Absolute, is Being by virtue of its sequence

upon that Absolute: it is indeed potentially a plurality, and yet it remains a unity and rejecting division

10. In what sense is the particular manifestation of Being a unity? Clearly, in so far as it is one thing, it

forfeits its unity; with "one" and "thing" we have already plurality. No species can be a unity in more than an

equivocal sense: a species is a plurality, so that the "unity" here is that of an army or a chorus. The unity of

the higher order does not belong to species; unity is, thus, ambiguous, not taking the same form in Being and

It follows that unity is not a genus. For a genus is such that wherever it is affirmed its opposites cannot also

be affirmed; anything of which unity and its opposites are alike affirmed and this implies the whole of

Being cannot have unity as a genus. Consequently unity can be affirmed as a genus neither of the primary

genera since the unity of Being is as much a plurality as a unity, and none of the other [primary] genera is a

unity to the entire exclusion of plurality nor of things posterior to Being, for these most certainly are a

plurality. In fact, no genus with all its items can be a unity; so that unity to become a genus must forfeit its

unity. The unit is prior to number; yet number it must be, if it is to be a genus.

Again, the unit is a unit from the point of view of number: if it is a unit generically, it will not be a unit in the

Again, just as the unit, appearing in numbers, not regarded as a genus predicated of them, but is thought of as

inherent in them, so also unity, though present in Being, cannot stand as genus to Being or to the other genera

Further, as the simplex must be the principle of the nonsimplex, though not its genus for then the

nonsimplex too would be simplex, so it stands with unity; if unity is a Principle; it cannot be a genus to its

subsequents, and therefore cannot be a genus of Being or of other things. If it is nevertheless to be a genus,

everything of which it is a genus must be taken as a unit a notion which implies the separation of unity from

substance: it will not, therefore, be allembracing. just as Being is not a genus of everything but only of

species each of which is a being, so too unity will be a genus of species each of which is a unity. But that

raises the question of what difference there is between one thing and another in so far as they are both units,

Unity, it may be suggested, is divided in its conjunction with Being and Substance; Being because it is so

divided is considered a genus the one genus manifested in many particulars; why then should not unity be

similarly a genus, inasmuch as its manifestations are as many as those of Substance and it is divided into as

In the first place, the mere fact that an entity inheres in many things is not enough to make it a genus of those

things or of anything else: in a word, a common property need not be a genus. The point inherent in a line is

not a genus of lines, or a genus at all; nor again, as we have observed, is the unity latent in numbers a genus

either of the numbers or of anything else: genus demands that the common property of diverse objects

involve also differences arising out of its own character, that it form species, and that it belong to the essence

of the objects. But what differences can there be in unity? What species does it engender? If it produces the

same species as we find in connection with Being, it must be identical with Being: only the name will differ,

11. We are bound however to enquire under what mode unity is contained in Being. How is what is termed

the "dividing" effected especially the dividing of the genera Being and unity? Is it the same division, or is it

First then: In what sense, precisely, is any given particular called and known to be a unity? Secondly: Does

unity as used of Being carry the same connotation as in reference to the Absolute?

Unity is not identical in all things; it has a different significance according as it is applied to the Sensible and

the Intellectual realms Being too, of course, comports such a difference and there is a difference in the

unity affirmed among sensible things as compared with each other; the unity is not the same in the cases of

chorus, camp, ship, house; there is a difference again as between such discrete things and the continuous.

Nevertheless, all are representations of the one exemplar, some quite remote, others more effective: the truer

likeness is in the Intellectual; Soul is a unity, and still more is Intellect a unity and Being a unity.

When we predicate Being of a particular, do we thereby predicate of it unity, and does the degree of its unity

tally with that of its being? Such correspondence is accidental: unity is not proportionate to Being; less unity

need not mean less Being. An army or a choir has no less Being than a house, though less unity.

It would appear, then, that the unity of a particular is related not so much to Being as to a standard of

perfection: in so far as the particular attains perfection, so far it is a unity; and the degree of unity depends on

this attainment. The particular aspires not simply to Being, but to Beinginperfection: it is in this strain

towards their perfection that such beings as do not possess unity strive their utmost to achieve it.

Things of nature tend by their very nature to coalesce with each other and also to unify each within itself;

their movement is not away from but towards each other and inwards upon themselves. Souls, moreover,

seem to desire always to pass into a unity over and above the unity of their own substance. Unity in fact

confronts them on two sides: their origin and their goal alike are unity; from unity they have arisen, and

towards unity they strive. Unity is thus identical with Goodness [is the universal standard of perfection]; for

no being ever came into existence without possessing, from that very moment, an irresistible tendency

From natural things we turn to the artificial. Every art in all its operation aims at whatsoever unity its capacity

and its models permit, though Being most achieves unity since it is closer at the start.

That is why in speaking of other entities we assert the name only, for example man; when we say "one man,"

we have in mind more than one; and if we affirm unity of him in any other connection, we regard it as

supplementary [to his essence]: but when we speak of Being as a whole we say it is one Being without

presuming that it is anything but a unity; we thereby show its close association with Goodness.

Thus for Being, as for the others, unity turns out to be, in some sense, Principle and Term, not however in the

same sense as for things of the physical order a discrepancy leading us to infer that even in unity there are

How, then, do we characterize the unity [thus diverse] in Being? Are we to think of it as a common property

seen alike in all its parts? In the first place, the point is common to lines and yet is not their genus, and this

unity we are considering may also be common to numbers and not be their genus though, we need hardly

say, the unity of UnityAbsolute is not that of the numbers, one, two and the rest. Secondly, in Being there is

nothing to prevent the existence of prior and posterior, simple and composite: but unity, even if it be identical

in all the manifestations of Being, having no differentiae can produce no species; but producing no species it

12. Enough upon that side of the question. But how does the perfection [goodness] of numbers, lifeless

things, depend upon their particular unity? Just as all other inanimates find their perfection in their unity.

If it should be objected that numbers are simply nonexistent, we should point out that our discussion is

concerned [not with units as such, but] with beings considered from the aspect of their unity.

We may again be asked how the point supposing its independent existence granted participates in

perfection. If the point is chosen as an inanimate object, the question applies to all such objects: but

perfection does exist in such things, for example in a circle: the perfection of the circle will be perfection for

the point; it will aspire to this perfection and strive to attain it, as far as it can, through the circle.

But how are the five genera to be regarded? Do they form particulars by being broken up into parts? No; the

But how, at that, can it remain a unity? The unity of a genus must be considered as a wholeinmany.

Does it exist then only in the things participating in it? No; it has an independent existence of its own as well.

13. We turn to ask why Quantity is not included among the primary genera, and Quality also.

Quantity is not among the primaries, because these are permanently associated with Being. Motion is bound

up with Actual Being [BeinginAct], since it is its life; with Motion, Stability too gained its foothold in

Reality; with these are associated Difference and Identity, so that they also are seen in conjunction with

Being. But number [the basis of Quantity] is a posterior. It is posterior not only with regard to these genera

but also within itself; in number the posterior is divided from the prior; this is a sequence in which the

posteriors are latent in the priors [and do not appear simultaneously]. Number therefore cannot be included

among the primary genera; whether it constitutes a genus at all remains to be examined.

Magnitude [extended quantity] is in a still higher degree posterior and composite, for it contains within itself

number, line and surface. Now if continuous magnitude derives its quantity from number, and number is not

a genus, how can magnitude hold that status? Besides, magnitudes, like numbers, admit of priority and

If, then, Quantity be constituted by a common element in both number and magnitude, we must ascertain the

nature of this common element, and consider it, once discovered, as a posterior genus, not as one of the

Primaries: thus failing of primary status, it must be related, directly or indirectly, to one of the Primaries.

We may take it as clear that it is the nature of Quantity to indicate a certain quantum, and to measure the

quantum of the particular; Quantity is moreover, in a sense, itself a quantum. But if the quantum is the

common element in number and magnitude, either we have number as a primary with magnitude derived

from it, or else number must consist of a blending of Motion and Stability, while magnitude will be a form of

Motion or will originate in Motion, Motion going forth to infinity and Stability creating the unit by checking

But the problem of the origin of number and magnitude, or rather of how they subsist and are conceived,

must be held over. It may, thus, be found that number is among the primary genera, while magnitude is

posterior and composite; or that number belongs to the genus Stability, while magnitude must be consigned

14. Why is Quality, again, not included among the Primaries? Because like Quantity it is a posterior,

subsequent to Substance. Primary Substance must necessarily contain Quantity and Quality as its

consequents; it cannot owe its subsistence to them, or require them for its completion: that would make it

Now in the case of composite substances those constituted from diverse elements number and qualities

provide a means of differentiation: the qualities may be detached from the common core around which they

are found to group themselves. But in the primary genera there is no distinction to be drawn between simples

and composites; the difference is between simples and those entities which complete not a particular

substance but Substance as such. A particular substance may very well receive completion from Quality, for

though it already has Substance before the accession of Quality, its particular character is external to

Nevertheless, we ventured to assert elsewhere that while the complements of Substance are only by analogy

called qualities, yet accessions of external origin and subsequent to Substance are really qualities; that,

further, the properties which inhere in substances are their activities [Acts], while those which are subsequent

are merely modifications [or Passions]: we now affirm that the attributes of the particular substance are never

complementary to Substance [as such]; an accession of Substance does not come to the substance of man qua

man; he is, on the contrary, Substance in a higher degree before he arrives at differentiation, just as he is

15. How then do the four genera complete Substance without qualifying it or even particularizing it?

It has been observed that Being is primary, and it is clear that none of the four Motion, Stability, Difference,

Identity is distinct from it. That this Motion does not produce Quality is doubtless also clear, but a word or

If Motion is the Act of Substance, and Being and the Primaries in general are its Act, then Motion is not an

accidental attribute: as the Act of what is necessarily actual [what necessarily involves Act], it is no longer to

be considered as the complement of Substance but as Substance itself. For this reason, then, it has not been

assigned to a posterior class, or referred to Quality, but has been made contemporary with Being.

The truth is not that Being first is and then takes Motion, first is and then acquires Stability: neither Stability

nor Motion is a mere modification of Being. Similarly, Identity and Difference are not later additions: Being

did not grow into plurality; its very unity was a plurality; but plurality implies Difference, and

Substance [Real Being] requires no more than these five constituents; but when we have to turn to the lower

sphere, we find other principles giving rise no longer to Substance (as such) but to quantitative Substance and

qualitative: these other principles may be regarded as genera but not primary genera.

16. As for Relation, manifestly an offshoot, how can it be included among primaries? Relation is of thing

Place and Date are still more remote from Being. Place denotes the presence of one entity within another, so

that it involves a duality; but a genus must be a unity, not a composite. Besides, Place does not exist in the

higher sphere, and the present discussion is concerned with the realm of True Being.

Whether time is There, remains to be considered. Apparently it has less claim than even Place. If it is a

measurement, and that a measurement of Motion, we have two entities; the whole is a composite and

posterior to Motion; therefore it is not on an equal footing with Motion in our classification.

Action and Passivity presuppose Motion; if, then, they exist in the higher sphere, they each involve a duality;

Possession is a duality, while Situation, as signifying one thing situated in another, is a threefold conception.

17. Why are not beauty, goodness and the virtues, together with knowledge and intelligence, included among

If by goodness we mean The First what we call the Principle of Goodness, the Principle of which we can

predicate nothing, giving it this name only because we have no other means of indicating it then goodness,

clearly, can be the genus of nothing: this principle is not affirmed of other things; if it were, each of these

would be Goodness itself. The truth is that it is prior to Substance, not contained in it. If, on the contrary, we

Does this imply that the nature of Being is not good? Not good, to begin with, in the sense in which The First

is good, but in another sense of the word: moreover, Being does not possess its goodness as a quality but as a

But the other genera too, we said, are constituents of Being, and are regarded as genera because each is a

common property found in many things. If then goodness is similarly observed in every part of Substance or

Being, or in most parts, why is goodness not a genus, and a primary genus? Because it is not found identical

in all the parts of Being, but appears in degrees, first, second and subsequent, whether it be because one part

is derived from another posterior from prior or because all are posterior to the transcendent Unity, different

parts of Being participating in it in diverse degrees corresponding to their characteristic natures.

If however we must make goodness a genus as well [as a transcendent source], it will be a posterior genus,

for goodness is posterior to Substance and posterior to what constitutes the generic notion of Being, however

unfailingly it be found associated with Being; but the Primaries, we decided, belong to Being as such, and go

This indeed is why we posit that which transcends Being, since Being and Substance cannot but be a

plurality, necessarily comprising the genera enumerated and therefore forming a oneandmany.

It is true that we do not hesitate to speak of the goodness inherent in Being" when we are thinking of that Act

by which Being tends, of its nature, towards the One: thus, we affirm goodness of it in the sense that it is

thereby moulded into the likeness of The Good. But if this "goodness inherent in Being" is an Act directed

toward The Good, it is the life of Being: but this life is Motion, and Motion is already one of the genera.

If by beauty we mean the primary Beauty, the same or similar arguments will apply here as to goodness: and

if the beauty in the IdealForm is, as it were, an effulgence [from that primary Beauty], we may observe that

it is not identical in all participants and that an effulgence is necessarily a posterior.

If we mean the beauty which identifies itself with Substance, this has been covered in our treatment of

If, again, we mean beauty in relation to ourselves as spectators in whom it produces a certain experience, this

Act [of production] is Motion and none the less Motion by being directed towards Absolute Beauty.

Knowledge again, is Motion originating in the self; it is the observation of Being an Act, not a State: hence

it too falls under Motion, or perhaps more suitably under Stability, or even under both; if under both,

Intelligence, since it connotes intelligent Being and comprises the total of existence, cannot be one of the

genera: the true Intelligence [or Intellect] is Being taken with all its concomitants [with the other four

genera]; it is actually the sum of all the Existents: Being on the contrary, stripped of its concomitants, may be

Justice and selfcontrol [sophrosyne], and virtue in general these are all various Acts of Intelligence: they

are consequently not primary genera; they are posterior to a genus, that is to say, they are species.

19. Having established our four primary genera, it remains for us to enquire whether each of them of itself

alone produces species. And especially, can Being be divided independently, that is without drawing upon the

other genera? Surely not: the differentiae must come from outside the genus differentiated: they must be

Where then is it to find them? Obviously not in nonbeings. If then in beings, and the three genera are all that

is left, clearly it must find them in these, by conjunction and couplement with these, which will come into

But if all come into existence simultaneously, what else is produced but that amalgam of all Existents which

we have just considered [Intellect]? How can other things exist over and above this allincluding amalgam?

And if all the constituents of this amalgam are genera, how do they produce species? How does Motion

A word of warning must here be given against sinking the various genera in their species; and also against

reducing the genus to a mere predicate, something merely seen in the species. The genus must exist at once in

itself and in its species; it blends, but it must also be pure; in contributing along with other genera to form

Substance, it must not destroy itself. There are problems here that demand investigation.

But since we identified the amalgam of the Existents [or primary genera] with the particular intellect, Intellect

as such being found identical with Being or Substance, and therefore prior to all the Existents, which may be

regarded as its species or members, we may infer that the intellect, considered as completely unfolded, is a

Our treatment of this problem may serve to promote our investigation; we will take it as a kind of example,

20. We may thus distinguish two phases of Intellect, in one of which it may be taken as having no contact

whatever with particulars and no Act upon anything; thus it is kept apart from being a particular intellect. In

the same way science is prior to any of its constituent species, and the specific science is prior to any of its

component parts: being none of its particulars, it is the potentiality of all; each particular, on the other hand, is

actually itself, but potentially the sum of all the particulars: and as with the specific science, so with science

as a whole. The specific sciences lie in potentiality in science the total; even in their specific character they

are potentially the whole; they have the whole predicated of them and not merely a part of the whole. At the

So with Intellect. Intellect as a whole must be thought of as prior to the intellects actualized as individuals;

but when we come to the particular intellects, we find that what subsists in the particulars must be maintained

from the totality. The Intellect subsisting in the totality is a provider for the particular intellects, is the

potentiality of them: it involves them as members of its universality, while they in turn involve the universal

Intellect in their particularity, just as the particular science involves science the total.

The great Intellect, we maintain, exists in itself and the particular intellects in themselves; yet the particulars

are embraced in the whole, and the whole in the particulars. The particular intellects exist by themselves and

in another, the universal by itself and in those. All the particulars exist potentially in that selfexistent

universal, which actually is the totality, potentially each isolated member: on the other hand, each particular

is actually what it is [its individual self], potentially the totality. In so far as what is predicated of them is their

essence, they are actually what is predicated of them; but where the predicate is a genus, they are that only

potentially. On the other hand, the universal in so far as it is a genus is the potentiality of all its subordinate

species, though none of them in actuality; all are latent in it, but because its essential nature exists in actuality

before the existence of the species, it does not submit to be itself particularized. If then the particulars are to

exist in actuality to exist, for example, as species the cause must lie in the Act radiating from the universal.

21. How then does the universal Intellect produce the particulars while, in virtue of its ReasonPrinciple,

remaining a unity? In other words, how do the various grades of Being, as we call them, arise from the four

primaries? Here is this great, this infinite Intellect, not given to idle utterance but to sheer intellection,

allembracing, integral, no part, no individual: how, we ask, can it possibly be the source of all this plurality?

Number at all events it possesses in the objects of its contemplation: it is thus one and many, and the many

are powers, wonderful powers, not weak but, being pure, supremely great and, so to speak, full to

overflowing powers in very truth, knowing no limit, so that they are infinite, infinity, MagnitudeAbsolute.

As we survey this Magnitude with the beauty of Being within it and the glory and light around it, all

contained in Intellect, we see, simultaneously, Quality already in bloom, and along with the continuity of its

Act we catch a glimpse of Magnitude at Rest. Then, with one, two and three in Intellect, Magnitude appears

as of three dimensions, with Quantity entire. Quantity thus given and Quality, both merging into one and, we

may almost say, becoming one, there is at once shape. Difference slips in to divide both Quantity and

Quality, and so we have variations in shape and differences of Quality. Identity, coming in with Difference,

creates equality, Difference meanwhile introducing into Quantity inequality, whether in number or in

magnitude: thus are produced circles and squares, and irregular figures, with number like and unlike, odd and

The life of Intellect is intelligent, and its activity [Act] has no failingpoint: hence it excludes none of the

constituents we have discovered within it, each one of which we now see as an intellectual function, and all

of them possessed by virtue of its distinctive power and in the mode appropriate to Intellect.

But though Intellect possesses them all by way of thought, this is not discursive thought: nothing it lacks that

is capable of serving as ReasonPrinciple, while it may itself be regarded as one great and perfect

ReasonPrinciple, holding all the Principles as one and proceeding from its own Primaries, or rather having

eternally proceeded, so that "proceeding" is never true of it. It is a universal rule that whatever reasoning

discovers to exist in Nature is to be found in Intellect apart from all ratiocination: we conclude that Being has

so created Intellect that its reasoning is after a mode similar to that of the Principles which produce living

beings; for the ReasonPrinciples, prior to reasoning though they are, act invariably in the manner which the

What conditions, then, are we to think of as existing in that realm which is prior to Nature and transcends the

Principles of Nature? In a sphere in which Substance is not distinct from Intellect, and neither Being nor

Intellect is of alien origin, it is obvious that Being is best served by the domination of Intellect, so that Being

is what Intellect wills and is: thus alone can it be authentic and primary Being; for if Being is to be in any

Being, thus, exhibits every shape and every quality; it is not seen as a thing determined by some one

particular quality; there could not be one only, since the principle of Difference is there; and since Identity is

equally there, it must be simultaneously one and many. And so Being is; such it always was:

unitywithplurality appears in all its species, as witness all the variations of magnitude, shape and quality.

Clearly nothing may legitimately be excluded [from Being], for the whole must be complete in the higher

Life, too, burst upon Being, or rather was inseparably bound up with it; and thus it was that all living things

of necessity came to be. Body too was there, since Matter and Quality were present.

Everything exists forever, unfailing, involved by very existence in eternity. Individuals have their separate

entities, but are at one in the [total] unity. The complex, so to speak, of them all, thus combined, is Intellect;

and Intellect, holding all existence within itself, is a complete living being, and the essential Idea of Living

Being. In so far as Intellect submits to contemplation by its derivative, becoming an Intelligible, it gives that

22. We may here adduce the pregnant words of Plato: "Inasmuch as Intellect perceives the variety and

plurality of the Forms present in the complete Living Being...." The words apply equally to Soul; Soul is

subsequent to Intellect, yet by its very nature it involves Intellect in itself and perceives more clearly in that

prior. There is Intellect in our intellect also, which again perceives more clearly in its prior, for while of itself

This intellect, then, to which we ascribe perception, though not divorced from the prior in which it originates,

evolves plurality out of unity and has bound up with it the principle of Difference: it therefore takes the form

of a pluralityinunity. A pluralityinunity, it produces the many intellects by the dictate of its very nature.

It is certainly no numerical unity, no individual thing; for whatever you find in that sphere is a species, since

it is divorced from Matter. This may be the import of the difficult words of Plato, that Substance is broken up

into an infinity of parts. So long as the division proceeds from genus to species, infinity is not reached; a limit

is set by the species generated: the lowest species, however that which is not divided into further species

may be more accurately regarded as infinite. And this is the meaning of the words: "to relegate them once and

for all to infinity and there abandon them." As for particulars, they are, considered in themselves, infinite, but

Now Soul has Intellect for its prior, is therefore circumscribed by number down to its ultimate extremity; at

that point infinity is reached. The particular intellect, though allembracing, is a partial thing, and the

collective Intellect and its various manifestations [all the particular intellects] are in actuality parts of that

part. Soul too is a part of a part, though in the sense of being an Act [actuality] derived from it. When the Act

of Intellect is directed upon itself, the result is the manifold [particular] intellects; when it looks outwards,

If Soul acts as a genus or a species, the various [particular] souls must act as species. Their activities [Acts]

will be twofold: the activity upward is Intellect; that which looks downward constitutes the other powers

imposed by the particular ReasonPrinciple [the ReasonPrinciple of the being ensouled]; the lowest activity

This lower part of Soul does not prevent the rest from being entirely in the higher sphere: indeed what we call

the lower part is but an image of Soul: not that it is cut off from Soul; it is like the reflection in the mirror,

But we must keep in mind what this "outside" means. Up to the production of the image, the Intellectual

realm is wholly and exclusively composed of Intellectual Beings: in the same way the Sensible world,

representing that in so far as it is able to retain the likeness of a living being, is itself a living being: the

relation is like that of a portrait or reflection to the original which is regarded as prior to the water or the

The representation, notice, in the portrait or on the water is not of the dual being, but of the one element

[Matter] as formed by the other [Soul]. Similarly, this likeness of the Intellectual realm carries images, not of

the creative element, but of the entities contained in that creator, including Man with every other living being:

creator and created are alike living beings, though of a different life, and both coexist in the Intellectual

1. We have now explained our conception of Reality [True Being] and considered how far it agrees with the

teaching of Plato. We have still to investigate the opposed principle [the principle of Becoming].

There is the possibility that the genera posited for the Intellectual sphere will suffice for the lower also;

possibly with these genera others will be required; again, the two series may differ entirely; or perhaps some

of the sensible genera will be identical with their intellectual prototypes, and others different "identical,"

however, being understood to mean only analogous and in possession of a common name, as our results will

The subject of our discussion is the Sensible realm: Sensible Existence is entirely embraced by what we know

as the Universe: our duty, then, would seem to be clear enough to take this Universe and analyse its nature,

classifying its constituent parts and arranging them by species. Suppose that we were making a division of

speech: we should reduce its infinity to finite terms, and from the identity appearing in many instances evolve

a unity, then another and another, until we arrived at some definite number; each such unit we should call a

species if imposed upon individuals, a genus if imposed upon species. Thus, every species of speech and

similarly all phenomena might be referred to a unity; speech or element might be predicated of them all.

This procedure however is as we have already shown, impossible in dealing with the subject of our present

enquiry. New genera must be sought for this Universegenera distinct from those of the Intellectual,

inasmuch as this realm is different from that, analogous indeed but never identical, a mere image of the

higher. True, it involves the parallel existence of Body and Soul, for the Universe is a living form: essentially

however Soul is of the Intellectual and does not enter into the structure of what is called Sensible Being.

Remembering this fact, we must however great the difficulty exclude Soul from the present investigation,

just as in a census of citizens, taken in the interests of commerce and taxation, we should ignore the alien

population. As for the experiences to which Soul is indirectly subject in its conjunction with Body and by

reason of Body's presence, their classification must be attempted at a later stage, when we enquire into the

2. Our first observations must be directed to what passes in the Sensible realm for Substance. It is, we shall

agree, only by analogy that the nature manifested in bodies is designated as Substance, and by no means

because such terms as Substance or Being tally with the notion of bodies in flux; the proper term would be

But Becoming is not a uniform nature; bodies comprise under the single head simples and composites,

together with accidentals or consequents, these last themselves capable of separate classification.

Alternatively, Becoming may be divided into Matter and the Form imposed upon Matter. These may be

regarded each as a separate genus, or else both may be brought under a single category and receive alike the

But what, we may ask, have Matter and Form in common? In what sense can Matter be conceived as a genus,

and what will be its species? What is the differentia of Matter? In which genus, Matter or Form, are we to

rank the composite of both? It may be this very composite which constitutes the Substance manifested in

bodies, neither of the components by itself answering to the conception of Body: how, then, can we rank

them in one and the same genus as the composite? How can the elements of a thing be brought within the

same genus as the thing itself? Yet if we begin with bodies, our firstprinciples will be compounds.

Why not resort to analogy? Admitted that the classification of the Sensible cannot proceed along the identical

lines marked out for the Intellectual: is there any reason why we should not for IntellectualBeing substitute

Matter, and for Intellectual Motion substitute Sensible Form, which is in a sense the life and consummation

of Matter? The inertia of Matter would correspond with Stability, while the Identity and Difference of the

Intellectual would find their counterparts in the similarity and diversity which obtain in the Sensible realm.

But, in the first place, Matter does not possess or acquire Form as its life or its Act; Form enters it from

without, and remains foreign to its nature. Secondly, Form in the Intellectual is an Act and a motion; in the

Sensible Motion is different from Form and accidental to it: Form in relation to Matter approximates rather to

Stability than to Motion; for by determining Matter's indetermination it confers upon it a sort of repose.

In the higher realm Identity and Difference presuppose a unity at once identical and different: a thing in the

lower is different only by participation in Difference and in relation to some other thing; Identity and

Difference are here predicated of the particular, which is not, as in that realm, a posterior.

As for Stability, how can it belong to Matter, which is distorted into every variety of mass, receiving its forms

Let us begin by distinguishing Matter, Form, the Mixture of both, and the Attributes of the Mixture. The

Attributes may be subdivided into those which are mere predicates, and those serving also as accidents. The

accidents may be either inclusive or included; they may, further, be classified as activities, experiences,

Matter will be found common to all substances, not however as a genus, since it has no differentiae unless

indeed differentiae be ascribed to it on the ground of its taking such various forms as fire and air.

It may be held that Matter is sufficiently constituted a genus by the fact that the things in which it appears

hold it in common, or in that it presents itself as a whole of parts. In this sense Matter will indeed be a genus,

though not in the accepted sense of the term. Matter, we may remark, is also a single element, if the element

Further, if to a Form be added the qualification "bound up with, involved in Matter," Matter separates that

Form from other Forms: it does not however embrace the whole of Substantial Form [as, to be the genus of

We may, again, regard Form as the creator of Substance and make the ReasonPrinciple of Substance

dependent upon Form: yet we do not come thereby to an understanding of the nature of Substance.

We may, also, restrict Substance to the Composite. Matter and Form then cease to be substances. If they are

Substance equally with the Composite, it remains to enquire what there is common to all three.

The "mere predicates" fall under the category of Relation: such are cause and element. The accidents

included in the composite substances ire found to be either Quality or Quantity; those which are inclusive are

of the nature of Space and Time. Activities and experiences comprise Motions; consequents Space and Time,

The first three entities [Matter, Form, Composite] go, as we have discovered, to make a single common

genus, the Sensible counterpart of Substance. Then follow in order Relation, Quantity, Quality,

Timeduringwhich, Placeinwhich, Motion; though, with Time and Space already included [under

Thus we have five genera, counting the first three entities as one. If the first three are not massed into a unity,

the series will be Matter, Form, Composite, Relation, Quantity, Quality, Motion. The last three may, again,

4. What, then, we have to ask, is the constant element in the first three entities? What is it that identifies them

Is it the capacity to serve as a base? But Matter, we maintain, serves as the base and seat of Form: Form, thus,

will be excluded from the category of Substance. Again, the Composite is the base and seat of attributes:

hence, Form combined with Matter will be the basic ground of Composites, or at any rate of all posteriors of

But perhaps we may think Substance validly defined as that which is not predicated of anything else. White

and black are predicated of an object having one or other of these qualities; double presupposes something

distinct from itself we refer not to the half, but to the length of wood of which doubleness is affirmed. father

qua father is a predicate; knowledge is predicated of the subject in whom the knowledge exists; space is the

limit of something, time the measure of something. Fire, on the other hand, is predicated of nothing; wood as

such is predicated of nothing; and so with man, Socrates, and the composite substance in general.

Equally the Substantial Form is never a predicate, since it never acts as a modification of anything. Form is

not an attribute of Matter hence, is not predicable of Matter it is simply a constituent of the Couplement. On

the other hand, the Form of a man is not different from the man himself [and so does not "modify" the

Matter, similarly, is part of a whole, and belongs to something else only as to a whole and not as to a separate

thing of which it is predicated. White, on the contrary, essentially belongs to something distinct from itself.

We conclude that nothing belonging to something else and predicated of it can be Substance. Substance is

that which belongs essentially to itself, or, in so far as it is a part of the differentiated object, serves only to

complete the Composite. Each or either part of the Composite belongs to itself, and is only affirmed of the

Composite in a special sense: only qua part of the whole is it predicated of something else; qua individual it is

It may be claimed as a common element in Matter, Form and the Couplement that they are all substrates. But

the mode in which Matter is the substrate of Form is different from that in which Form and the Couplement

And is it strictly true to say that Matter is the substrate of Form? Form is rather the completion which Matter's

Moreover, Form cannot be said to reside in Matter [as in a substrate]. When one thing combines with another

to form a unity, the one does not reside in the other; both alike are substrates of a third: thus, Man [the Form]

and a man [the Composite] are substrates of their experiences, and are prior to their activities and

Substance, then, is that from which all other things proceed and to which they owe their existence; it is the

5. These are incontrovertible facts in regard to the pseudosubstance of the Sensible realm: if they apply also

in some degree to the True Substance of the Intellectual, the coincidence is, doubtless, to be attributed to

We are aware that "the first" is so called only in relation to the things which come after it: "first" has no

absolute significance; the first of one series is subsequent to the last of another. "Substrate," similarly, varies

in meaning [as applied to the higher and to the lower], while as for passivity its very existence in the

Intellectual is questionable; if it does exist there, it is not the passivity of the Sensible.

It follows that the fact of "not being present in a subject [or substrate] is not universally true of Substance,

unless presence in a subject be stipulated as not including the case of the part present in the whole or of one

thing combining with another to form a distinct unity; a thing will not be present as in a subject in that with

which it cooperates in the information of a composite substance. Form, therefore, is not present in Matter as

Substance, then, is that which is not present in a subject. But if we adopt the definition "neither present in a

subject nor predicated of a subject," we must add to the second "subject" the qualification "distinct," in order

that we may not exclude the case of Man predicated of a particular man. When I predicate Man of Socrates, it

is as though I affirmed, not that a piece of wood is white, but that whiteness is white; for in asserting that

Socrates is a man, I predicate Man [the universal] of a particular man, I affirm Man of the manhood in

Socrates; I am really saying only that Socrates is Socrates, or that this particular rational animal is an animal.

It may be objected that nonpresence in a subject is not peculiar to Substance, inasmuch as the differentia of

a substance is no more present in a subject than the substance itself; but this objection results from taking a

part of the whole substance, such as "twofooted" in our example, and asserting that this part is not present in

a subject: if we take, not "twofooted" which is merely an aspect of Substance, but "twofootedness" by

which we signify not Substance but Quality, we shall find that this "twofootedness" is indeed present in a

We may be told that neither Time nor Place is present in a subject. But if the definition of Time as the

measure of Motion be regarded as denoting something measured, the "measure" will be present in Motion as

in a subject, while Motion will be present in the moved: if, on the contrary, it be supposed to signify a

The truth is, however, that the "Substance" of our enquiry may be apprehended in directly opposite ways: it

may be determined by one of the properties we have been discussing, by more than one, by all at once,

6. Granted, it may be urged, that these observations upon the nature of Substance are sound, we have not yet

arrived at a statement of its essence. Our critic doubtless expects to see this "Sensible": but its essence, its

Do we infer that fire and water are not Substance? They certainly are not Substance because they are visible.

Why, then? Because they possess Matter? No. Or Form? No. Nor because they involve a Couplement of

Matter and Form. Then why are they Substance? By existing. But does not Quantity exist, and Quality? This

What, then, is the meaning of "existence" as applied to fire, earth and the other elements? What is the

difference between this existence and existence in the other categories? It is the difference between being

simply that which merely is and being white. But surely the being qualified by "white" is the same as that

having no qualification? It is not the same: the latter is Being in the primary sense, the former is Being only

by participation and in a secondary degree. Whiteness added to Being produces a being white; Being added to

whiteness produces a white being: thus, whiteness becomes an accident of Being, and Being an accident of

The case is not equivalent to predicating white of Socrates and Socrates of white: for Socrates remains the

same, though white would appear to have a different meaning in the two propositions, since in predicating

Socrates of white we include Socrates in the [whole] sphere of whiteness, whereas in the proposition

"Being is white" implies, similarly, that Being possesses whiteness as an attribute, while in the proposition

"whiteness is Being [or, is a being]" Being is regarded as comprising whiteness in its own extension.

In sum, whiteness has existence because it is bound up with Being and present in it: Being is, thus, the source

of its existence. Being is Being on its own account, but the white is due to whiteness not because it is

The Being of the Sensible resembles the white in not originating in itself. It must therefore be regarded as

dependent for its being upon the Authentic Being, as white is dependent upon the Authentic Whiteness, and

the Authentic Whiteness dependent for its whiteness upon participation in that Supreme Being whose

7. But Matter, it may be contended, is the source of existence to the Sensible things implanted in it. From

That Matter is not a Primary we have established elsewhere. If it be urged that other things can have no

subsistence without being implanted in Matter, we admit the claim for Sensible things. But though Matter be

prior to these, it is not thereby precluded from being posterior to many thingsposterior, in fact, to all the

beings of the Intellectual sphere. Its existence is but a pale reflection, and less complete than that of the things

implanted in it. These are ReasonPrinciples and more directly derived from Being: Matter has of itself no

ReasonPrinciple whatever; it is but a shadow of a Principle, a vain attempt to achieve a Principle.

But, our critic may pursue, Matter gives existence to the things implanted in it, just as Socrates gives

existence to the whiteness implanted in himself? We reply that the higher being gives existence to the lower,

But once concede that Form is higher in the scale of Being than Matter, and Matter can no longer be regarded

as a common ground of both, nor Substance as a genus embracing Matter, Form and the Couplement. True,

these will have many common properties, to which we have already referred, but their being [or existence]

will nonetheless be different. When a higher being comes into contact with a lower, the lower, though first in

the natural order, is yet posterior in the scale of Reality: consequently, if Being does not belong in equal

degrees to Matter, to Form and to the Couplement, Substance can no longer be common to all three in the

sense of being their genus: to their posteriors it will bear a still different relation, serving them as a common

base by being bound up with all alike. Substance, thus, resembles life, dim here, clearer there, or portraits of

which one is an outline, another more minutely worked. By measuring Being by its dim manifestation and

neglecting a fuller revelation elsewhere, we may come to regard this dim existence as a common ground.

But this procedure is scarcely permissible. Every being is a distinct whole. The dim manifestation is in no

sense a common ground, just as there is no common ground in the vegetal, the sensory and the intellectual

We conclude that the term "Being" must have different connotations as applied to Matter, to Form and to

both conjointly, in spite of the single source pouring into the different streams.

Take a second derived from a first and a third from the second: it is not merely that the one will rank higher

and its successor be poorer and of lower worth; there is also the consideration that, even deriving from the

same source, one thing, subjected in a certain degree to fire, will give us an earthen jar, while another, taking

Perhaps we cannot even maintain that Matter and Form are derived from a single source; they are clearly in

8. The division into elements must, in short, be abandoned, especially in regard to Sensible Substance, known

necessarily by sense rather than by reason. We must no longer look for help in constituent parts, since such

Our plan must be to apprehend what is constant in stone, earth, water and the entities which they compose

the vegetal and animal forms, considered purely as sensibles and to confine this constant within a single

genus. Neither Matter nor Form will thus be overlooked, for Sensible Substance comports them; fire and

earth and the two intermediaries consist of Matter and Form, while composite things are actually many

substances in one. They all, moreover, have that common property which distinguishes them from other

things: serving as subjects to these others, they are never themselves present in a subject nor predicated of

any other thing. Similarly, all the characteristics which we have ascribed to Substance find a place in this

But Sensible Substance is never found apart from magnitude and quality: how then do we proceed to separate

these accidents? If we subtract them magnitude, figure, colour, dryness, moistness what is there left to be

regarded as Substance itself? All the substances under consideration are, of course, qualified.

There is, however, something in relation to which whatever turns Substance into qualified Substance is

accidental: thus, the whole of fire is not Substance, but only a part of it if the term "part" be allowed.

What then can this "part" be? Matter may be suggested. But are we actually to maintain that the particular

sensible substance consists of a conglomeration of qualities and Matter, while Sensible Substance as a whole

is merely the sum of these coagulations in the uniform Matter, each one separately forming a quale or a

quantum or else a thing of many qualities? Is it true to say that everything whose absence leaves subsistence

incomplete is a part of the particular substance, while all that is accidental to the substance already existent

takes independent rank and is not submerged in the mixture which constitutes this socalled substance?

I decline to allow that whatever combines in this way with anything else is Substance if it helps to produce a

single mass having quantity and quality, whereas taken by itself and divorced from this complementary

function it is a quality: not everything which composes the amalgam is Substance, but only the amalgam as a

And let no one take exception on the ground that we produce Sensible Substance from nonsubstances. The

whole amalgam itself is not True Substance; it is merely an imitation of that True Substance which has Being

apart from its concomitants, these indeed being derived from it as the possessor of True Being. In the lower

realm the case is different: the underlying ground is sterile, and from its inability to produce fails to attain to

the status of Being; it remains a shadow, and on this shadow is traced a sketch the world of Appearance.

9. So much for one of the genera the "Substance," so called, of the Sensible realm.

The genus as a whole must be identified with body. Bodies may be divided into the characteristically material

and the organic: the material bodies comprise fire, earth, water, air; the organic the bodies of plants and

The next step is to find the species of earth and of the other elements, and in the case of organic bodies to

distinguish plants according to their forms, and the bodies of animals either by their habitations on the earth,

in the earth, and similarly for the other elements or else as light, heavy and intermediate. Some bodies, we

shall observe, stand in the middle of the universe, others circumscribe it from above, others occupy the

middle sphere: in each case we shall find bodies different in shape, so that the bodies of the living beings of

Once we have classified bodies into the four species, we are ready to combine them on a different principle,

at the same time intermingling their differences of place, form and constitution; the resultant combinations

will be known as fiery or earthy on the basis of the excess or predominance of some one element.

The distinction between First and Second Substances, between Fire and a given example of fire, entails a

difference of a peculiar kind the difference between universal and particular. This however is not a

difference characteristic of Substance; there is also in Quality the distinction between whiteness and the white

The question may here be asked: "What deficiency has grammar compared with a particular grammar, and

science as a whole in comparison with a science?" Grammar is certainly not posterior to the particular

grammar: on the contrary, the grammar as in you depends upon the prior existence of grammar as such: the

grammar as in you becomes a particular by the fact of being in you; it is otherwise identical with grammar the

Turn to the case of Socrates: it is not Socrates who bestows manhood upon what previously was not Man, but

Besides, Socrates is merely a particular instance of Man; this particularity can have no effect whatever in

We may be told that Man [the universal] is Form alone, Socrates Form in Matter. But on this very ground

Socrates will be less fully Man than the universal; for the ReasonPrinciple will be less effectual in Matter.

If, on the contrary, Man is not determined by Form alone, but presupposes Matter, what deficiency has Man

in comparison with the material manifestation of Man, or the ReasonPrinciple in isolation as compared with

Besides, the more general is by nature prior; hence, the FormIdea is prior to the individual: but what is prior

by nature is prior unconditionally. How then can the Form take a lower rank? The individual, it is true, is

prior in the sense of being more readily accessible to our cognisance; this fact, however, entails no objective

Moreover, such a difference, if established, would be incompatible with a single ReasonPrinciple of

Substance; First and Second Substance could not have the same Principle, nor be brought under a single

10. Another method of division is possible: substances may be classed as hotdry, drycold, coldmoist, or

however we choose to make the coupling. We may then proceed to the combination and blending of these

couples, either halting at that point and going no further than the compound, or else subdividing by

habitation on the earth, in the earth or by form and by the differences exhibited by living beings, not qua

Differentiation by form or shape is no more out of place than a division based on qualities heat, cold and the

like. If it be objected that qualities go to make bodies what they are, then, we reply, so do blendings, colours,

shapes. Since our discussion is concerned with Sensible Substance, it is not strange that it should turn upon

distinctions related to senseperception: this Substance is not Being pure and simple, but the Sensible Being

We have remarked that its apparent subsistence is in fact an assemblage of Sensibles, their existence

guaranteed to us by senseperception. But since their combination is unlimited, our division must be guided

by the FormIdeas of living beings, as for example the FormIdea of Man implanted in Body; the particular

Form acts as a qualification of Body, but there is nothing unreasonable in using qualities as a basis of

We may be told that we have distinguished between simple and composite bodies, even ranking them as

opposites. But our distinction, we reply, was between material and organic bodies and raised no question of

the composite. In fact, there exists no means of opposing the composite to the simple; it is necessary to

determine the simples in the first stage of division, and then, combining them on the basis of a distinct

underlying principle, to differentiate the composites in virtue of their places and shapes, distinguishing for

These observations will suffice for the Being [Substance], or rather the Becoming, which obtains in the

11. Passing to Quantity and the quantum, we have to consider the view which identifies them with number

and magnitude on the ground that everything quantitative is numbered among Sensible things or rated by the

extension of its substrate: we are here, of course, discussing not Quantity in isolation, but that which causes a

Now we have often maintained that number and magnitude are to be regarded as the only true quantities, and

that Space and Time have no right to be conceived as quantitative: Time as the measure of Motion should be

assigned to Relation, while Space, being that which circumscribes Body, is also a relative and falls under the

On the other hand, why do we not find in the category of Quantity "great" and "small"? It is some kind of

Quantity which gives greatness to the great; greatness is not a relative, though greater and smaller are

What is it, then, which makes a mountain small and a grain of millet large? Surely, in the first place, "small"

is equivalent to "smaller." It is admitted that the term is applied only to things of the same kind, and from this

admission we may infer that the mountain is "smaller" rather than "small," and that the grain of millet is not

large in any absolute sense but large for a grain of millet. In other words, since the comparison is between

Again, why is not beauty classed as a relative? Beauty, unlike greatness, we regard as absolute and as a

quality; "more beautiful" is the relative. Yet even the term "beautiful" may be attached to something which in

a given relation may appear ugly: the beauty of man, for example, is ugliness when compared with that of the

gods; "the most beautiful of monkeys," we may quote, "is ugly in comparison with any other type."

Nonetheless, a thing is beautiful in itself; as related to something else it is either more or less beautiful.

Similarly, an object is great in itself, and its greatness is due, not to any external, but to its own participation

Are we actually to eliminate the beautiful on the pretext that there is a more beautiful? No more then must we

eliminate the great because of the greater: the greater can obviously have no existence whatever apart from

the great, just as the more beautiful can have no existence without the beautiful.

12. It follows that we must allow contrariety to Quantity: whenever we speak of great and small, our notions

acknowledge this contrariety by evolving opposite images, as also when we refer to many and few; indeed,

"Many," predicated of the inhabitants of a house, does duty for "more": "few" people are said to be in the

"Many," again, necessarily involves a large numerical plurality. This plurality can scarcely be a relative; it is

The same applies to the continuous [magnitude], the notion of which entails prolongation to a distant point.

Quantity, then, appears whenever there is a progression from the unit or the point: if either progression comes

to a rapid halt, we have respectively "few" and "small"; if it goes forward and does not quickly cease, "many"

What, we may be asked, is the limit of this progression? What, we retort, is the limit of beauty, or of heat?

Whatever limit you impose, there is always a "hotter"; yet "hotter" is accounted a relative, "hot" a pure

In sum, just as there is a ReasonPrinciple of Beauty, so there must be a ReasonPrinciple of greatness,

participation in which makes a thing great, as the Principle of beauty makes it beautiful.

To judge from these instances, there is contrariety in Quantity. Place we may neglect as not strictly coming

under the category of Quantity; if it were admitted, "above" could only be a contrary if there were something

in the universe which was "below": as referring to the partial, the terms "above" and "below" are used in a

purely relative sense, and must go with "right" and "left" into the category of Relation.

Syllable and discourse are only indirectly quantities or substrates of Quantity; it is voice that is quantitative:

but voice is a kind of Motion; it must accordingly in any case [quantity or no quantity] be referred to Motion,

13. It has been remarked that the continuous is effectually distinguished from the discrete by their possessing

The same principle gives rise to the numerical distinction between odd and even; and it holds good that if

there are differentiae found in both contraries, they are either to be abandoned to the objects numbered, or

else to be considered as differentiae of the abstract numbers, and not of the numbers manifested in the

sensible objects. If the numbers are logically separable from the objects, that is no reason why we should not

But how are we to differentiate the continuous, comprising as it does line, surface and solid? The line may be

rated as of one dimension, the surface as of two dimensions, the solid as of three, if we are only making a

calculation and do not suppose that we are dividing the continuous into its species; for it is an invariable rule

that numbers, thus grouped as prior and posterior, cannot be brought into a common genus; there is no

common basis in first, second and third dimensions. Yet there is a sense in which they would appear to be

equal namely, as pure measures of Quantity: of higher and lower dimensions, they are not however more or

Numbers have similarly a common property in their being numbers all; and the truth may well be, not that

Suppose, however, that they are not derived from any source whatever, but merely exist; we at any rate

conceive them as being derived, and so may be assumed to regard the smaller as taking priority over the

greater: yet, even so, by the mere fact of their being numbers they are reducible to a single type.

What applies to numbers is equally true of magnitudes; though here we have to distinguish between line,

surface and solid the last also referred to as "body" in the ground that, while all are magnitudes, they differ

It remains to enquire whether these species are themselves to be divided: the line into straight, circular, spiral;

the surface into rectilinear and circular figures; the solid into the various solid figures sphere and polyhedra:

whether these last should be subdivided, as by the geometers, into those contained by triangular and

quadrilateral planes: and whether a further division of the latter should be performed.

14. How are we to classify the straight line? Shall we deny that it is a magnitude?

The suggestion may be made that it is a qualified magnitude. May we not, then, consider straightness as a

differentia of "line"? We at any rate draw on Quality for differentiae of Substance.

The straight line is, thus, a quantity plus a differentia; but it is not on that account a composite made up of

straightness and line: if it be a composite, the composite possesses a differentiae of its own.

But [if the line is a quantity] why is not the product of three lines included in Quantity? The answer is that a

triangle consists not merely of three lines but of three lines in a particular disposition, a quadrilateral of four

lines in a particular disposition: even the straight line involves disposition as well as quantity.

Holding that the straight line is not mere quantity, we should naturally proceed to assert that the line as

limited is not mere quantity, but for the fact that the limit of a line is a point, which is in the same category,

Quantity. Similarly, the limited surface will be a quantity, since lines, which have a far better right than itself

to this category, constitute its limits. With the introduction of the limited surface rectangle, hexagon,

polygon into the category of Quantity, this category will be brought to include every figure whatsoever.

If however by classing the triangle and the rectangle as qualia we propose to bring figures under Quality, we

are not thereby precluded from assigning the same object to more categories than one: in so far as it is a

magnitude a magnitude of such and such a size it will belong to Quantity; in so far as it presents a

It may be urged that the triangle is essentially a particular shape. Then what prevents our ranking the sphere

To proceed on these lines would lead us to the conclusion that geometry is concerned not with magnitudes

but with Quality. But this conclusion is untenable; geometry is the study of magnitudes. The differences of

magnitudes do not eliminate the existence of magnitudes as such, any more than the differences of substances

Moreover, every surface is limited; it is impossible for any surface to be infinite in extent.

Again, when I find Quality bound up with Substance, I regard it as substantial quality: I am not less, but far

more, disposed to see in figures or shapes [qualitative] varieties of Quantity. Besides, if we are not to regard

Suppose, then, that we allow differences of magnitude; we commit ourselves to a specific classification of the

15. How far is it true that equality and inequality are characteristic of Quantity?

Triangles, it is significant, are said to be similar rather than equal. But we also refer to magnitudes as similar,

and the accepted connotation of similarity does not exclude similarity or dissimilarity in Quantity. It may, of

course, be the case that the term "similarity" has a different sense here from that understood in reference to

Furthermore, if we are told that equality and inequality are characteristic of Quantity, that is not to deny that

similarity also may be predicated of certain quantities. If, on the contrary, similarity and dissimilarity are to

be confined to Quality, the terms as applied to Quantity must, as we have said, bear a different meaning.

But suppose similarity to be identical in both genera; Quantity and Quality must then be expected to reveal

May the truth be this: that similarity is predicable of Quantity only in so far as Quantity possesses

[qualitative] differences? But as a general rule differences are grouped with that of which they are

differences, especially when the difference is a difference of that thing alone. If in one case the difference

completes the substance and not in another, we inevitably class it with that which it completes, and only

consider it as independent when it is not complementary: when we say "completes the substance," we refer

not to Subtance as such but to the differentiated substance; the particular object is to be thought of as

We must not however fad to observe that we predicate equality of triangles, rectangles, and figures generally,

whether plane or solid: this may be given as a ground for regarding equality and inequality as characteristic

It remains to enquire whether similarity and dissimilarity are characteristic of Quality.

We have spoken of Quality as combining with other entities, Matter and Quantity, to form the complete

Sensible Substance; this Substance, so called, may be supposed to constitute the manifold world of Sense,

which is not so much an essence as a quale. Thus, for the essence of fire we must look to the

ReasonPrinciple; what produces the visible aspect is, properly speaking, a quale.

Man's essence will lie in his ReasonPrinciple; that which is perfected in the corporeal nature is a mere image

Consider: the visible Socrates is a man, yet we give the name of Socrates to that likeness of him in a portrait,

which consists of mere colours, mere pigments: similarly, it is a ReasonPrinciple which constitutes

Socrates, but we apply the name Socrates to the Socrates we see: in truth, however, the colours and shapes

which make up the visible Socrates are but reproductions of those in the ReasonPrinciple, while this

ReasonPrinciple itself bears a corresponding relation to the truest ReasonPrinciple of Man. But we need

16. When each of the entities bound up with the pseudosubstance is taken apart from the rest, the name of

Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we

signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing for example, the beauty or ugliness of a body. This

beauty need we say? is identical in name only with Intellectual Beauty: it follows that the term "Quality"

as applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual is necessarily equivocal; even blackness and whiteness are

But the beauty in the germ, in the particular ReasonPrinciple is this the same as the manifested beauty, or

do they coincide only in name? Are we to assign this beauty and the same question applies to deformity in

the soul to the Intellectual order, or to the Sensible? That beauty is different in the two spheres is by now

clear. If it be embraced in Sensible Quality, then virtue must also be classed among the qualities of the lower.

But merely some virtues will take rank as Sensible, others as Intellectual qualities.

It may even be doubted whether the arts, as ReasonPrinciples, can fairly be among Sensible qualities;

ReasonPrinciples, it is true, may reside in Matter, but "matter" for them means Soul. On the other hand,

their being found in company with Matter commits them in some degree to the lower sphere. Take the case of

lyrical music: it is performed upon strings; melody, which may be termed a part of the art, is sensuous

sound though, perhaps, we should speak here not of parts but of manifestations [Acts]: yet, called

manifestations, they are nonetheless sensuous. The beauty inherent in body is similarly bodiless; but we have

Geometry and arithmetic are, we shall maintain, of a twofold character; in their earthly types they rank with

Sensible Quality, but in so far as they are functions of pure Soul, they necessarily belong to that other world

in close proximity to the Intellectual. This, too, is in Plato's view the case with music and astronomy.

The arts concerned with material objects and making use of perceptible instruments and senseperception

must be classed with Sensible Quality, even though they are dispositions of the Soul, attendant upon its

There is also every reason for consigning to this category the practical virtues whose function is directed to a

social end: these do not isolate Soul by inclining it towards the higher; their manifestation makes for beauty

On this principle, the beauty in the germ, and still more the blackness and whiteness in it, will be included

Are we, then, to rank the individual soul, as containing these ReasonPrinciples, with Sensible Substance?

But we do not even identify the Principles with body; we merely include them in Sensible Quality on the

ground that they are connected with body and are activities of body. The constituents of Sensible Substance

have already been specified; we have no intention whatever of adding to them Substance bodiless.

As for Qualities, we hold that they are invariably bodiless, being affections arising within Soul; but, like the

ReasonPrinciples of the individual soul, they are associated with Soul in its apostasy, and are accordingly

counted among the things of the lower realm: such affections, torn between two worlds by their objects and

their abode, we have assigned to Quality, which is indeed not bodily but manifested in body.

But we refrain from assigning Soul to Sensible Substance, on the ground that we have already referred to

Quality [which is Sensible] those affections of Soul which are related to body. On the contrary, Soul,

conceived apart from affection and ReasonPrinciple, we have restored to its origin, leaving in the lower

17. This procedure, if approved, will entail a distinction between psychic and bodily qualities, the latter

If we decide to refer all souls to the higher, we are still at liberty to perform for Sensible qualities a division

founded upon the senses themselves the eyes, the ears, touch, taste, smell; and if we are to look for further

differences, colours may be subdivided according to varieties of vision, sounds according to varieties of

hearing, and so with the other senses: sounds may also be classified qualitatively as sweet, harsh, soft.

Here a difficulty may be raised: we divide the varieties of Substance and their functions and activities, fair or

foul or indeed of any kind whatsoever, on the basis of Quality, Quantity rarely, if ever, entering into the

differences which produce species; Quantity, again, we divide in accordance with qualities of its own: how

then are we to divide Quality itself into species? what differences are we to employ, and from what genus

shall we take them? To take them from Quality itself would be no less absurd than setting up substances as

How, then, are we to distinguish black from white? how differentiate colours in general from tastes and

tangible qualities? By the variety of senseorgans? Then there will be no difference in the objects

But, waiving this objection, how deal with qualities perceived by the same senseorgan? We may be told that

some colours integrate, others disintegrate the vision, that some tastes integrate, others disintegrate the

tongue: we reply that, first, it is the actual experiences [of colour and taste, and not the senseorgans] that we

are discussing and it is to these that the notions of integration and disintegration must be applied; secondly, a

It may be suggested that we divide them by their powers, and this suggestion is so far reasonable that we may

well agree to divide the nonsensuous qualities, the sciences for example, on this basis; but we see no reason

for resorting to their effects for the division of qualities sensuous. Even if we divide the sciences by their

powers, founding our division of their processes upon the faculties of the mind, we can only grasp their

differences in a rational manner if we look not only to their subjectmatter but also to their

But, granted that we may divide the arts by their ReasonPrinciples and theorems, this method will hardly

apply to embodied qualities. Even in the arts themselves an explanation would be required for the differences

between the ReasonPrinciples themselves. Besides, we have no difficulty in seeing that white differs from

18. These problems at any rate all serve to show that, while in general it is necessary to look for differences

by which to separate things from each other, to hunt for differences of the differences themselves is both

futile and irrational. We cannot have substances of substances, quantities of quantities, qualities of qualities,

differences of differences; differences must, where possible, be found outside the genus, in creative powers

and the like: but where no such criteria are present, as in distinguishing darkgreen from palegreen, both

being regarded as derived from white and black, what expedient may be suggested?

Senseperception and intelligence may be trusted to indicate diversity but not to explain it: explanation is

outside the province of senseperception, whose function is merely to produce a variety of information;

while, as for intelligence, it works exclusively with intuitions and never resorts to explanations to justify

them; there is in the movements of intelligence a diversity which separates one object from another, making

Do all qualities constitute differentiae, or not? Granted that whiteness and colours in general and the qualities

dependent upon touch and taste can, even while they remain species [of Quality], become differentiae of

other things, how can grammar and music serve as differentiae? Perhaps in the sense that minds may be

distinguished as grammatical and musical, especially if the qualities are innate, in which case they do become

It remains to decide whether there can be any differentia derived from the genus to which the differentiated

thing belongs, or whether it must of necessity belong to another genus? The former alternative would produce

differentiae of things derived from the same genus as the differentiae themselves for example, qualities of

qualities. Virtue and vice are two states differing in quality: the states are qualities, and their differentiae

qualities unless indeed it be maintained that the state undifferentiated is not a quality, that the differentia

But consider the sweet as beneficial, the bitter as injurious: then bitter and sweet are distinguished, not by

Quality, but by Relation. We might also be disposed to identify the sweet with the thick, and the Pungent

with the thin: "thick" however hardly reveals the essence but merely the cause of sweetness an argument

We must therefore reflect whether it may be taken as an invariable rule that Quality is never a differentia of

Quality, any more than Substance is a differentia of Substance, or Quantity of Quantity.

Surely, it may be interposed, five differs from three by two. No: it exceeds it by two; we do not say that it

differs: how could it differ by a "two" in the "three"? We may add that neither can Motion differ from Motion

In the case of virtue and vice, whole must be compared with whole, and the differentiation conducted on this

basis. As for the differentia being derived from the same genus as themselves, namely, Quality, and from no

other genus, if we proceed on the principle that virtue is bound up with pleasure, vice with lust, virtue again

with the acquisition of food, vice with idle extravagance, and accept these definitions as satisfactory, then

19. With Quality we have undertaken to group the dependent qualia, in so far as Quality is bound up with

them; we shall not however introduce into this category the qualified objects [qua objects], that we may not

be dealing with two categories at once; we shall pass over the objects to that which gives them their [specific]

But how are we to classify such terms as "not white"? If "not white" signifies some other colour, it is a

quality. But if it is merely a negation of an enumeration of things not white, it will be either a meaningless

sound, or else a name or definition of something actual: if a sound, it is a kind of motion; if a name or

definition, it is a relative, inasmuch as names and definitions are significant. But if not only the things

enumerated are in some one genus, but also the propositions and terms in question must be each of them

significative of some genus, then we shall assert that negative propositions and terms posit certain things

within a restricted field and deny others. Perhaps, however, it would be better, in view of their composite

What view, then, shall we take of privations? If they are privations of qualities, they will themselves be

qualities: "toothless" and "blind," for example, are qualities. "Naked" and "dothed," on the other hand, are

neither of them qualities but states: they therefore comport a relation to something else.

Passivity, while it lasts, is not a quality but a motion; when it is a past experience remaining in one's

possession, it is a quality; if one ceases to possess the experience then regarded as a finished occurrence, one

is considered to have been moved in other words, to have been in Motion. But in none of these cases is it

necessary to conceive of anything but Motion; the idea of time should be excluded; even present time has no

"Well" and similar adverbial expressions are to be referred to the single generic notion [of Quality].

It remains to consider whether blushing should be referred to Quality, even though the person blushing is not

included in this category. The fact of becoming flushed is rightly not referred to Quality; for it involves

passivity in short, Motion. But if one has ceased to become flushed and is actually red, this is surely a case

of Quality, which is independent of time. How indeed are we to define Quality but by the aspect which a

substance presents? By predicating of a man redness, we clearly ascribe to him a quality.

We shall accordingly maintain that states alone, and not dispositions, constitute qualities: thus, "hot" is a

20. We have to ascertain whether there is not to every quality a contrary. In the case of virtue and vice, even

But when we turn to colours, we do not find the intermediates so related. If we regard the intermediates as

blendings of the extremes, we must not posit any contrariety other than that between black and white, but

must show that all other colours are combinations of these two. Contrariety however demands that there be

some one distinct quality in the intermediates, though this quality may be seen to arise from a combination.

It may further be suggested that contraries not only differ from each other, but also entail the greatest possible

difference. But "the greatest possible difference" would seem to presuppose that intermediates have already

been established: eliminate the series, and how will you define "the greatest possible"? Sight, we may be told,

will reveal to us that grey is nearer than black to white; and taste may be our judge when we have hot, cold

That we are accustomed to act upon these assumptions is obvious enough; but the following considerations

White and yellow are entirely different from each other a statement which applies to any colour whatsoever

as compared with any other; they are accordingly contrary qualities. Their contrariety is independent of the

presence of intermediates: between health and disease no intermediate intrudes, and yet they are contraries.

It may be urged that the products of a contrariety exhibit the greatest diversity. But "the greatest diversity" is

clearly meaningless, unless we can point to lower degrees of diversity in the means. Thus, we cannot speak of

"the greatest diversity" in reference to health and disease. This definition of contrariety is therefore

Suppose that we say "great diversity" instead of "the greatest": if "great" is equivalent to greater and implies a

less, immediate contraries will again escape us; if, on the other hand, we mean strictly "great" and assume

that every quality shows a great divergence from every other, we must not suppose that the divergence can be

Nonetheless, we must endeavour to find a meaning for the term "contrary." Can we accept the principle that

when things have a certain similarity which is not generic nor in any sense due to admixture, but a similarity

residing in their forms if the term be permitted they differ in degree but are not contraries; contraries being

rather those things which have no specific identity? It would be necessary to stipulate that they belong to the

same genus, Quality, in order to cover those immediate contraries which [apparently] have nothing conducing

to similarity, inasmuch as there are no intermediates looking both ways, as it were, and having a mutual

similarity to each other; some contraries are precluded by their isolation from similarity.

If these observations be sound, colours which have a common ground will not be contraries. But there will be

nothing to prevent, not indeed every colour from being contrary to every other, but any one colour from being

contrary to any other; and similarly with tastes. This will serve as a statement of the problem.

As for Degree [subsisting in Quality], it was given as our opinion that it exists in the objects participating in

Quality, though whether it enters into qualities as such into health and justice was left open to question. If

indeed these qualities possess an extension quite apart from their participants, we must actually ascribe to

them degrees: but in truth they belong to a sphere where each entity is the whole and does not admit of

21. The claim of Motion to be established as a genus will depend upon three conditions: first, that it cannot

rightly be referred to any other genus; second, that nothing higher than itself can be predicated of it in respect

of its essence; third, that by assuming differences it will produce species. These conditions satisfied, we may

Clearly it cannot be identified with either the Substance or the Quality of the things which possess it. It

cannot, further, be consigned to Action, for Passivity also comprises a variety of motions; nor again to

Passivity itself, because many motions are actions: on the contrary, actions and passions are to be referred to

Furthermore, it cannot lay claim to the category of Relation on the mere ground that it has an attributive and

not a selfcentred existence: on this ground, Quality too would find itself in that same category; for Quality is

If we are agreed that Quality and Quantity, though attributive, are real entities, and on the basis of this reality

distinguishable as Quality and Quantity respectively: then, on the same principle, since Motion, though an

attribute has a reality prior to its attribution, it is incumbent upon us to discover the intrinsic nature of this

reality. We must never be content to regard as a relative something which exists prior to its attribution, but

only that which is engendered by Relation and has no existence apart from the relation to which it owes its

name: the double, strictly so called, takes birth and actuality in juxtaposition with a yard's length, and by this

very process of being juxtaposed with a correlative acquires the name and exhibits the fact of being double.

What, then, is that entity, called Motion, which, though attributive, has an independent reality, which makes

its attribution possible the entity corresponding to Quality, Quantity and Substance?

But first, perhaps, we should make sure that there is nothing prior to Motion and predicated of it as its genus.

Change may be suggested as a prior. But, in the first place, either it is identical with Motion, or else, if

change be claimed as a genus, it will stand distinct from the genera so far considered: secondly, Motion will

evidently take rank as a species and have some other species opposed to it becoming, say which will be

What, then, is the ground for denying that becoming is a motion? The fact, perhaps, that what comes to be

does not yet exist, whereas Motion has no dealings with the nonexistent. But, on that ground, becoming will

not be a change either. If however it be alleged that becoming is merely a type of alteration or growth since it

takes place when things alter and grow, the antecedents of becoming are being confused with becoming itself.

Yet becoming, entailing as it does these antecedents, must necessarily be a distinct species; for the event and

process of becoming cannot be identified with merely passive alteration, like turning hot or white: it is

possible for the antecedents to take place without becoming as such being accomplished, except in so far as

the actual alteration [implied in the antecedents] has "come to be"; where, however, an animal or a vegetal

life is concerned, becoming [or birth] takes place only upon its acquisition of a Form.

The contrary might be maintained: that change is more plausibly ranked as a species than is Motion, because

change signifies merely the substitution of one thing for another, whereas Motion involves also the removal

of a thing from the place to which it belongs, as is shown by locomotion. Even rejecting this distinction, we

must accept as types of Motion knowledge and musical performance in short, changes of condition: thus,

alteration will come to be regarded as a species of Motion namely, motion displacing.

22. But suppose that we identify alteration with Motion on the ground that Motion itself results in difference:

It may roughly be characterized as the passage from the potentiality to its realization. That is potential which

can either pass into a Form for example, the potential statue or else pass into actuality such as the ability

to walk: whenever progress is made towards the statue, this progress is Motion; and when the ability to walk

is actualized in walking, this walking is itself Motion: dancing is, similarly, the motion produced by the

In the one type of Motion a new Form comes into existence created by the motion; the other constitutes, as it

were, the pure Form of the potentiality, and leaves nothing behind it when once the motion has ceased.

Accordingly, the view would not be unreasonable which, taking some Forms to be active, others inactive,

regarded Motion as a dynamic Form in opposition to the other Forms which are static, and further as the

cause of whatever new Form ensues upon it. To proceed to identify this bodily motion with life would

however be unwarrantable; it must be considered as identical only in name with the motions of Intellect and

That Motion is a genus we may be all the more confident in virtue of the difficulty the impossibility even

But how can it be a Form in cases where the motion leads to deterioration, or is purely passive? Motion, we

may suggest, is like the heat of the sun causing some things to grow and withering others. In so far as Motion

is a common property, it is identical in both conditions; its apparent difference is due to the objects moved.

Is, then, becoming ill identical with becoming well? As motions they are identical. In what respect, then, do

This question may however be postponed until we come to consider alteration: at present we have to discover

what is the constant element in every motion, for only on this basis can we establish the claim of Motion to

Perhaps the one term covers many meanings; its claim to generic status would then correspond to that of

As a solution of the problem we may suggest that motions conducing to the natural state or functioning in

natural conditions should perhaps, as we have already asserted, be regarded as being in a sense Forms, while

those whose direction is contrary to nature must be supposed to be assimilated to the results towards which

But what is the constant element in alteration, in growth and birth and their opposites, in local change? What

is that which makes them all motions? Surely it is the fact that in every case the object is never in the same

state before and after the motion, that it cannot remain still and in complete inactivity but, so long as the

motion is present, is continually urged to take a new condition, never acquiescing in Identity but always

Thus, Difference may be predicated of Motion, not merely in the sense that it arises and persists in a

difference of conditions, but in the sense of being itself perpetual difference. It follows that Time, as being

created by Motion, also entails perpetual difference: Time is the measure of unceasing Motion,

In short, the common basis of all Motion is the existence of a progression and an urge from potentiality and

the potential to actuality and the actual: everything which has any kind of motion whatsoever derives this

23. The Motion which acts upon Sensible objects enters from without, and so shakes, drives, rouses and

thrusts its participants that they may neither rest nor preserve their identity and all to the end that they may

be caught into that restlessness, that flustering excitability which is but an image of Life.

We must avoid identifying Motion with the objects moved: by walking we do not mean the feet but the

activity springing from a potentiality in the feet. Since the potentiality is invisible, we see of necessity only

the active feet that is to say, not feet simply, as would be the case if they were at rest, but something besides

feet, something invisible but indirectly seen as an accompaniment by the fact that we observe the feet to be in

everchanging positions and no longer at rest. We infer alteration, on the other hand, from the qualitative

Where, then, does Motion reside, when there is one thing that moves and another that passes from an inherent

potentiality to actuality? In the mover? How then will the moved, the patient, participate in the motion? In the

moved? Then why does not Motion remain in it, once having come? It would seem that Motion must neither

be separated from the active principle nor allowed to reside in it; it must proceed from agent to patient

without so inhering in the latter as to be severed from the former, passing from one to the other like a breath

Now, when the potentiality of Motion consists in an ability to walk, it may be imagined as thrusting a man

forward and causing him to be continually adopting a different position; when it lies in the capacity to heat, it

heats; when the potentiality takes hold of Matter and builds up the organism, we have growth; and when

another potentiality demolishes the structure, the result is decay, that which has the potentiality of demolition

experiencing the decay. Where the birthgiving principle is active, we find birth; where it is impotent and the

power to destroy prevails, destruction takes place not the destruction of what already exists, but that which

Health comes about in the same way when the power which produces health is active and predominant;

Thus, Motion is conditioned, not only by the objects in which it occurs, but also by its origins and its course,

and it is a distinctive mark of Motion to be always qualified and to take its quality from the moved.

24. With regard to locomotion: if ascending is to be held contrary to descending, and circular motion different

[in kind] from motion in a straight line, we may ask how this difference is to be defined the difference, for

The driving power is one though indeed it might be maintained that the upward drive is different from the

downward, and the downward passage of a different character from the upward, especially if it be a natural

motion, in which case the upmotion constitutes lightness, the downmotion heaviness.

But in all these motions alike there is the common tendency to seek an appointed place, and in this tendency

we seem to have the differentia which separates locomotion from the other species.

As for motion in a circle and motion in a straight line, if the former is in practice indistinguishable from the

latter, how can we regard them as different? The only difference lies in the shape of the course, unless the

view be taken that circular motion is "impure," as not being entirely a motion, not involving a complete

However, it appears in general that locomotion is a definite unity, taking its differences from externals.

25. The nature of integration and disintegrations calls for scrutiny. Are they different from the motions above

mentioned, from comingtobe and passingaway, from growth and decay, from change of place and from

alteration? or must they be referred to these? or, again, must some of these be regarded as types of integration

If integration implies that one element proceeds towards another, implies in short an approach, and

disintegration, on the other hand, a retreat into the background, such motions may be termed local; we have

clearly a case of two things moving in the direction of unity, or else making away from each other.

If however the things achieve a sort of fusion, mixture, blending, and if a unity comes into being, not when

the process of combination is already complete, but in the very act of combining, to which of our specified

motions shall we refer this type? There will certainly be locomotion at first, but it will be succeeded by

something different; just as in growth locomotion is found at the outset, though later it is supplanted by

quantitative motion. The present case is similar: locomotion leads the way, but integration or disintegration

does not inevitably follow; integration takes place only when the impinging elements become intertwined,

On the other hand, it often happens that locomotion follows disintegration, or else occurs simultaneously,

though the experience of the disintegrated is not conceived in terms of locomotion: so too in integration a

distinct experience, a distinct unification, accompanies the locomotion and remains separate from it.

Are we then to posit a new species for these two motions, adding to them, perhaps, alteration? A thing is

altered by becoming dense in other words, by integration; it is altered again by being rarefied that is, by

disintegration. When wine and water are mixed, something is produced different from either of the

But perhaps we should recall a previous distinction, and while holding that integrations and disintegrations

precede alterations, should maintain that alterations are nonetheless distinct from either; that, further, not

every alteration is of this type [presupposing, that is to say, integration or disintegration], and, in particular,

rarefication and condensation are not identical with disintegration and integration, nor in any sense derived

Again, can we use integration and disintegration to explain blackness and whiteness? But to doubt the

independent existence of these qualities means that, beginning with colours, we may end by annihilating

almost all qualities, or rather all without exception; for if we identify every alteration, or qualitative change,

with integration and disintegration, we allow nothing whatever to come into existence; the same elements

26. We may now take the various specific types of Motion, such as locomotion, and once again enquire for

each one whether it is not to be divided on the basis of direction, up, down, straight, circular a question

already raised; whether the organic motion should be distinguished from the inorganic they are clearly not

alike; whether, again, organic motions should be subdivided into walking, swimming and flight.

Perhaps we should also distinguish, in each species, natural from unnatural motions: this distinction would

however imply that motions have differences which are not external. It may indeed be the case that motions

create these differences and cannot exist without them; but Nature may be supposed to be the ultimate source

Motions may also be classed as natural, artificial and purposive: "natural" embracing growth and decay;

"artificial" architecture and shipbuilding; "purposive" enquiry, learning, government, and, in general, all

Again, with regard to growth, alteration and birth, the division may proceed from the natural and unnatural,

27. What view are we to take of that which is opposed to Motion, whether it be Stability or Rest? Are we to

consider it as a distinct genus, or to refer it to one of the genera already established? We should, no doubt, be

well advised to assign Stability to the Intellectual, and to look in the lower sphere for Rest alone.

First, then, we have to discover the precise nature of this Rest. If it presents itself as identical with Stability,

we have no right to expect to find it in the sphere where nothing is stable and the apparently stable has merely

Suppose the contrary: we decide that Rest is different from Stability inasmuch as Stability belongs to the

utterly immobile, Rest to the stationary which, though of a nature to move, does not move. Now, if Rest

means coming to rest, it must be regarded as a motion which has not yet ceased but still continues; but if we

suppose it to be incompatible with Motion, we have first to ask whether there is in the Sensible world

Yet nothing can experience every type of motion; certain motions must be ruled out in order that we may

speak of the moving object as existing: may we not, then, say of that which has no locomotion and is at rest

as far as pertains to that specific type of motion, simply that it does not move?

Rest, accordingly, is the negation of Motion: in other words, it has no generic status. It is in fact related only

to one type of motion, namely, locomotion; it is therefore the negation of this motion that is meant.

But, it may be asked, why not regard Motion as the negation of Stability? We reply that Motion does not

appear alone; it is accompanied by a force which actualizes its object, forcing it on, as it were, giving it a

thousand forms and destroying them all: Rest, on the contrary, comports nothing but the object itself, and

Why, then, did we not in discussing the Intellectual realm assert that Stability was the negation of Motion?

Because it is not indeed possible to consider Stability as an annulling of Motion, for when Motion ceases

Stability does not exist, but requires for its own existence the simultaneous existence of Motion; and what is

of a nature to move is not stationary because Stability of that realm is motionless, but because Stability has

taken hold of it; in so far as it has Motion, it will never cease to move: thus, it is stationary under the

influence of Stability, and moves under the influence of Motion. In the lower realm, too, a thing moves in

virtue of Motion, but its Rest is caused by a deficiency; it has been deprived of its due motion.

What we have to observe is the essential character of this Sensible counterpart of Stability.

Consider sickness and health. The convalescent moves in the sense that he passes from sickness to health.

What species of rest are we to oppose to this convalescence? If we oppose the condition from which he

departs, that condition is sickness, not Stability; if that into which he passes, it is health, again not the same as

It may be declared that health or sickness is indeed some form of Stability: we are to suppose, then, that

Stability is the genus of which health and sickness are species; which is absurd.

Stability may, again, be regarded as an attribute of health: according to this view, health will not be health

28. We have already indicated that Activity and Passivity are to be regarded as motions, and that it is possible

As for the remaining socalled genera, we have shown that they are reducible to those which we have

With regard to the relative, we have maintained that Relation belongs to one object as compared with another,

that the two objects coexist simultaneously, and that Relation is found wherever a substance is in such a

condition as to produce it; not that the substance is a relative, except in so far as it constitutes part of a

We may also adopt the ancient division of relatives into creative principles, measures, excesses and

deficiencies, and those which in general separate objects on the basis of similarities and differences.

1. How are we to explain the omnipresence of the soul? Does it depend upon the definite magnitude of the

material universe coupled with some native tendency in soul to distribute itself over material mass, or is it a

In the latter case, soul will not appear just where body may bring it; body will meet soul awaiting it

everywhere; wheresoever body finds place, there soul lay before ever body was; the entire material mass of

But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be

of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before

there was any All? And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence

of extension, extending over a universe? We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it

does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an accidental attribute leaves the problem still

unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the

We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say sweetness or colour, for while these are actual

states of the masses affected so that they show that quality at every point, none of them has an independent

existence; they are attributes of body and known only as in body; such quality is necessarily of a definite

extension. Further, the colour at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is

the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as

the facts of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in

the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence.

Obviously, we must take hold of the question from the very beginning in the hope of finding some clear and

convincing theory as to how soul, immaterial and without magnitude, can be thus broadspread, whether

before material masses exist or as enveloping them. Of course, should it appear that this omnipresence may

occur apart from material things, there is no difficulty in accepting its occurrence within the material.

2. Side by side exist the Authentic All and its counterpart, the visible universe. The Authentic is contained in

nothing, since nothing existed before it; of necessity anything coming after it must, as a first condition of

existence, be contained by this All, especially since it depends upon the Authentic and without that could

We may be reminded that the universe cannot be contained in the Authentic as in a place, where place would

mean the boundaries of some surrounding extension considered as an envelope, or some space formerly a part

of the Void and still remaining unoccupied even after the emergence of the universe, that it can only support

itself, as it were, upon the Authentic and rest in the embrace of its omnipresence; but this objection is merely

verbal and will disappear if our meaning is grasped; we mention it for another purpose; it goes to enforce our

real assertion that the Authentic All, at once primal and veritable, needs no place and is in no way contained.

The All, as being an integral, cannot fall short of itself; it must ever have fulfilled its own totality, ever

reached to its own equivalence; as far as the sum of entities extends, there this is; for this is the All.

Inevitably, also, anything other than this All that may be stationed therein must have part in the All, merge

into it, and hold by its strength; it is not that the thing detaches a portion of the All but that within itself it

finds the All which has entered into it while still unbrokenly selfabiding, since Being cannot lodge in

Being, then, is present to all Being; an identity cannot tear itself asunder; the omnipresence asserted of it must

be presence within the realm of Being; that is, it must be a selfpresence. And it is in no way strange that the

omnipresence should be at once selfabiding and universal; this is merely saying omnipresence within a

It is our way to limit Being to the senseknown and therefore to think of omnipresence in terms of the

concrete; in our overestimate of the sensible, we question how that other Nature can reach over such vastness;

but our great is small, and this, small to us, is great; it reaches integrally to every point of our universe or,

better, our universe, moving from every side and in all its members towards this, meets it everywhere as the

The universe in all its reach can attain nothing further that would mean overpassing the total of Being and

therefore is content to circle about it; not able to encompass or even to fill the All, it is content to accept place

and subordination, for thus it preserves itself in neighbouring the higher present to it present and yet absent;

Wherever the body of the universe may touch, there it finds this All; it strives for no further advance, willing

to revolve in that one circle, since to it that is the All and in that movement its every part embraces the All.

If that higher were itself in place there would be the need of seeking that precise place by a certain right path;

part of seeker must touch part of sought, and there would be far and near. But since there is no far and near

there must be, if presence at all, presence entire. And presence there indubitably is; this highest is present to

3. But are we to think of this Authentic Being as, itself, present, or does it remain detached, omnipresent in

Under the theory of presence by powers, souls are described as rays; the source remains selflocked and

Now, in beings whose unity does not reproduce the entire nature of that principle, any presence is presence of

an emanant power: even this, however, does not mean that the principle is less than integrally present; it is

not sundered from the power which it has uttered; all is offered, but the recipient is able to take only so much.

But in Beings in which the plenitude of these powers is manifested, there clearly the Authentic itself is

present, though still as remaining distinct; it is distinct in that, becoming the informing principle of some

definite thing, it would abdicate from its standing as the total and from its uttermost selfabiding and would

belong, in some mode of accident, to another thing as well. Still it is not the property of what may seek to

join with it; it chooses where it will and enters as the participant's power may allow, but it does not become a

chattel; it remains the quested and so in another sense never passes over. There is nothing disquieting in

omnipresence after this mode where there is no appropriation: in the same accidental way, we may

reasonably put it, soul concurs with body, but it is soul selfholding, not inbound with Matter, free even of

Nor does the placelessness of Being make it surprising that it be present universally to things of place; on the

contrary, the wonder would be the more than wonder, the impossibility if from a place of its own it were

present to other things in their place, or if having place it were present at all and, especially present, as we

But set it outside of place, and reason tells us that it will be present entire where it is present at all and that,

present to the total, it must be present in the same completeness to every several unity; otherwise something

How can we so dispart Being? We cannot break Life into parts; if the total was Life, the fragment is not. But

we do not thus sunder Intelligence, one intelligence in this man, another in that? No; such a fragment would

not be Intelligence. But the Being of the individual? Once more, if the total thing is Being, then a fragment

could not be. Are we told that in a body, a total of parts, every member is also a body? But here we are

dividing not body but a particular quantity of body, each of those divisions being described as body in virtue

of possessing the Form or Idea that constitutes body; and this Idea has no magnitude, is incapable of

4. But how explain beings by the side of Being, and the variety of intelligences and of souls, when Being has

the unity of omnipresent identity and not merely that of a species, and when intellect and soul are likewise

numerically one? We certainly distinguish between the soul of the All and the particular souls.

This seems to conflict with our view which, moreover, for all its logical necessity, scarcely carries conviction

against our mental reluctance to the notion of unity identically omnipresent. It would appear more plausible

to suppose a partition of the Allthe original remaining undiminished or, in a more legitimate phrase, an

Thus the Authentic would be left selfgathered, while what we think of as the parts the separate souls

But if the Authentic Being is to be kept unattached in order to remove the difficulty of integral omnipresence,

the same considerations must apply equally to the souls; we would have to admit that they cannot be

integrally omnipresent in the bodies they are described as occupying; either, soul must be distributed, part to

body's part, or it is lodged entire at some one point in the body giving forth some of its powers to the other

A further objection is that some one spot in the body will hold the soul, the others no more than a power from

Still, how account for the many souls, many intelligences, the beings by the side of the Being?

No doubt the beings proceed from the Priors in the mode only of numerical distinction and not as concrete

masses, but the difficulty remains as to how they come to constitute the plenitude of the material universe.

We are agreed that diversity within the Authentic depends not upon spatial separation but sheerly upon

differentiation; all Being, despite this plurality, is a unity still; "Being neighbours Being"; all holds together;

and thus the IntellectualPrinciple [which is Being and the Beings] remains an integral, multiple by

Soul too? Souls too. That principle distributed over material masses we hold to be in its own nature incapable

of distribution; the magnitude belongs to the masses; when this soulprinciple enters into them or rather

they into it it is thought of as distributable only because, within the discrimination of the corporeal, the

animating force is to be recognised at any and every point. For soul is not articulated, section of soul to

section of body; there is integral omnipresence manifesting the unity of that principle, its veritable

Now as in soul unity does not debar variety, so with Being and the Beings; in that order multiplicity does not

conflict with unity. Multiplicity. This is not due to the need of flooding the universe with life; nor is the

extension of the corporeal the cause of the multiplicity of souls; before body existed, soul was one and many;

the many souls foreexisted in the All not potentially but each effectively; that one collective soul is no bar to

the variety; the variety does not abrogate the unity; the souls are apart without partition, present each to all as

never having been set in opposition; they are no more hedged off by boundaries than are the multiple items of

knowledge in one mind; the one soul so exists as to include all souls; the nature of such a principle must be

5. Herein lies its greatness, not in mass; mass is limited and may be whittled down to nothingness; in that

order no such paring off is possible nor, if it were, could there be any falling short. Where limitation is

unthinkable, what fear can there be of absence at any point? Nowhere can that principle fail which is the

unfailing, the everlasting, the undwindling; suppose it in flux and it must at some time flow to its end; since it

is not in flux and, besides [as the All], it has nowhere to flow to it lies spread over the universe; in fact it is

the universe, too great to be held by body, giving, therefore, to the material universe but little of itself, the

We may not make this principle the lesser, or if in the sense of mass we do, we must not begin to mistrust the

power of that less to stretch to the greater. Of course, we have in fact no right to affirm it less or to measure

the thing of magnitude against that which has none; as well talk of a doctor's skill being smaller than his

body. This greatness is not to be thought of in terms of quantity; the greater and less of body have nothing to

The nature of the greatness of soul is indicated by the fact that as the body grows, the larger mass is held by

the same soul that sufficed to the smaller; it would be in many ways absurd to suppose a corresponding

Because any second body must approach, if it might; but the first has approached and received and keeps.

Are we to think that this second body, in keeping its soul with a like care, is keeping the same soul as the

Why not: what difference is there? Merely some additions [from the experiences of life, none in the soul

We ask further why one soul in foot and hand and not one soul in the distinct members of the universe.

Sensations no doubt differ from soul to soul but only as do the conditions and experiences; this is difference

not in the judging principle but in the matters coming to judgement; the judge is one and the same soul

pronouncing upon various events, and these not its own but belonging to a particular body; it is only as a man

pronounces simultaneously upon a pleasant sensation in his finger and a pain in his head.

But why is not the soul in one man aware, then, of the judgement passed by another?

Because it is a judgement made, not a state set up; besides, the soul that has passed the judgement does not

pronounce but simply judges: similarly a man's sight does not report to his hearing, though both have passed

judgement; it is the reason above both that reports, and this is a principle distinct from either. Often, as it

happens, reason does become aware of a verdict formed in another reason and takes to itself an alien

7. Let us consider once more how it is possible for an identity to extend over a universe. This comes to the

question how each variously placed entity in the multiplicity of the sense order can have its share in one

The solution is in the reasons given for refusing to distribute that principle; we are not to parcel it out among

the entities of the multiple; on the contrary, we bring the distributed multiples to the unity. The unity has not

gone forth to them: from their dispersion we are led to think of it as broken up to meet them, but this is to

A hand may very well control an entire mass, a long plank, or anything of that sort; the control is effective

throughout and yet is not distributed, unit for unit, over the object of control: the power is felt to reach over

the whole area, though the hand is only handlong, not taking the extension of the mass it wields; lengthen

the object and, provided that the total is within the strength, the power handles the new load with no need of

distributing itself over the increased area. Now let us eliminate the corporeal mass of the hand, retaining the

power it exerted: is not that power, the impartible, present integrally over the entire area of control?

Or imagine a small luminous mass serving as centre to a transparent sphere, so that the light from within

shows upon the entire outer surface, otherwise unlit: we surely agree that the inner core of light, intact and

immobile, reaches over the entire outer extension; the single light of that small centre illuminates the whole

field. The diffused light is not due to any bodily magnitude of that central point which illuminates not as body

but as body lit, that is by another kind of power than corporeal quality: let us then abstract the corporeal mass,

retaining the light as power: we can no longer speak of the light in any particular spot; it is equally diffused

within and throughout the entire sphere. We can no longer even name the spot it occupied so as to say

whence it came or how it is present; we can but seek and wonder as the search shows us the light

simultaneously present at each and every point in the sphere. So with the sunlight: looking to the corporeal

mass you are able to name the source of the light shining through all the air, but what you see is one identical

light in integral omnipresence. Consider too the refraction of light by which it is thrown away from the line of

incidence; yet, direct or refracted, it is one and the same light. And supposing, as before, that the sun were

simply an unembodied illuminant, the light would no longer be fixed to any one definite spot: having no

8. The light of our world can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass of known position, but

conceive an immaterial entity, independent of body as being of earlier nature than all body, a nature firmly

selfbased or, better, without need of base: such a principle, incorporeal, autonomous, having no source for

its rising, coming from no place, attached to no material mass, this cannot be allotted part here and part there:

that would be to give it both a previous position and a present attachment. Finally, anything participating in

such a principle can participate only as entirety with entirety; there can be no allotment and no partition.

A principle attached to body might be exposed, at least by way of accident, to such partition and so be

definable as passive and partible in view of its close relationship with the body of which it is so to speak a

state or a Form; but that which is not inbound with body, which on the contrary body must seek, will of

necessity go utterly free of every bodily modification and especially of the very possibility of partition which

is entirely a phenomenon of body, belonging to its very essence. As partibility goes with body, so

impartibility with the bodiless: what partition is possible where there is no magnitude? If a thing of

magnitude participates to any degree in what has no magnitude, it must be by a participation without division;

When we affirm unity in multiplicity, we do not mean that the unity has become the multiples; we link the

variety in the multiples with the unity which we discern, undivided, in them; and the unity must be

understood as for ever distinct from them, from separate item and from total; that unity remains true to itself,

remains itself, and so long as it remains itself cannot fail within its own scope [and therefore does reach over

the multiple], yet it is not to be thought of as coextensive with the material universe or with any member of

the All; utterly outside of the quantitative, it cannot be coextensive with anything.

Extension is of body; what is not of body, but of the opposed order, must be kept free of extension; but where

there is no extension there is no spatial distinction, nothing of the here and there which would end its freedom

of presence. Since, then, partition goes with place each part occupying a place of its own how can the

placeless be parted? The unity must remain selfconcentrated, immune from part, however much the multiple

aspire or attain to contact with it. This means that any movement towards it is movement towards its entirety,

and any participation attained is participation in its entirety. Its participants, then, link with it as with

something unparticipated, something never appropriated: thus only can it remain intact within itself and

within the multiples in which it is manifested. And if it did not remain thus intact, it would cease to be itself;

any participation, then, would not be in the object of quest but in something never quested.

9. If in such a partition of the unity, that which entered into each participant were an entire always identical

with the first then, in the progressive severance, the firsts would become numerous, each particular

becoming a first: and then what prevents these many firsts from reconstituting the collective unity? Certainly

not the bodies they have entered, for those firsts cannot be present in the material masses as their Forms if

they are to remain identical with the First from which they come. On the other hand, taking the part

conceived as present in the multiple to be simply a power [emanating from the First], at once such a part

ceases to be the unity; we have then to ask how these powers come to be cut off, to have abandoned their

Again, are those powers, entering the universe of sense, still within the First or not?

If they are not, we have the absurdity that the First has been lessened, disempowered, stripped of power

originally possessed. Besides, how could powers thus cut off subsist apart from the foundations of their

being? Suppose these powers to be at once within the First and elsewhere; then the universe of sense contains

either the entire powers or parts of them; if parts of powers, the other parts are There; if entires, then either

the powers There are present here also undivided and this brings us back to an identity omnipresent in

integral identity or they are each an entire which has taken division into a multiplicity of similars so that

attached to every essence there is one power only that particularly appropriated to it the other powers

remaining powers unattached: yet power apart from Being is as impossible as Being apart from power; for

Or, again, suppose the powers coming Thence are other than their source lesser, fainter, as a bright light

dwindles to a dim but each attached to its essence as a power must always be: such secondary powers would

be perfectly uniform and at once we are forced to admit the omnipresence of the one same power or at the

least the presence as in one and the same body of some undivided identity integral at every point.

And if this is the case with a particular body, why not with the entire universe?

If we think of the single power as being endlessly divided, it is no longer a power entire; partition means

lessening of power; and, with part of power for part of body, the conditions of consciousness cease.

Further, a vestigial cut off from its source disappears for example, a reflected light and in general an

emanant loses its quality once it is severed from the original which it reproduces: just so the powers derived

This being so, where these powers appear, their source must be present with them; thus, once more, that

10. We may be told that an image need not be thus closely attached to its archetype, that we know images

holding in the absence of their archetype and that a warmed object may retain its heat when the fire is

To begin with the image and archetype: If we are reminded of an artist's picture we observe that here the

image was produced by the artist, not by his subject; even in the case of a selfportrait, the picture is no

"image of archetype," since it is not produced by the painter's body, the original represented: the reproduction

Nor is there strictly any such making of image as we see in water or in mirrors or in a shadow; in these cases

the original is the cause of the image which, at once, springs from it and cannot exist apart from it. Now, it is

in this sense that we are to understand the weaker powers to be images of the Priors. As for the illustration

from the fire and the warmed object, the warmth cannot be called an image of the fire unless we think of

warmth as containing fire so that the two are separate things. Besides, the fire removed, the warmth does

If we are told that these powers fade out similarly, we are left with only one imperishable: the souls, the

IntellectualPrinciple, become perishable; then since Being [identical with the IntellectualPrinciple]

becomes transitory, so also must the Beings, its productions. Yet the sun, so long as it holds its station in the

universe, will pour the same light upon the same places; to think its light may be lessened is to hold its mass

perishable. But it has been abundantly stated that the emanants of the First are not perishable, that the souls,

11. Still, this integral omnipresence admitted, why do not all things participate in the Intellectual Order in its

We can but see that presence is determined by the fitness of the participant so that, while Being is

omnipresent to the realm of Being, never falling short of itself, yet only the competent possess themselves of

that presence which depends not upon situation but upon adequacy; the transparent object and the opaque

answer very differently to the light. These firsts, seconds, thirds, of participance are determined by rank, by

power, not by place but by differentiation; and difference is no bar to coexistence, witness soul and

IntellectualPrinciple: similarly our own knowledge, the trivial next the gravest; one and the same object

yields colour to our sight, fragrance to smell, to every sense a particular experience, all presented

That diversity is simplex still; that multiple is one; for it is a ReasonPrinciple, which is to say a unity in

variety: all Being is one; the differing being is still included in Being; the differentiation is within Being,

obviously not within nonBeing. Being is bound up with the unity which is never apart from it; wheresoever

Being appears, there appears its unity; and the unity of Being is selfstanding, for presence in the sensible

does not abrogate independence: things of sense are present to the Intellectual where this occurs otherwise

than as the Intellectual is present within itself; so, too, body's presence to soul differs from that of knowledge

to soul; one item of knowledge is present in a different way than another; a body's presence to body is, again,

12. Think of a sound passing through the air and carrying a word; an ear within range catches and

comprehends; and the sound and word will strike upon any other ear you may imagine within the intervening

void, upon any that attends; from a great distance many eyes look to the one object and all take it fully; all

this, because eye and ear exist. In the same way, what is apt for soul will possess itself of soul, while from the

Now the sound was diffused throughout the air not in sections but as one sound, entire at every point of that

space. So with sight: if the air carries a shape impressed upon it this is one undivided whole; for, wherever

there be an eye, there the shape will be grasped; even to such as reject this particular theory of sight, the facts

of vision still stand as an example of participation determined by an identical unity.

The sound is the clearer illustration: the form conveyed is an entirety over all the air space, for unless the

spoken word were entire at every point, for every ear to catch the whole alike, the same effect could not be

made upon every listener; the sound, evidently, is not strung along the air, section to section. Why, then, need

we hesitate to think of soul as a thing not extended in broken contact, part for part, but omnipresent within the

range of its presence, indwelling in totality at every point throughout the All?

Entered into such bodies as are apt to it, the soul is like the spoken sound present in the air, before that entry,

like the speaker about to speak though even embodied it remains at once the speaker and the silent.

No doubt these illustrations are imperfect, but they carry a serviceable similitude: the soul belongs to that

other Kind, and we must not conceive a part of it embodied and a part intact; it is at once a selfenclosed

Further, any newcoming entity achieving soul receives mysteriously that same principle which was equally in

the previously ensouled; for it is not in the dispensation that a given part of soul situate at some given point

should enter here and there; what is thought of as entering was always a selfenclosed entire and, for all the

seeming entry, so remains; no real entry is conceivable. If, then, the soul never entered and yet is now seen to

be present present without waiting upon the participant clearly it is present, here too, without breach of its

selfinclusion. This can mean only that the participant came to soul; it lay outside the veritable reality but

advanced towards it and so established itself in the kosmos of life. But this kosmos of life is a selfgathered

entire, not divisible into constituent masses but prior to mass; in other words, the participation is of entire in

entire. Any newcomer into that kosmos of life will participate in it entire. Admitting, then, that this kosmos of

life is present entire in the universe, it must be similarly entire in each several entity; an identity numerically

13. But how account, at this, for its extension over all the heavens and all living beings?

There is no such extension. Senseperception, by insistence upon which we doubt, tells of Here and There;

but reason certifies that the Here and There do not attach to that principle; the extended has participated in

Clearly no participant can participate in itself; selfparticipation would be merely identity. Body, then, as

participant does not participate in body; body it has; its participation must be in what is not body. So too

magnitude does not participate in magnitude; it has it: not even in addition of quantity does the initial

magnitude participate in magnitude: the two cubits do not themselves become three cubits; what occurs is

that an object totalling to a certain quantity now totals to another: for magnitude to participate in magnitude

the actual two cubits must themselves become the new three [which cannot occur].

If, then, the divided and quantitatively extended is to participate in another Kind, is to have any sort of

participation, it can participate only in something undivided, unextended, wholly outside of quantity.

Therefore, that which is to be introduced by the participation must enter as itself an omnipresent indivisible.

This indivisibility must, of course, not be taken in any sense of littleness: littleness would be still divisible,

could not cover the extension of the participant and could not maintain integral presence against that

expansion. Nor is it the indivisibility of a geometric point: the participant mass is no single point but includes

an infinity of points; so that on the theory this principle must be an infinity of points, not a simultaneous

If, then, the participant mass in its entirety is to contain that principle entire, the universe must hold that one

14. But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a particular soul of the individual and how the

The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it

is at once a unity and an infinity; it holds all its content as one yet with each item distinct, though not to the

point of separation. Except by thus holding all its content as onelife entire, soul entire, all intelligence it

could not be infinite; since the individualities are not fenced off from each other, it remains still one thing. It

was to hold life not single but infinite and yet one life, one in the sense not of an aggregate built up but of the

retention of the unity in which all rose. Strictly, of course, it is a matter not of the rising of the individuals but

of their being eternally what they are; in that order, as there is no beginning, so there is no apportioning

except as an interpretation by the recipient. What is of that realm is the ancient and primal; the relation to it of

the thing of process must be that of approach and apparent merging with always dependence.

Are we that higher or the participant newcomer, the thing of beginnings in time?

Before we had our becoming Here we existed There, men other than now, some of us gods: we were pure

souls, Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, members of the Intellectual, not fenced off, not cut

away, integral to that All. Even now, it is true, we are not put apart; but upon that primal Man there has

intruded another, a man seeking to come into being and finding us there, for we were not outside of the

universe. This other has wound himself about us, foisting himself upon the Man that each of us was at first.

Then it was as if one voice sounded, one word was uttered, and from every side an ear attended and received

and there was an effective hearing, possessed through and through of what was present and active upon it:

now we have lost that first simplicity; we are become the dual thing, sometimes indeed no more than that

later foisting, with the primal nature dormant and in a sense no longer present.

It had a certain aptitude and it grasped at that to which it was apt. In its nature it was capable of soul: but what

is unfitted to receive soul entire present entire but not for it takes what share it may; such are the members

of the animal and vegetal order. Similarly, of a significant sound, some forms of being take sound and

A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound

with Reality entire; it possesses also a body; but this body is not a husk having no part in soul, not a thing that

earlier lay away in the soulless; the body had its aptitude and by this draws near: now it is not body merely,

but living body. By this neighboring it is enhanced with some impress of soul not in the sense of a portion

of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul entire: at once there is the ground of desire,

pleasure, pain; the body of the living form that has come to be was certainly no unrelated thing.

The soul, sprung from the divine, lay selfenclosed at peace, true to its own quality; but its neighbour, in

uproar through weakness, instable of its own nature and beaten upon from without, cries, at first to itself and

afterwards upon the living total, spreading the disorder at large. Thus, at an assembly the Elders may sit in

tranquil meditation, but an unruly populace, crying for food and casting up a host of grievances, will bring the

whole gathering into ugly turmoil; when this sort of people hold their peace so that a word from a man of

sense may reach them, some passable order is restored and the baser part ceases to prevail; otherwise the

silence of the better allows the rabble to rule, the distracted assembly unable to take the word from above.

This is the evil of state and of council: and this is the evil of man; man includes an inner rabble pleasures,

desires, fears and these become masters when the man, the manifold, gives them play.

But one that has reduced his rabble and gone back to the Man he was, lives to that and is that Man again, so

There is the man, too, that lives partly in the one allegiance and partly in the other; he is a blend of the good

16. But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul's entry or presence

to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into

animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into

soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting.

We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of

itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the

coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of

life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and

embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it

gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that communion.

The various rankings of the universe will determine various degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the

Intellectual, will give forth freely to body as being more nearly of the one power and standing closer, as

The soul's evil will be this association, its good the release. Why? Because, even unmerged, a soul in any way

to be described as attached to this universe is in some degree fallen from the All into a state of partition;

essentially belonging to the All, it no longer directs its act Thither: thus, a man's knowledge is one whole, but

he may guide himself by no more than some single item of it, where his good would lie in living not by some

That One Soul member of the Intellectual kosmos and there merging what it has of partial into the total has

broken away, so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself becoming partial with it: thus fire

that might consume everything may be set to ply its allpower upon some trifle. So long as the soul remains

utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when it has accepted separation not that of place but that of act

determining individualities it is a part, no longer the soul entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when,

on the contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly the AllSoul, the partial in it latent.

As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its release; if into some

lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the body is, in place

So long as the imagesoul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary,

the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the imagesoul may very well go

alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that

Let the imageoffspring of the individuality fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its light upon itself,

chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct.

1. The integral omnipresence of a unity numerically identical is in fact universally received; for all men

instinctively affirm the god in each of us to be one, the same in all. It would be taken as certain if no one

asked How or sought to bring the conviction to the test of reasoning; with this effective in their thought, men

would be at rest, finding their stay in that oneness and identity, so that nothing would wrench them from this

unity. This principle, indeed, is the most solidly established of all, proclaimed by our very souls; we do not

piece it up item by item, but find it within beforehand; it precedes even the principle by which we affirm

unquestionably that all things seek their good; for this universal quest of good depends on the fact that all aim

Now this unity in going forth, so far as it may, towards the Other Order must become manifest as multiplicity

and in some sense become multiple; but the primal nature and the appetition of the good, which is appetition

of unity, lead back to what is authentically one; to this every form of Being is urged in a movement towards

its own reality. For the good to every nature possessing unity is to be selfbelonging, to be itself, and that

In virtue of that unity the Good may be regarded as truly inherent. Hence the Good is not to be sought

outside; it could not have fallen outside of what is; it cannot possibly be found in nonBeing; within Being

If that Good has Being and is within the realm of Being, then it is present, selfcontained, in everything: we,

therefore, need not look outside of Being; we are in it; yet that Good is not exclusively ours: therefore all

2. Now the reasoning faculty which undertakes this problem is not a unity but a thing of parts; it brings the

bodily nature into the enquiry, borrowing its principles from the corporeal: thus it thinks of the Essential

Existence as corporeal and as a thing of parts; it baulks at the unity because it does not start from the

appropriate principles. We, however, must be careful to bring the appropriately convincing principles to the

discussion of the Unity, of perfect Being: we must hold to the Intellectual principles which alone apply to the

On the one hand there is the unstable, exposed to all sorts of change, distributed in place, not so much Being

as Becoming: on the other, there is that which exists eternally, not divided, subject to no change of state,

neither coming into being nor falling from it, set in no region or place or support, emerging from nowhere,

In dealing with that lower order we would reason from its own nature and the characteristics it exhibits; thus,

on a plausible foundation, we achieve plausible results by a plausible system of deduction: similarly, in

dealing with the Intellectual, the only way is to grasp the nature of the essence concerned and so lay the sure

foundations of the argument, not forgetfully straying over into that other order but basing our treatment on

In every entity the essential nature is the governing principle and, as we are told, a sound definition brings to

light many even of the concomitants: where the essential nature is the entire being, we must be all the more

3. If this principle is the Authentic Existent and holds unchanging identity, does not go forth from itself, is

untouched by any process of becoming or, as we have said, by any situation in place, then it must be always

selfgathered, never in separation, not partly here and partly there, not giving forth from itself: any such

instability would set it in thing after thing or at least in something other than itself: then it would no longer be

selfgathered; nor would it be immune, for anything within which it were lodged would affect it; immune, it

is not in anything. If, then, not standing away from itself, not distributed by part, not taking the slightest

change, it is to be in many things while remaining a selfconcentrated entire, there is some way in which it

has multipresence; it is at once selfenclosed and not so: the only way is to recognise that while this principle

itself is not lodged in anything, all other things participate in it all that are apt and in the measure of their

Thus, we either cancel all that we have affirmed and the principles laid down, and deny the existence of any

The One, numerically identical, undistributed, an unbroken entire, yet stands remote from nothing that exists

by its side; but it does not, for that, need to pour itself forth: there is no necessity either that certain portions

of it enter into things or again that, while it remains selfabiding, something produced and projected from it

enter at various points into that other order. Either would imply something of it remaining there while the

emanant is elsewhere: thus separated from what has gone forth, it would experience local division. And

would those emanants be, each in itself, whole or part? If part, the One has lost its nature, that of an entire, as

we have already indicated; if whole, then either the whole is broken up to coincide point for point with that in

which it is become present or we are admitting that an unbroken identity can be omnipresent.

This is a reasoning, surely, founded on the thing itself and its essential nature, not introducing anything

4. Then consider this god [in man] whom we cannot think to be absent at some point and present at another.

All that have insight into the nature of the divine beings hold the omnipresence of this god and of all the

Now allpervasion is inconsistent with partition; that would mean no longer the god throughout but part of

the god at one point and part at another; the god ceases to be one god, just as a mass cut up ceases to be a

mass, the parts no longer giving the first total. Further, the god becomes corporeal.

If all this is impossible, the disputed doctrine presents itself again; holding the god to pervade the Being of

Again, if we think of the divine nature as infinite and certainly it is confined by no bounds this must mean

that it nowhere fails; its presence must reach to everything; at the point to which it does not reach, there it has

Now, admitting any sequent to the absolute unity, that sequent must be bound up with the absolute; any third

will be about that second and move towards it, linked to it as its offspring. In this way all participants in the

Later will have share in the First. The Beings of the Intellectual are thus a plurality of firsts and seconds and

thirds attached like one sphere to one centre, not separated by interval but mutually present; where, therefore,

the Intellectual tertiaries are present, the secondaries and firsts are present too.

5. Often for the purpose of exposition as a help towards stating the nature of the produced multiplicity we

use the example of many lines radiating from one centre; but, while we provide for individualization, we

must carefully preserve mutual presence. Even in the case of our circle we need not think of separated radii;

all may be taken as forming one surface: where there is no distinction even upon the one surface but all is

power and reality undifferentiated, all the beings may be thought of as centres uniting at one central centre:

we ignore the radial lines and think of their terminals at that centre, where they are at one. Restore the radii;

once more we have lines, each touching a generating centre of its own, but that centre remains coincident

with the one first centre; the centres all unite in that first centre and yet remain what they were, so that they

are as many as are the lines to which they serve as terminals; the centres themselves appear as numerous as

Thus we may liken the Intellectual Beings in their diversity to many centres coinciding with the one centre

and themselves at one in it but appearing multiple on account of the radial lines lines which do not generate

the centres but merely lead to them. The radii, thus, afford a serviceable illustration for the mode of contact

6. The Intellectual Beings, thus, are multiple and one; in virtue of their infinite nature their unity is a

multiplicity, many in one and one over many, a unitplurality. They act as entire upon entire; even upon the

partial thing they act as entire; but there is the difference that at first the partial accepts this working only

partially though the entire enters later. Thus, when Man enters into human form there exists a particular man

who, however, is still Man. From the one thing Man man in the Idea material man has come to constitute

many individual men: the one identical thing is present in multiplicity, in multiimpression, so to speak, from

This does not mean that Man Absolute, or any Absolute, or the Universe in the sense of a Whole, is absorbed

by multiplicity; on the contrary, the multiplicity is absorbed by the Absolute, or rather is bound up with it.

There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a substance entire and that in

which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the body: it is in this latter mode that

7. To Real Being we go back, all that we have and are; to that we return as from that we came. Of what is

There we have direct knowledge, not images or even impressions; and to know without image is to be; by our

part in true knowledge we are those Beings; we do not need to bring them down into ourselves, for we are

There among them. Since not only ourselves but all other things also are those Beings, we all are they; we are

When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces;

look inward and all is the one head. If man could but be turned about by his own motion or by the happy pull

of Athene he would see at once God and himself and the All. At first no doubt all will not be seen as one

whole, but when we find no stop at which to declare a limit to our being we cease to rule ourselves out from

the total of reality; we reach to the All as a unity and this not by any stepping forward, but by the fact of

8. For my part I am satisfied that anyone considering the mode in which Matter participates in the Ideas will

be ready enough to accept this tenet of omnipresence in identity, no longer rejecting it as incredible or even

difficult. This because it seems reasonable and imperative to dismiss any notion of the Ideas lying apart with

Matter illumined from them as from somewhere above a meaningless conception, for what have distance

This participation cannot be thought of as elusive or very perplexing; on the contrary, it is obvious, accessible

Note, however, that when we sometimes speak of the Ideas illuminating Matter this is not to suggest the

mode in which material light pours down on a material object; we use the phrase in the sense only that, the

material being image while the Ideas are archetypes, the two orders are distinguished somewhat in the

We do not mean that the Idea, locally separate, shows itself in Matter like a reflection in water; the Matter

touches the Idea at every point, though not in a physical contact, and, by dint of neighbourhood nothing to

keep them apart is able to absorb thence all that lies within its capacity, the Idea itself not penetrating, not

We take it, then, that the Idea, say of Fire for we had best deal with Matter as underlying the elements is

not in the Matter. The Ideal Fire, then, remaining apart, produces the form of fire throughout the entire

enfired mass. Now let us suppose and the same method will apply to all the socalled elements that this

Fire in its first material manifestation is a multiple mass. That single Fire is seen producing an image of itself

in all the sensible fires; yet it is not spatially separate; it does not, then, produce that image in the manner of

our visible light; for in that case all this sensible fire, supposing that it were a whole of parts [as the analogy

would necessitate], must have generated spatial positions out of itself, since the Idea or Form remains in a

nonspatial world; for a principle thus pluralized must first have departed from its own character in order to

The Idea, impartible, gives nothing of itself to the Matter; its unbreaking unity, however, does not prevent it

shaping that multiple by its own unity and being present to the entirety of the multiple, bringing it to pattern

not by acting part upon part but by presence entire to the object entire. It would be absurd to introduce a

multitude of Ideas of Fire, each several fire being shaped by a particular idea; the Ideas of fire would be

infinite. Besides, how would these resultant fires be distinct, when fire is a continuous unity? and if we apply

yet another fire to certain matter and produce a greater fire, then the same Idea must be allowed to have

functioned in the same way in the new matter as in the old; obviously there is no other Idea.

9. The elements in their totality, as they stand produced, may be thought of as one spheric figure; this cannot

be the piecemeal product of many makers each working from some one point on some one portion. There

must be one cause; and this must operate as an entire, not by part executing part; otherwise we are brought

back to a plurality of makers. The making must be referred to a partless unity, or, more precisely, the making

principle must be a partless unity not permeating the sphere but holding it as one dependent thing. In this way

the sphere is enveloped by one identical life in which it is inset; its entire content looks to the one life: thus all

It is in this understanding that the soul has been taken to be a numerical principle, while others think of it as

in its nature a selfincreasing number; this latter notion is probably designed to meet the consideration that

the soul at no point fails but, retaining its distinctive character, is ample for all, so much so that were the

kosmos vaster yet the virtue of soul would still compass it or rather the kosmos still be sunk in soul entire.

Of course, we must understand this adding of extension not as a literal increase but in the sense that the soul,

essentially a unity, becomes adequate to omnipresence; its unity sets it outside of quantitative measurement,

the characteristic of that other order which has but a counterfeit unity, an appearance by participation.

The essential unity is no aggregate to be annulled upon the loss of some one of the constituents; nor is it held

within any allotted limits, for so it would be the less for a set of things, more extensive than itself, outside its

scope; or it must wrench itself asunder in the effort to reach to all; besides, its presence to things would be no

longer as whole to all but by part to part; in vulgar phrase, it does not know where it stands; dismembered, it

Now if this principle is to be a true unity where the unity is of the essence it must in some way be able to

manifest itself as including the contrary nature, that of potential multiplicity, while by the fact that this

multiplicity belongs to it not as from without but as from and by itself, it remains authentically one,

possessing boundlessness and multiplicity within that unity; its nature must be such that it can appear as a

whole at every point; this, as encircled by a single selfembracing ReasonPrinciple, which holds fast about

that unity, never breaking with itself but over all the universe remaining what it must be.

The unity is in this way saved from the local division of the things in which it appears; and, of course,

existing before all that is in place, it could never be founded upon anything belonging to that order of which,

on the contrary, it is the foundation; yet, for all that they are based upon it, it does not cease to be wholly

selfgathered; if its fixed seat were shaken, all the rest would fall with the fall of their foundation and stay;

nor could it be so unintelligent as to tear itself apart by such a movement and, secure within its own being,

trust itself to the insecurity of place which, precisely, looks to it for safety.

10. It remains, then, poised in wisdom within itself; it could not enter into any other; those others look to it

and in their longing find it where it is. This is that "Love Waiting at the Door," ever coming up from without,

striving towards the beautiful, happy when to the utmost of its power it attains. Even here the lover does not

so much possess himself of the beauty he has loved as wait before it; that Beauty is abidingly selfenfolded

but its lovers, the Many, loving it as an entire, possess it as an entire when they attain, for it was an entire that

they loved. This seclusion does not prevent its sufficing to all, but is the very reason for its adequacy; because

Similarly wisdom is entire to all; it is one thing; it is not distributed parcelwise; it cannot be fixed to place; it

is not spread about like a colouring, for it is not corporeal; in any true participation in wisdom there must be

one thing acting as unit upon unit. So must it be in our participation in the One; we shall not take our several

portions of it, nor you some separate entire and I another. Think of what happens in Assemblies and all kinds

of meetings; the road to sense is the road to unity; singly the members are far from wise; as they begin to

grow together, each, in that true growth, generates wisdom while he recognizes it. There is nothing to prevent

our intelligences meeting at one centre from their several positions; all one, they seem apart to us as when

without looking we touch one object or sound one string with different fingers and think we feel several. Or

take our souls in their possession of good; it is not one good for me and another for you; it is the same for

both and not in the sense merely of distinct products of an identical source, the good somewhere above with

something streaming from it into us; in any real receiving of good, giver is in contact with taker and gives not

The Intellectual giving is not an act of transmission; even in the case of corporeal objects, with their local

separation, the mutual giving [and taking] is of things of one order and their communication, every effect

they produce, is upon their like; what is corporeal in the All acts and is acted upon within itself, nothing

external impinging upon it. Now if in body, whose very nature is partition, there is no incursion of the alien,

It is therefore by identification that we see the good and touch it, brought to it by becoming identical with

what is of the Intellectual within ourselves. In that realm exists what is far more truly a kosmos of unity;

otherwise there will be two sensible universes, divided into correspondent parts; the Intellectual sphere, if a

unity only as this sphere is, will be undistinguishable from it except, indeed, that it will be less worthy of

respect since in the nature of things extension is appropriate in the lower while the Intellectual will have

wrought out its own extension with no motive, in a departure from its very character.

And what is there to hinder this unification? There is no question of one member pushing another out as

occupying too much space, any more than happens in our own minds where we take in the entire fruit of our

We may be told that this unification is not possible in Real Beings; it certainly would not be possible, if the

11. But how can the unextended reach over the defined extension of the corporeal? How can it, so, maintain

This is a problem often raised and reason calls vehemently for a solution of the difficulties involved. The fact

stands abundantly evident, but there is still the need of intellectual satisfaction.

We have, of course, no slight aid to conviction, indeed the very strongest, in the exposition of the character of

that principle. It is not like a stone, some vast block lying where it lies, covering the space of its own

extension, held within its own limits, having a fixed quantity of mass and of assigned stonepower. It is a

First Principle, measureless, not bounded within determined size such measurement belongs to another

order and therefore it is allpower, nowhere under limit. Being so, it is outside of Time.

Time in its ceaseless onward sliding produces parted interval; Eternity stands in identity, preeminent, vaster

by unending power than Time with all the vastness of its seeming progress; Time is like a radial line running

out apparently to infinity but dependent upon that, its centre, which is the pivot of all its movement; as it goes

it tells of that centre, but the centre itself is the unmoving principle of all the movement.

Time stands, thus, in analogy with the principle which holds fast in unchanging identity of essence: but that

principle is infinite not only in duration but also in power: this infinity of power must also have its

counterpart, a principle springing from that infinite power and dependent upon it; this counterpart will, after

its own mode, run a course corresponding to the course of Time in keeping with that stationary power

which is its greater as being its source: and in this too the source is present throughout the full extension of its

This secondary of Power, participating as far as it may in that higher, must be identified.

Now the higher power is present integrally but, in the weakness of the recipient material, is not discerned as

every point; it is present as an identity everywhere not in the mode of the material triangle identical though,

in many representations, numerically multiple, but in the mode of the immaterial, ideal triangle which is the

source of the material figures. If we are asked why the omnipresence of the immaterial triangle does not

entail that of the material figure, we answer that not all Matter enters into the participation necessary; Matter

accepts various forms and not all Matter is apt for all form; the First Matter, for example, does not lend itself

to all but is for the First Kinds first and for the others in due order, though these, too, are omnipresent.

Consider the life in any living thing; it does not reach only to some fixed point, unable to permeate the entire

being; it is omnipresent. If on this again we are asked How, we appeal to the character of this power, not

subject to quantity but such that though you divide it mentally for ever you still have the same power, infinite

to the core; in it there is no Matter to make it grow less and less according to the measured mass.

Conceive it as a power of an everfresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out,

brimming over with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite

thing, you will not find it. The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will

never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give; you will always be able to move

with it better, to be in its entirety and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something

of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before you.

In that you have entered into the All, no longer content with the part; you cease to think of yourself as under

limit but, laying all such determination aside, you become an All. No doubt you were always that, but there

has been an addition and by that addition you are diminished; for the addition was not from the realm of

Being you can add nothing to Being but from nonBeing. It is not by some admixture of nonBeing that

one becomes an entire, but by putting nonBeing away. By the lessening of the alien in you, you increase.

Cast it aside and there is the All within you; engaged in the alien, you will not find the All. Not that it has to

come and so be present to you; it is you that have turned from it. And turn though you may, you have not

severed yourself; it is there; you are not in some far region: still there before it, you have faced to its contrary.

It is so with the lesser gods; of many standing in their presence it is often one alone that sees them; that one

alone was alone in the power to see. These are the gods who "in many guises seek our cities"; but there is

That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and heaven, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing

through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to soul and life, all bound to Him and so

1. It is suggested that multiplicity is a falling away from The Unity, infinity being the complete departure, an

innumerable multiplicity, and that this is why unlimit is an evil and we evil at the stage of multiplicity.

A thing, in fact, becomes a manifold when, unable to remain selfcentred, it flows outward and by that

dissipation takes extension: utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold since there is nothing to bind part to

part; when, with all this outflowing, it becomes something definite, there is a magnitude.

Given consciousness, there will be, since the thing must feel its exile, its sundrance from its essence.

Everything seeks not the alien but itself; in that outward moving there is frustration or compulsion; a thing

most exists not when it takes multiplicity or extension but when it holds to its own being, that is when its

movement is inward. Desire towards extension is ignorance of the authentically great, a movement not on the

appropriate path but towards the strange; to the possession of the self the way is inward.

Consider the thing that has taken extension; broken into so many independent items, it is now those several

parts and not the thing it was; if that original is to persist, the members must stand collected to their total; in

other words, a thing is itself not by being extended but by remaining, in its degree, a unity: through expansion

and in the measure of the expansion, it is less itself; retaining unity, it retains its essential being.

Yes; because it has not been allowed to slip away into the limitless but is held fast by unity; and it has beauty

in virtue of Beauty not of Magnitude; it needed Beauty to parry that magnitude; in the degree of its extension

it was void of beauty and to that degree ugly. Thus extension serves as Matter to Beauty since what calls for

its ordering is a multiplicity. The greater the expansion, the greater the disorder and ugliness.

Objects of sense are not unlimited and therefore the Number applying to them cannot be so. Nor is an

enumerator able to number to infinity; though we double, multiply over and over again, we still end with a

finite number; though we range over past and future, and consider them, even, as a totality, we still end with

Are we then to dismiss absolute limitlessness and think merely that there is always something beyond?

No; that more is not in the reckoner's power to produce; the total stands already defined.

In the Intellectual the Beings are determined and with them Number, the number corresponding to their total;

in this sphere of our own as we make a man a multiple by counting up his various characteristics, his beauty

and the rest we take each image of Being and form a corresponding image of number; we multiply a

nonexistent in and so produce multiple numbers; if we number years we draw on the numbers in our own

3. And there is the question How can the infinite have existence and remain unlimited: whatever is in actual

But, first, if multiplicity holds a true place among Beings, how can it be an evil?

As existent it possesses unity; it is a unitmultiple, saved from stark multiplicity; but it is of a lessened unity

and, by that inwoven multiplicity, it is evil in comparison with unity pure. No longer steadfast in that nature,

but fallen, it is the less, while in virtue of the unity thence retained it keeps some value; multiplicity has value

But how explain the unlimited? It would seem that either it is among beings and so is limited or, if unlimited,

is not among beings but, at best, among things of process such as Time. To be brought to limit it must be

unlimited; not the limited but the unlimited is the subject of limitation, since between the limited and the

unlimited there is no intermediate to accept the principle of limitation. The unlimited recoils by very nature

from the Idea of limit, though it may be caught and held by it from without: the recoil, of course, is not from

one place to another; the limitless can have nothing to do with place which arises only with the limiting of the

unlimited. Hence what is known as the flux of the unlimited is not to be understood as local change; nor does

any other sort of recognisable motion belong to it in itself; therefore the limitless cannot move: neither can it

be at rest: in what, since all place is later? Its movement means little more than that it is not fixed in rest.

No; any such poising, with or without side motion, could be known only by place [which Matter precedes].

We must fasten on the bare notion and take what that gives us opposites that still are not opposed: we think

of large and small and the unlimited becomes either, of stationary and moving, and it will be either of these.

But primarily it can be neither in any defined degree, or at once it is under limit. Limitless in this unlimited

and undefined way, it is able to appear as either of a pair of opposites: draw near, taking care to throw no net

of limit over it, and you have something that slips away; you come upon no unity for so it would be defined;

approach the thing as a unit, and you find it manifold; call it a manifold, and again you falsify, for when the

single thing is not a unity neither is the total a manifold. In one manifestation it takes the appearance of

And there is movement in its lack of consciousness; it has passed out of IntellectualPrinciple, slid away.

That it cannot break free but is under compulsion from without to keep to its circling with no possibility of

advance, in this would be its rest. Thus it is not true to speak of Matter as being solely in flux.

4. We have to enquire into the existence of the Numbers in the Intellectual. Are they Ideas added to the other

In the latter case, Being, as the first [in the Intellectual] would give us the conception of the Monad; then

since Being produces motion and rest, Three exists; and so on for all the other members of the realm of

Being. Or perhaps there is one monad for each member, or a monad for the first, with a dyad for its next,

since there exists a series, and a corresponding number for every successive total, decad for ten, and so on.

If, on the contrary, Number is a direct production of the IntellectualPrinciple [an Idea in itself], there is the

Plato, where he says that men arrived at the conception of Number by way of the changes of day and night

thus making the concept depend upon variation among things seems to hold that the things numerable

precede and by their differences produce number: Number then would consist in a process within the human

mind passing onwards from thing to thing; it results by the fact that the mind takes count, that is when the

mind traverses things and reports their differences; observing pure identity unbroken by difference, it says

One. But there is the passage where he tells us that the veritable Number has Being, is a Being; this is the

opposed view that Number is no product of the reckoning mind but a reality in itself, the concept of which is

Is it an accompaniment upon each substance, something seen in the things as in a man we see one man, in a

But how explain the dyad and triad? How comes the total to be unitary and any particular number to be

brought under unity? The theory offers a multiplicity of units, and no number is reducible to unity but the

simple "one." It might be suggested that a dyad is that thing or rather what is observed upon that thing

which has two powers combined, a compound thing related to a unity: or numbers might be what the

Pythagoreans seem to hold them in their symbolic system in which Justice, for example, is a Tetrad: but this

is rather to add the number, a number of manifold unity like the decad, to the multiplicity of the thing which

yet is one thing. Now it is not so that we treat the ten things; we bring them together and apply the figure ten

to the several items. Or rather in that case we say ten, but when the several items form a unity we say decad.

One answer might be that whiteness is similarly observed upon things and yet is real, just as movement is

observed upon things and there is still a real existence of movement. But movement is not on a par with

number: it is because movement is an entity that unity can be observed upon it. Besides, the kind of real

existence thus implied annuls the reality of number, making it no more than an attribute; but that cannot be

since an attribute must exist before it can be attributed; it may be inseparable from the subject but still must in

itself be something, some entity as whiteness is; to be a predicate it must be that which is to be predicated.

Thus if unity is observed in every subject, and "one man" says more than "man's oneness being different from

the manness and common to all things then this oneness must be something prior to man and to all the rest:

only so can the unity come to apply to each and to all: it must therefore be prior also to even movement, prior

to Being, since without unity these could not be each one thing: of course what is here meant is not the unity

postulated as transcending Being but the unity predicable of the Ideas which constitute each several thing. So

too there is a decad prior to the subject in which we affirm it; this prior would be the decad absolute, for

Is this unity, then, connate and coexistent to the Beings? Suppose it coexistent merely as an accidental, like

health in man, it still must exist of itself; suppose it present as an element in a compound, there must first

exist unity and the unity absolute that can thus enter into composition; moreover if it were compounded with

an object brought into being by its agency it would make that object only spuriously a unity; its entry would

But what of the decad? Where lies the need of decad to a thing which, by totalling to that power, is decad

The need may be like that of Form to Matter; ten and decad may exist by its virtue; and, once more, the decad

6. Granted, then, that there exist, apart from things, a unity absolute and a decad absolute in other words, that

the Intellectual beings, together with their characteristic essence have also their order, Henads, Dyads, Triads,

what is the nature of these numerical entities and how does it come into being? We cannot but think that

As a beginning, what is the origin of the Ideas in general? It is not that the thinking principle thought of each

Idea and by that act of thought procured their several existences; not because Justice and Movement were

thus thought did they come to be; that would imply that while the thought is later than the thing the concept

of Justice must be later than Justice itself yet the thought precedes what, as founded on the thinking, owes

its existence to it. Besides, if justice is only a certain definite thought we have the absurdity that Justice is

nothing more than a definition of Justice. Thinking of Justice or Movement is but grasping their nature; this

We may be reminded that in immaterial objects the knowledge is identical with the thing; but we must not

misapply that statement; it does not say that the knowledge is the thing known, or that the reason surveying

the thing is the thing, but that the immaterial thing, being an Intellectual object is also a thought; this does not

imply a definition or conception of the object; the thing itself, as belonging to the Intellectual, can be nothing

else than Intellect or knowledge. This is not a case of knowledge selfdirected; it is that the thing in the

Intellectual transmutes the knowledge, which is not fixed like the knowledge of material things; in other

words it makes it true knowledge, that is to say no image of the thing but the thing directly.

Thus it is not the conception of movement that brings movement to be; movement absolute produces that

conception; it produces itself as at once movement and the concept of movement, for movement as it exists

There, bound up with Being, is a concept. It is movement absolute because it is the first movement there can

be none till this exist and it is the authentic Movement since it is not accidental to something else but is the

activity of actual Being in motion. Thus it is a real existent, though the notion of Being is different.

Justice therefore is not the thought of Justice but, as we may put it, a state of the IntellectualPrinciple, or

rather an activity of it an appearance so lovely that neither evening nor dawn is so fair, nor anything else in

all the realm of sense, an Intellectual manifestation selfrising, selfseen, or, rather, selfbeing.

7. It is inevitably necessary to think of all as contained within one nature; one nature must hold and

encompass all; there cannot be as in the realm of sense thing apart from thing, here a sun and elsewhere

something else; all must be mutually present within a unity. This is the very nature of the

IntellectualPrinciple as we may know from soul which reproduces it and from what we call Nature under

which and by which the things of process are brought into their disjointed being while that Nature itself

But within the unity There, the several entities have each its own distinct existence; the allembracing

Intellect sees what is in it, what is within Being; it need not look out upon them since it contains them, need

Against doubters we cite the fact of participation; the greatness and beauty of the IntellectualPrinciple we

know by the soul's longing towards it; the longing of the rest towards soul is set up by its likeness to its

It is surely inconceivable that any living thing be beautiful failing a LifeAbsolute of a wonderful, an

ineffable, beauty: this must be the Collective Life, made up of all living things, or embracing all, forming a

unity coextensive with all, as our universe is a unity embracing all the visible.

8. As then there is a LifeForm primal which therefore is the LifeForm Absolute and there is

IntellectualPrinciple or Being, Authentic Being, these, we affirm, contain all living things and all Number,

and Absolute Justice and Beauty and all of that order; for we ascribe an existence of their own to Absolute

Man, Absolute Number, Absolute Justice. It remains to discover, in so far as such knowledge is possible, how

At the outset we must lay aside all senseperception; by IntellectualPrinciple we know

IntellectualPrinciple. We reflect within ourselves there is life, there is intellect, not in extension but as

power without magnitude, issue of Authentic Being which is power selfexisting, no vacuity but a thing most

living and intellective nothing more living, more intelligent, more real and producing its effect by contact

and in the ratio of the contact, closely to the close, more remotely to the remote. If Being is to be sought, then

most be sought is Being at its intensest; so too the intensest of Intellect if the Intellectual act has worth; and

First, then, we take Being as first in order; then IntellectualPrinciple; then the LivingForm considered as

containing all things: IntellectualPrinciple, as the Act of Real Being, is a second.

Thus it is clear that Number cannot be dependent upon the LivingForm since unity and duality existed

before that; nor does it rise in the IntellectualPrinciple since before that there existed Real Being which is

9. It remains then to consider whether Being by its distinction produced Number or Number produced that

distinction. It is certain that either Number was the cause of Being, movement, rest, identity and difference,

The first question is whether Number can exist in and of itself or is dependent upon things Two being

something observed in two things, Three in three; and so of the arithmetical One, for if this could exist apart

For the present we must take it that Being precedes Number, is its source. But if One means one being and

the duality two beings, then unity precedes Being, and Number precedes the Beings.

Let us consider: When we think of the existence and the fine appearance of a man as forming one thing, that

unity is certainly thought of as subsequent to a precedent duality; when we group a horse with a dog, the

duality is obviously the subsequent. But think of that which brings man or horse or dog into being or

produces them, with full intention, from where they lie latent within itself: the producer must say "I begin

with a first, I pass on to a second; that makes two; counting myself there are three." Of course there was no

such numbering even of Beings for their production, since the due number was known from the very

beginning; but this consideration serves to show that all Number precedes the very Beings themselves.

The truth is that it existed within the Authentic Being but not as applying to it, for Being was still unparted;

the potentiality of Number existed and so produced the division within Being, put in travail with multiplicity;

Number must be either the substance of Being or its Activity; the LifeForm as such and the

IntellectualPrinciple must be Number. Clearly Being is to be, thought of as Number Collective, while the

Beings are Number unfolded: the IntellectualPrinciple is Number moving within itself, while the

LivingForm is Number container of the universe. Even Being is the outcome of the Unity, and, since the

Hence it is that the Forms have been described as Henads and Numbers. This is the authentic Number; the

other, the "monadic" is its image. The Authentic is that made manifest in the Forms and helping to bring them

to be; primally it is the Number in the Authentic Being, inherent to it and preceding the Beings, serving to

For the Unity is source to Being; Being's Being is stayed upon the Unity as its safeguard from dissolution; the

Unity cannot rest upon Being which at that would be a unity before possessing unity; and so with the decad

10. When it takes lot with multiplicity, Being becomes Number by the fact of awakening to manifoldness;

before, it was a preparation, so to speak, of the Beings, their forepromise, a total of henads offering a stay

Here with us a man will say "I wish I had such and such a quantity of gold" or "such and such a number of

houses." Gold is one thing: the wish is not to bring the numerical quantity into gold but to bring the gold to

quantity; the quantity, already present in the mind, is to be passed on to the gold so that it acquire that

If the Beings preceded the number and this were discerned upon them at the stirring, to such and such a total,

of the numbering principle, then the actual number of the Beings would be a chance not a choice; since that

total is not a matter of chance, Number is a causing principle preceding that determined total.

Number then preexists and is the cause by which produced things participate in quantity.

The single thing derives its unity by participation in UnityAbsolute; its being it derives from

BeingAbsolute, which holds its Being from itself alone; a unity is a unity in virtue of Being; the particular

unity where the unity is a multiple unity is one thing only as the Triad is; the collective Being is a unity of

this kind, the unity not of the monad but of the myriad or any such collective number.

Take a man affirming the presence of ten thousand things; it is he that produces the number; he does not tell

us that the ten thousand have uttered it; they merely exhibit their several forms; the enumerator's mind

By being able to enumerate; that is by knowing Number: but in order to this, Number must be in existence,

and that that Principle should not know its own total content is absurd, impossible.

It is with Number as with Good. When we pronounce things to be good either we mean that they are in their

own nature so or we affirm goodness as an accidental in them. Dealing with the primals, the goodness we

have in mind is that First Hypostasis; where the goodness is an accidental we imply the existence of a

Principle of Good as a necessary condition of the accidental presence; there must be some source of that good

which is observed elsewhere, whether this source be an Absolute Good or something that of its own nature

produces the good. Similarly with number; in attributing the decad to things we affirm either the truly

existent decad or, where the decadhood is accidental, we necessarily posit the selfsubsistent decad, decad

not associated; if things are to be described as forming a decad, then either they must be of themselves the

It must be urged as a general truth that anything affirmed of a subject not itself either found its way in from

outside or is the characteristic Act of that subject; and supposing the predicated attribute to show no variation

of presence and absence but to be always present, then, if the subject is a Real Being so also is the accidental

in an equal degree; or, failing Real Being, it at least belongs to the existents, it exists. In the case when the

subject can be thought of as remaining without its Act, yet that Act is inbound with it even though to our

minds it appears as a later; when on the contrary the subject cannot be conceived without the attributeman,

for example, without unity then the attribute is either not later but concomitant or, being essential to the

11. It may be suggested that the decad is nothing more than so many henads; admitting the one henad why

should we reject the ten? As the one is a real existence why not the rest? We are certainly not compelled to

attach that one henad to some one thing and so deprive all the rest of the means to unity: since every existent

must be one thing, the unity is obviously common to all. This means one principle applying to many, the

principle whose existence within itself we affirmed to be presupposed by its manifestation outside.

But if a henad exists in some given object and further is observed in something else, then that first henad

being real, there cannot be only one henad in existence; there must be a multiplicity of henads.

Supposing that first henad alone to exist, it must obviously be lodged either in the thing of completest Being

or at all events in the thing most completely a unity. If in the thing of completest Being, then the other henads

are but nominal and cannot be ranked with the first henad, or else Number becomes a collection of unlike

monads and there are differences among monads [an impossibility]. If that first henad is to be taken as lodged

in the thing of completest unity, there is the question why that most perfect unity should require the first

Since all this is impossible, then, before any particular can be thought of as a unit, there must exist a unity

bare, unrelated by very essence. If in that realm also there must be a unity apart from anything that can be

Each particular, considered in itself, would be a manifold of monads, totalling to a collective unity. If

however Nature produces continuously or rather has produced once for all not halting at the first

production but bringing a sort of continuous unity into being, then it produces the minor numbers by the

sheer fact of setting an early limit to its advance: outgoing to a greater extent not in the sense of moving

from point to point but in its inner changes it would produce the larger numbers; to each number so

emerging it would attach the due quantities and the appropriate thing, knowing that without this adaptation to

Number the thing could not exist or would be a stray, something outside, at once, of both Number and

12. We may be told that unity and monad have no real existence, that the only unity is some definite object

that is one thing, so that all comes to an attitude of the mind towards things considered singly.

But, to begin with, why at this should not the affirmation of Being pass equally as an attitude of mind so that

Being too must disappear? No doubt Being strikes and stings and gives the impression of reality; but we find

ourselves just as vividly struck and impressed in the presence of unity. Besides, is this attitude, this concept

itself, a unity or a manifold? When we deny the unity of an object, clearly the unity mentioned is not supplied

by the object, since we are saying it has none; the unity therefore is within ourselves, something latent in our

[An objector speaks] "But the unity we thus possess comes by our acceptance of a certain idea or impression

from things external; it is a notion derived from an object. Those that take the notion of numbers and of unity

to be but one species of the notions held to be inherent in the mind must allow to numbers and to unity the

reality they ascribe to any of the others, and upon occasion they must be met; but no such real existence can

be posited when the concept is taken to be an attitude or notion rising in us as a byproduct of the objects;

this happens when we say "This," "What," and still more obviously in the affirmations "Crowd," "Festival,"

"Army," "Multiplicity." As multiplicity is nothing apart from certain constituent items and the festival

nothing apart from the people gathered happily at the rites, so when we affirm unity we are not thinking of

some Oneness selfstanding, unrelated. And there are many other such cases; for instance "on the right,"

"Above" and their opposites; what is there of reality about this "Ontherightness" but the fact that two

different positions are occupied? So with "Above": "Above" and "Below" are a mere matter of position and

Now in answer to this series of objections our first remark is that there does exist an actuality implicit in each

one of the relations cited; though this is not the same for all or the same for correlatives or the same for every

13. It cannot reasonably be thought that the notion of unity is derived from the object since this is physical

man, animal, even stone, a presentation of that order is something very different from unity [which must be a

thing of the Intellectual]; if that presentation were unity, the mind could never affirm unity unless of that

Then again, just as in the case of "On the right" or other such affirmation of relation, the mind does not affirm

in some caprice but from observation of contrasted position, so here it affirms unity in virtue of perceiving

something real; assuredly the assertion of unity is not a bare attitude towards something nonexistent. It is

not enough that a thing be alone and be itself and not something else: and that very "something else" tells of

another unity. Besides Otherness and Difference are later; unless the mind has first rested upon unity it

cannot affirm Otherness or Difference; when it affirms Aloneness it affirms unitywithaloneness; thus unity

Besides, that in us which asserts unity of some object is first a unity, itself; and the object is a unity before

A thing must be either one thing or more than one, manifold: and if there is to be a manifold there must be a

precedent unity. To talk of a manifold is to talk of what has something added to unity; to think of an army is

to think of a multitude under arms and brought to unity. In refusing to allow the manifold to remain manifold,

the mind makes the truth clear; it draws a separate many into one, either supplying a unity not present or keen

to perceive the unity brought about by the ordering of the parts; in an army, even, the unity is not a fiction but

as real as that of a building erected from many stones, though of course the unity of the house is more

If, then, unity is more pronounced in the continuous, and more again where there is no separation by part, this

is clearly because there exists, in real existence, something which is a Nature or Principle of Unity. There

cannot be a greater and less in the nonexistent: as we predicate Substance of everything in sense, but

predicate it also of the Intellectual order and more strictly there since we hold that the greater and more

sovereign substantiality belongs to the Real Beings and that Being is more marked in Substance, even

sensible Substance, than in the other Kinds so, finding unity to exhibit degree of more and less, differing in

sensethings as well as in the Intellectual, we must similarly admit that Unity exists under all forms though

As Substance and Real Being, despite the participation of the sensible, are still of the Intellectual and not the

sensible order, so too the unity observed present in things of sense by participation remains still an

Intellectual and to be grasped by an Intellectual Act. The mind, from a thing present to it, comes to

knowledge of something else, a thing not presented; that is, it has a prior knowledge. By this prior knowledge

it recognises Being in a particular being; similarly when a thing is one it can affirm unity as it can affirm also

It is impossible to name or conceive anything not making one or two or some number; equally impossible

that the thing should not exist without which nothing can possibly be named or conceived; impossible to deny

the reality of that whose existence is a necessary condition of naming or affirming anything; what is a first

need, universally, to the formation of every concept and every proposition must exist before reasoning and

thinking; only as an existent can it be cited to account for the stirring of thought. If Unity is necessary to the

substantial existence of all that really is and nothing exists which is not one Unity must precede Reality

and be its author. It is therefore, an existent Unity, not an existent that develops Unity; considered as

BeingwithUnity it would be a manifold, whereas in the pure Unity there is no Being save in so far as Unity

attends to producing it. As regards the word "This," it is nat a bare word; it affirms an indicated existence

without using the name, it tells of a certain presence, whether a substance or some other existent; any This

must be significant; it is no attitude of the mind applying itself to a nonexistent; the This shows a thing

The Unity is not of a nature to lose its own manner of being only because something else stands in a state

which it does not itself share; to stray from its unity it must itself suffer division into duality or the still wider

If by division the one identical mass can become a duality without loss of quantity, clearly the unity it

possessed and by this destructive division lost was something distinct. What may be alternatively present and

absent to the same subject must be classed among RealBeings, regardless of position; an accidental

elsewhere, it must have reality in itself whether it be manifested in things of sense or in the Intellectual an

accidental in the Laters but selfexistent in the higher, especially in the First in its aspect of Unity developing

into Being. We may be told that Unity may lose that character without change in itself, becoming duality by

association with something else; but this is not true; unity does not become two things; neither the added nor

what takes the addition becomes two; each remains the one thing it was; the duality is predicable of the group

Two and the Dyad are not essentially relative: if the only condition to the construction of duality were

meeting and association such a relation might perhaps constitute Twoness and Duality; but in fact we see

Duality produced by the very opposite process, by the splitting apart of a unity. This shows that duality or

any other such numerical form is no relation produced either by scission or association. If one configuration

produces a certain thing it is impossible that the opposite should produce the same so that the thing may be

Unity is due to the presence of Unity; duality to that of Duality; it is precisely as things are white by

Whiteness, just by Justice, beautiful by Beauty. Otherwise we must reject these universals and call in relation

here also: justice would arise from a certain attitude in a given situation, Beauty from a certain pattern of the

person with nothing present able to produce the beauty, nothing coming from without to effect that agreeable

You see something which you pronounce to be a unity; that thing possesses also size, form, and a host of

other characteristics you might name; size, bulk, sweetness, bitterness and other Ideas are actually present in

the thing; it surely cannot be thought that, while every conceivable quality has RealBeing, quantity

[Number] has not and that while continuous quantity exists, discrete quantity does not and this though

continuous quantity is measured by the discrete. No: as size by the presence of Magnitude, and Oneness by

As to the How of participation, the enquiry is that of all participation in Ideal Forms; we must note, however,

that the presence of the Decad in the looser totals is different from its presence in the continuous; there is

difference again in its presence within many powers where multiplicity is concentred in unity; arrived at the

Intellectuals, there too we discover Number, the Authentic Number, no longer entering the alien,

15. We must repeat: The Collective Being, the Authentic, There, is at once Being and IntellectualPrinciple

and the Complete Living Form; thus it includes the total of living things; the Unity There is reproduced by

the unity of this living universe in the degree possible to it for the sensenature as such cannot compass that

transcendental unity thus that LivingAll is inevitably NumberEntire: if the Number were not complete,

the All would be deficient to the extent of some number, and if every number applicable to living things were

not contained in it, it would not be the allcomprehending LifeForm. Therefore, Number exists before every

Again: Man exists in the Intellectual and with him all other living things, both by possession of RealBeing

and because that is the LifeForm Complete. Even the man of this sphere is a member of the Intellectual

since that is the LifeForm Complete; every living thing by virtue of having life, is There, There in the

Lifeform, and man is There also, in the Intellectual, in so far as he is intellect, for all intelligences are

severally members of That. Now all this means Number There. Yet even in Intellect Number is not present

primally; its presence There is the reckoning of the Acts of IntellectualPrinciple; it tallies with the justice in

IntellectualPrinciple, its moral wisdom, its virtues, its knowledge, all whose possession makes That

But knowledge must not this imply presence to the alien? No; knowledge, known and knower are an

identity; so with all the rest; every member of IntellectualPrinciple is therefore present to it primally; justice,

for example, is not accidental to it as to soul in its character as soul, where these virtues are mainly potential

becoming actual by the intention towards IntellectualPrinciple and association with it.

Next we come to Being, fully realized, and this is the seat of Number; by Number, Being brings forth the

Beings; its movement is planned to Number; it establishes the numbers of its offspring before bringing them

to be, in the same way as it establishes its own unity by linking pure Being to the First: the numbers do not

link the lower to the First; it suffices that Being is so linked; for Being, in taking form as Number, binds its

members to itself. As a unity, it suffers no division, remaining selfconstant; as a thing of division,

containing its chosen total of members, it knows that total and so brings forth Number, a phase therefore of

its content: its development of part is ruled by the powers of Number, and the Beings it produces sum to that

Number. Thus Number, the primal and true, is Principle and source of actuality to the Beings.

Hence it is that in our sphere, also, Number accompanies the coming to be of particular things and to suppose

another number than the actual is to suppose the production of something else or of nothing.

These then are the primal numbers; they are numerable; the numbers of the other order are of a double

character; as derived from the first numbers they are themselves numerable but as acting for those first they

are measures of the rest of things, numbering numbers and numerables. For how could they declare a Decad

16. But here we may be questioned about these numbers which we describe as the primal and authentic:

"Where do you place these numbers, in what genus among Beings? To everyone they seem to come under

Quantity and you have certainly brought Quantity in, where you say that discrete Quantity equally with the

continuous holds place among Beings; but you go on to say that there are the numbers belonging to the Firsts

and then talk of other numbers quite distinct, those of reckoning; tell us how you arrange all this, for there is

difficulty here. And then, the unity in sensethings is that a quantity or is quantity here just so many units

brought together, the unity being the startingpoint of quantity but not quantity itself? And, if the

startingpoint, is it a kindred thing or of another genus? All this you owe it to us to make clear."

You take one thing with another for we must first deal with objects of sense a dog and a man, or two men;

or you take a group and affirm ten, a decad of men: in this case the number affirmed is not a Reality, even as

Reality goes in the sphere of sense, but is purely Quantity: similarly when you resolve into units, breaking up

the decad, those units are your principle of Quantity since the single individual is not a unity absolute.

But the case is different when you consider one man in himself and affirm a certain number, duality, for

By this analysis and totalling, you get quantity; but there are two objects under consideration and each of

these is one; each of the unities contributes to the complete being and the oneness is inherent in each; this is

another kind of number; number essential; even the duality so formed is no posterior; it does not signify a

quantity apart from the thing but the quantity in the essence which holds the thing together. The number here

is no mere result of your detailing; the things exist of themselves and are not brought together by your

reckoning, but what has it to do with essential reality that you count one man in with another? There is here

no resultant unity such as that of a choir the decad is real only to you who count the ten; in the ten of your

reckoning there cannot be a decad without a unitary basis; it is you that make the ten by your counting, by

fixing that tenness down to quantity; in choir and army there is something more than that, something not of

The Number inherent apart from any enumeration has its own manner of being, but the other, that resulting

upon the appearance of an external to be appraised by the Number within yourself, is either an Act of these

inherent numbers or an Act in accordance with them; in counting we produce number and so bring quantity

It is the Number of our essence. "Our essence" we read "partakes of Number and harmony and, also, is

Number and harmony." "Neither body nor magnitude," someone says: soul, then, is Number since it is

essence. The number belonging to body is an essence of the order of body; the number belonging to soul

In the Intellectuals, all, if the Absolute LivingForm, there is a multiple a triad, let us say that Triad of the

LivingForm is of the nature of essence: and the Triad prior to any living thing, Triad in the realm of Being,

When you enumerate two things say, animal and beauty each of these remains one thing; the number is

your production; it lay within yourself; it is you that elaborate quantity, here the dyad. But when you declare

virtue to be a Tetrad, you are affirming a Tetrad which does actually exist; the parts, so to speak, make one

thing; you are taking as the object of your act a Unity Tetrad to which you accommodate the Tetrad within

17. But what of the Infinite Number we hear of; does not all this reasoning set it under limit?

And rightly so if the thing is to be a number; limitlessness and number are in contradiction.

How, then, do we come to use the term? Is it that we think of Number as we think of an infinite line, not with

the idea that any such lire exists but that even the very greatest that of the [path of the] universe, for

example may be thought of as still greater? So it might be with number; let it be fixed, yet we still are free

to think of its double, though not of course to produce the doubled quantity since it is impossible to join to the

It is our view that there does exist an infinite line, among the Intellectual Beings: for There a line would not

be quantitative and being without quantity could be numerically infinite. This however would be in another

mode than that of limitless extension. In what mode then? In that the conception of the Absolute Line does

But what sort of thing is the Line in the Intellectual and what place does it hold?

It is later than Number since unity is observed in it; it rises at one point and traverses one course and simply

But where does this thing lie? Is it existent only in the defining thought, so to speak?

No; it is also a thing, though a thing of the Intellectual. All that belongs to that order is at once an Intellectual

and in some degree the concrete thing. There is a position, as well as a manner of being, for all

configurations, for surface, for solid. And certainly the configurations are not of our devising; for example,

the configurations of the universe are obviously antecedent to ourselves; so it must be with all the

configurations of the things of nature; before the bodily reproductions all must exist There, without

configuration, primal configurations. For these primals are not shapes in something; selfbelonging, they are

perfect without extension; only the extended needs the external. In the sphere of RealBeing the

configuration is always a unity; it becomes discrete either in the LivingForm or immediately before: I say

"becomes discrete" not in the sense that it takes magnitude There but that it is broken apart for the purpose of

the LivingForm and is allotted to the bodies within that Form for instance, to Fire There, the Intellectual

Pyramid. And because the IdealForm is There, the fire of this sphere seeks to produce that configuration

against the check of Matter: and so of all the rest as we read in the account of the realm of sense.

They are in the IntellectualPrinciple previously but they also exist in the LivingForm; if this be considered

as including the IntellectualPrinciple, then they are primally in the LifeForm, but if that Principle comes

first then they are previously in that. And if the LifeForm entire contains also souls, it must certainly be

No doubt there is the passage "Whatever Intellect sees in the entire LifeForm"; thus seeing, must not the

No; the seeing may imply merely that the reality comes into being by the fact of that seeing; the

IntellectualPrinciple is not external to the LifeForm; all is one; the Act of the IntellectualPrinciple

possesses itself of bare sphere, while the LifeForm holds the sphere as sphere of a living total.

18. It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the "More than is present";

the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire;

no number has been or could be omitted to make addition possible. It might be described as infinite in the

sense that it has not been measured who is there to measure it? but it is solely its own, a concentrated unit,

entire, not ringed round by any boundary; its manner of being is settled for it by itself alone. None of the

RealBeings is under limit; what is limited, measured, is what needs measure to prevent it running away into

the unbounded. There every being is Measure; and therefore it is that all is beautiful. Because that is a living

thing it is beautiful, holding the highest life, the complete, a life not tainted towards death, nothing mortal

there, nothing dying. Nor is the life of that Absolute LivingForm some feeble flickering; it is primal, the

brightest, holding all that life has of radiance; it is that first light which the souls There draw upon for their

life and bring with them when they come here. It knows for what purpose it lives, towards What it lives, from

Whence it lives; for the Whence of its life is the Whither... and close above it stands the wisdom of all, the

collective IntellectualPrinciple, knit into it, one with it, colouring it to a higher goodness, by kneading

wisdom into it, making its beauty still more august. Even here the august and veritably beautiful life is the

life in wisdom, here dimly seen, There purely. For There wisdom gives sight to the seer and power for the

Here attention is set for the most part upon the unliving and, in the living, upon what is lifeless in them; the

inner life is taken only with alloy: There, all are Living Beings, living wholly, unalloyed; however you may

choose to study one of them apart from its life, in a moment that life is flashed out upon you: once you have

known the Essence that pervades them, conferring that unchangeable life upon them, once you perceive the

judgement and wisdom and knowledge that are theirs, you can but smile at all the lower nature with its

In virtue of this Essence it is that life endures, that the IntellectualPrinciple endures, that the Beings stand in

their eternity; nothing alters it, turns it, moves it; nothing, indeed, is in being besides it to touch it; anything

that is must be its product; anything opposed to it could not affect it. Being itself could not make such an

opposite into Being; that would require a prior to both and that prior would then be Being; so that Parmenides

was right when he taught the identity of Being and Unity. Being is thus beyond contact not because it stands

How then can we deny to it either Being or anything at all that may exist effectively, anything that may

As long as it exists it produces: but it exists for ever; so, therefore, do its products. And so great is it in power

and beauty that it remains the allurer, all things of the universe depending from it and rejoicing to hold their

trace of it and through that to seek their good. To us, existence is before the good; all this world desires life

and wisdom in order to Being; every soul and every intellect seeks to be its Being, but Being is sufficient to

1. God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the light

and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and

It cannot be that other forms of being were produced first and that, these perishing in the absence of the

senses, the maker at last supplied the means by which men and other living beings might avert disaster.

We may be told that it lay within the divine knowledge that animal life would be exposed to heat and cold

and other such experiences incident to body and that in this knowledge he provided the senses and the organs

apt to their activity in order that the living total might not fall an easy prey.

Now, either he gave these organs to souls already possessing the sensitive powers or he gave senses and

But if the souls were given the powers as well as the organs, then, souls though they were, they had no

sensation before that giving. If they possessed these powers from the moment of being souls and became

souls in order to their entry into process, then it is of their very nature to belong to process, unnatural to them

to be outside of process and within the Intellectual: they were made in the intent that they should belong to

the alien and have their being amid evil; the divine provision would consist in holding them to their disaster;

Precedent planning, it may be; but still we are forced back to some thing or things determining it. What

Either senseperception or intellect. But senseperception it cannot in this case be: intellect is left; yet,

starting from intellect, the conclusion will be knowledge, not therefore the handling of the sensible; what

begins with the intellectual and proceeds to the intellectual can certainly not end in dealings with the sensible.

Providence, then, whether over living beings or over any part of the universe was never the outcome of plan.

There is in fact no planning There; we speak of reasoned purpose in the world of things only to convey that

the universe is of the character which in the later order would point to a wise purposing; Providence implies

that things are as, in the later order, a competent foreplanning would produce them. Reasoning serves, in

beings not of the order above that need, to supply for the higher power; foresight is necessary in the lack of

power which could dispense with it; it labours towards some one occurrence in preference to another and it

goes in a sort of dread of the unfitting; where only the fitting can occur, there is no foreseeing. So with

planning; where one only of two things can be, what place is there for plan? The alone and one and utterly

simplex cannot involve a "this to avert that": if the "this" could not be, the "that" must; the serviceable thing

But surely this is foreseeing, deliberating: are we not back at what was said at the beginning, that God did to

this end give both the senses and the powers, however perplexing that giving be?

No: all turns on the necessary completeness of Act; we cannot think anything belonging to God to be other

than a whole and all and therefore in anything of God's that all must be contained; God therefore must take in

the future, present beforehand. Certainly there is no later in the divine; what is There as present is future for

elsewhere. If then the future is present, it must be present as having been foreconceived for later coming to

be; at that divine stage therefore it lacks nothing and therefore can never lack; all existed, eternally and in

such a way that at the later stage any particular thing may be said to exist for this or that purpose; the All, in

its extension and so to speak unfolding, is able to present succession while yet it is simultaneous; this is

2. Thus we have even here the means of knowing the nature of the IntellectualPrinciple, though, seeing it

more closely than anything else, we still see it at less than its worth. We know that it exists but its cause we

do not see, or, if we do, we see that cause as something apart. We see a man or an eye, if you like but this

is an image or part of an image; what is in that Principle is at once Man and the reason of his being; for There

man or eye must be, itself, an intellective thing and a cause of its being; it could not exist at all unless it

were that cause, whereas here, everything partial is separate and so is the cause of each. In the Intellectual, all

Even here the thing and its cause are often identical an eclipse furnishes an example what then is there to

prevent other things too being identical with their cause and this cause being the essence of the thing? It must

be so; and by this search after the cause the thing's essence is reached, for the essence of a thing is its cause. I

am not here saying that the informing Idea is the cause of the thing though this is true but that the Idea

A thing of inactivity, even though alive, cannot include its own cause; but where could a FormingIdea, a

member of the IntellectualPrinciple, turn in quest of its cause? We may be answered "In the

IntellectualPrinciple"; but the two are not distinct; the Idea is the IntellectualPrinciple; and if that Principle

must contain the Ideas complete, their cause must be contained in them. The IntellectualPrinciple itself

contains every cause of the things of its content; but these of its content are identically IntellectualPrinciple,

each of them IntellectualPrinciple; none of them, thus, can lack its own cause; each springs into being

carrying with it the reason of its being. No result of chance, each must rise complete with its cause; it is an

integral and so includes the excellence bound up with the cause. This is how all participants in the Idea are

In our universe, a coherent total of multiplicity, the several items are linked each to the other, and by the fact

that it is an all every cause is included in it: even in the particular thing the part is discernibly related to the

whole, for the parts do not come into being separately and successively but are mutually cause and caused at

one and the same moment. Much more in the higher realm must all the singles exist for the whole and each

for itself: if then that world is the conjoint reality of all, of an all not chanceruled and not sectional, the

cause There must include the causes: every item must hold, in its very nature, the uncaused possession of its

cause; uncaused, independent and standing apart from cause, they must be selfcontained, cause and all.

Further, since nothing There is chancesprung, and the multiplicity in each comprehends the entire content,

then the cause of every member can be named; the cause was present from the beginning, inherent, not a

cause but a fact of the being; or, rather, cause and manner of being were one. What could an Idea have, as

cause, over and above the IntellectualPrinciple? It is a thought of that Principle and cannot, at that, be

considered as anything but a perfect product. If it is thus perfect we cannot speak of anything in which it is

lacking nor cite any reason for such lack. That thing must be present, and we can say why. The why is

inherent, therefore, in the entity, that is to say in every thought and activity of the IntellectualPrinciple. Take

for example the Idea of Man; Man entire is found to contribute to it; he is in that Idea in all his fulness

including everything that from the beginning belonged to Man. If Man were not complete There, so that there

were something to be added to the Idea, that additional must belong to a derivative; but Man exists from

No: all stands in that likeness, nothing to be added or taken away; this planning and reasoning is based only

on an assumption; things are taken to be in process and this suggests planning and reasoning; insist on the

eternity of the process and planning falls to the ground. There can be no planning over the eternal; that would

imply forgetfulness of a first state; further, if the second state were better, things stood ill at first; if they stood

Only in conjunction with their causes are things good; even in this sphere a thing is good in virtue of being

complete; form means that the thing is complete, the Matter duly controlled; this control means that nothing

has been left crude; but something is so left if anything belonging to the shape be missingeye, or other part.

Thus to state cause is to state the thing complete. Why eyes or eyebrows? For completion: if you say "For

preservation," you affirm an indwelling safeguard of the essence, something contributory to the being: the

essence, then, preceded the safeguard and the cause was inbound with the essence; distinct, this cause is in its

All parts, thus, exist in regard to each other: the essence is allembracing, complete, entire; the excellency is

inbound with the cause and embraced by it; the being, the essence, the cause, all are one.

But, at this, senseperception even in its particular modes is involved in the Idea by eternal necessity, in

virtue of the completeness of the Idea; IntellectualPrinciple, as allinclusive, contains in itself all by which

we are brought, later, to recognise this perfection in its nature; the cause, There, was one total, allinclusive;

thus Man in the Intellectual was not purely intellect, senseperception being an addition made upon his entry

into birth: all this would seem to imply a tendance in that great Principle towards the lower, towards this

But how could that Principle have such perception, be aware of things of sense? Surely it is untenable on the

one hand that senseperception should exist There, from eternity, and on the other that only upon the

debasement of the soul should there be senseperception here and the accomplishment in this realm of the

4. To meet the difficulty we must make a close examination of the nature of Man in the Intellectual; perhaps,

though, it is better to begin with the man of this plane lest we be reasoning to Man There from a

We ask first whether man as here is a ReasonPrinciple different to that soul which produces him as here and

gives him life and thought; or is he that very soul or, again, the [yet lower] soul using the human body?

Now if man is a reasonable living being and by "living being" is meant a conjoint of soul and body, the

ReasonPrinciple of man is not identical with soul. But if the conjoint of soul and body is the

reasonprinciple of man, how can man be an eternal reality, seeing that it is only when soul and body have

The ReasonPrinciple will be the foreteller of the man to be, not the Man Absolute with which we are

dealing but more like his definition, and not at that indicating his nature since what is indicated is not the Idea

that is to enter Matter but only that of the known thing, the conjoint. We have not yet found the Man we are

But it may be said the ReasonPrinciple of such beings must be some conjoint, one element in another.

This does not define the principle of either. If we are to state with entire accuracy the ReasonPrinciples of

the Forms in Matter and associated with Matter, we cannot pass over the generative ReasonPrinciple, in this

case that of Man, especially since we hold that a complete definition must cover the essential manner of

What, then, is this essential of Man? What is the indwelling, inseparable something which constitutes Man as

here? Is the ReasonPrinciple itself a reasoning living being or merely a maker of that reasoning lifeform?

The living being corresponds to a reasoning life in the ReasonPrinciple; man therefore is a reasoning life:

but there is no life without soul; either, then, the soul supplies the reasoning life and man therefore is not an

But if reasoning soul is the man, why does it not constitute man upon its entry into some other animal form?

5. Man, thus, must be some ReasonPrinciple other than soul. But why should he not be some conjoint a

soul in a certain ReasonPrinciple the ReasonPrinciple being, as it were, a definite activity which however

This is the case with the ReasonPrinciples in seed which are neither soulless nor entirely soul. For these

productive principles cannot be devoid of soul and there is nothing surprising in such essences being

But these principles producing other forms than man, of what phase of soul are they activities? Of the vegetal

soul? Rather of that which produces animal life, a brighter soul and therefore one more intensely living.

The soul of that order, the soul that has entered into Matter of that order, is man by having, apart from body, a

certain disposition; within body it shapes all to its own fashion, producing another form of Man, man reduced

It is soul, then, that holds the pattern and ReasonPrinciples of Man, the natural tendencies, the dispositions

and powers all feeble since this is not the Primal Man and it contains also the IdealForms of other senses,

Forms which themselves are senses, bright to all seeming but images, and dim in comparison with those of

The higher Man, above this sphere, rises from the more godlike soul, a soul possessed of a nobler humanity

and brighter perceptions. This must be the Man of Plato's definition ["Man is Soul"], where the addition

"Soul as using body" marks the distinction between the soul which uses body directly and the soul, poised

The Man of the realm of birth has senseperception: the higher soul enters to bestow a brighter life, or rather

does not so much enter as simply impart itself; for soul does not leave the Intellectual but, maintaining that

contact, holds the lower life as pendant from it, blending with it by the natural link of ReasonPrinciple to

It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source

of the soul's perception of the senserealm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as

sensepercipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the senserealm to the lowest

extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes

perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would

perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how

the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the ReasonPrinciples in copy; and Man in the

IntellectualPrinciple contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the

secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all not in the sense of

actually living by them all but as standing in underparallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another

rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the

third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though

in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the body, then if the second also

departs of course not losing hold on the Above the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No

doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the ReasonPrinciple of a man should come to occupy the

body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that.

Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher.

It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials [Daimons], who are of one Form with the soul that

makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a

Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. For that Being into which man develops is not to be called

a god; there remains the difference which distinguishes souls, all of the same race though they be. This is

When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is

giving forth the ReasonPrinciple necessarily in it of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the

7. But if it is by becoming evil and inferior that the soul produces the animal nature, the making of ox or

horse was not at the outset in its character; the reasonprinciple of the animal, and the animal itself, must lie

Inferior, yes; but outside of nature, no. The thing There [Soul in the Intellectual] was in some sense horse and

dog from the beginning; given the condition, it produces the higher kind; let the condition fail, then, since

produce it must, it produces what it may: it is like a skillful craftsman competent to create all kinds of works

of art but reduced to making what is ordered and what the aptitude of his material indicates.

The power of the AllSoul, as ReasonPrinciple of the universe, may be considered as laying down a pattern

before the effective separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something like a tentative illumining

of Matter; the elaborating soul would give minute articulation to these representations of itself; every separate

effective soul would become that towards which it tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer

But this is to anticipate: our enquiry was How there can be senseperception in man without the implication

that the Divine addresses itself to the realm of process. We maintained, and proved, that the Divine does not

look to this realm but that things here are dependent upon those and represent them and that man here,

holding his powers from Thence, is directed Thither, so that, while sense makes the environment of what is of

What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into cognisance in a way of their own, since they are

not material, while the sensible sense here so distinguished as dealing with corporeal objects is fainter than

the perception belonging to that higher world; the man of this sphere has senseperception because existing

in a less true degree and taking only enfeebled images of things There perceptions here are Intellections of

8. So much for the thing of sense; but it would appear that the prototype There of the living form, the

universal horse, must look deliberately towards this sphere; and, that being so, the idea of horse must have

Yet what was that there to present the idea of the horse it was desired to produce? Obviously the idea of horse

must exist before there was any planning to make a horse; it could not be thought of in order to be made;

there must have been horse unproduced before that which was later to come into being. If, then, the thing

existed before it was produced if it cannot have been thought of in order to its production the Being that

held the horse as There held it in presence without any looking to this sphere; it was not with intent to set

horse and the rest in being here that they were contained There; it is that, the universal existing, the

reproduction followed of necessity since the total of things was not to halt at the Intellectual. Who was there

But how come these animals of earth to be There? What have they to do within God? Reasoning beings, all

very well; but this host of the unreasoning, what is there august in them? Surely the very contrary?

The answer is that obviously the unity of our universe must be that of a manifold since it is subsequent to that

unityabsolute; otherwise it would be not next to that but the very same thing. As a next it could not hold the

higher rank of being more perfectly a unity; it must fall short: since the best is a unity, inevitably there must

Because neither of the constituents could ever be a pure unity, but at the very least a duality and so

progressively [in an endless dualization]. Besides, in that first duality of the hypothesis there would be also

movement and rest, Intellect and the life included in Intellect, allembracing Intellect and life complete. That

means that it could not be one Intellect; it must be Intellect agglomerate including all the particular intellects,

a thing therefore as multiple as all the Intellects and more so; and the life in it would nat be that of one soul

but of all the souls with the further power of producing the single souls: it would be the entire living universe

containing much besides man; for if it contained only man, man would be alone here.

9. Admitted, then it will be said for the nobler forms of life; but how can the divine contain the mean, the

unreasoning? The mean is the unreasoning, since value depends upon reason and the worth of the intellective

implies worthlessness where intellection is lacking. Yet how can there be question of the unreasoning or

In taking up the refutation of these objections, we must insist upon the consideration that neither man nor

animals here can be thought of as identical with the counterparts in the higher realm; those ideal forms must

be taken in a larger way. And again the reasoning thing is not of that realm: here the reasoning, There the

Degrees of reasoning here correspond to degrees of Intellection in that other sphere, as between man and the

other living beings There; and those others do in some measure act by understanding.

But why are they not at man's level of reason: why also the difference from man to man?

We must reflect that, since the many forms of lives are movements and so with the Intellections they

cannot be identical: there must be different lives, distinct intellections, degrees of lightsomeness and clarity:

there must be firsts, seconds, thirds, determined by nearness to the Firsts. This is how some of the

Intellections are gods, others of a secondary order having what is here known as reason, while others again

belong to the socalled unreasoning: but what we know here as unreasoning was There a ReasonPrinciple;

the unintelligent was an Intellect; the Thinker of Horse was Intellect and the Thought, Horse, was an Intellect.

But [it will be objected] if this were a matter of mere thinking we might well admit that the intellectual

concept, remaining concept, should take in the unintellectual, but where concept is identical with thing how

can the one be an Intellection and the other without intelligence? Would not this be Intellect making itself

No: the thing is not unintelligent; it is Intelligence in a particular mode, corresponding to a particular aspect

of Life; and just as life in whatever form it may appear remains always life, so Intellect is not annulled by

appearing in a certain mode. IntellectualPrinciple adapted to some particular living being does not cease to

be the IntellectualPrinciple of all, including man: take it where you will, every manifestation is the whole,

though in some special mode; the particular is produced but the possibility is of all. In the particular we see

the IntellectualPrinciple in realization; the realized is its latest phase; in one case the last aspect is "horse";

at "horse" ended the progressive outgoing towards the lesser forms of life, as in another case it will end at

something lower still. The unfolding of the powers of this Principle is always attended by some abandonment

in regard to the highest; the outgoing is by loss, and by this loss the powers become one thing or another

according to the deficiency of the lifeform produced by the failing principle; it is then that they find the

means of adding various requisites; the safeguards of the life becoming inadequate there appear nail, talon,

fang, horn. Thus the IntellectualPrinciple by its very descent is directed towards the perfect sufficiency of

the natural constitution, finding there within itself the remedy of the failure.

10. But failure There? What can defensive horns serve to There? To sufficiency as living form, to

completeness. That principle must be complete as living form, complete as Intellect, complete as life, so that

if it is not to be one thing it may be another. Its characteristic difference is in this power of being now this,

now that, so that, summing all, it may be the completest lifeform, Intelligence complete, life in greatest

fulness with each of the particulars complete in its degree while yet, over all that multiplicity, unity reigns.

If all were one identity, the total could not contain this variety of forms; there would be nothing but a

selfsufficing unity. Like every compound it must consist of things progressively differing in form and

safeguarded in that form. This is in the very nature of shape and ReasonPrinciple; a shape, that of man let us

suppose, must include a certain number of differences of part but all dominated by a unity; there will be the

noble and the inferior, eye and finger, but all within a unity; the part will be inferior in comparison with the

total but best in its place. The ReasonPrinciple, too, is at once the living form and something else,

something distinct from the being of that form. It is so with virtue also; it contains at once the universal and

the particular; and the total is good because the universal is not differentiated.

11. The very heavens, patently multiple, cannot be thought to disdain any form of life since this universe

holds everything. Now how do these things come to be here? Does the higher realm contain all of the lower?

But, having fire [warmth] and water, it will certainly have vegetation; how does vegetation exist There?

Earth, too? either these are alive or they are There as dead things and then not everything There has life. How

Vegetal life we can well admit, for the plant is a ReasonPrinciple established in life. If in the plant the

ReasonPrinciple, entering Matter and constituting the plant, is a certain form of life, a definite soul, then,

since every ReasonPrinciple is a unity, then either this of plantlife is the primal or before it there is a

primal plant, source of its being: that first plant would be a unity; those here, being multiple, must derive

from a unity. This being so, that primal must have much the truer life and be the veritable plant, the plants

here deriving from it in the secondary and tertiary degree and living by a vestige of its life.

But earth; how is there earth There: what is the being of earth and how are we to represent to ourselves the

Earth, here and There alike, must possess shape and a ReasonPrinciple. Now in the case of the vegetal, the

ReasonPrinciple of the plant here was found to be living in that higher realm: is there such a

Take the most earthy of things found shaped in earth and they exhibit, even they, the indwelling

earthprinciple. The growing and shaping of stones, the internal moulding of mountains as they rise, reveal

the working of an ensouled ReasonPrinciple fashioning them from within and bringing them to that shape:

this, we must take it, is the creative earthprinciple corresponding to what we call the specific principle of a

tree; what we know as earth is like the wood of the tree; to cut out a stone is like lopping a twig from a tree,

except of course that there is no hurt done, the stone remaining a member of the earth as the twig, uncut, of

Realizing thus that the creative force inherent in our earth is life within a ReasonPrinciple, we are easily

convinced that the earth There is much more primally alive, that it is a reasoned EarthLivingness, the earth

Fire, similarly, with other such things, must be a ReasonPrinciple established in Matter: fire certainly does

not originate in the friction to which it may be traced; the friction merely brings out a fire already existent in

the scheme and contained in the materials rubbed together. Matter does not in its own character possess this

firepower: the true cause is something informing the Matter, that is to say, a ReasonPrinciple, obviously

therefore a soul having the power of bringing fire into being; that is, a life and a ReasonPrinciple in one.

It is with this in mind that Plato says there is soul in everything of this sphere. That soul is the cause of the

fire of the senseworld; the cause of fire here is a certain Life of fiery character, the more authentic fire. That

transcendent fire being more truly fire will be more veritably alive; the fire absolute possesses life. And the

Now, it is quite certain that these are equally within the living total, parts of the living all; life does not appear

visibly in them; but neither does it in the case of the earth where its presence is inferred by what earth

produces: but there are living things in fire and still more manifestly in water and there are systems of life in

the air. The particular fire, rising only to be quenched, eludes the soul animating the universe; it slips away

from the magnitude which would manifest the soul within it; so with air and water. If these Kinds could

somehow be fastened down to magnitude they would exhibit the soul within them, now concealed by the fact

that their function requires them to be loose or flowing. It is much as in the case of the fluids within

ourselves; the flesh and all that is formed out of the blood into flesh show the soul within, but the blood itself,

not bringing us any sensation, seems not to have soul; yet it must; the blood is not subject to blind force; its

nature obliges it to abstain from the soul which nonetheless is indwelling in it. This must be the case with the

three elements; it is the fact that the living beings formed from the close conglomeration of air [the stars] are

not susceptible to suffering. But just as air, so long as it remains itself, eludes the light which is and remains

unyielding, so too, by the effect of its circular movement, it eludes soul and, in another sense, does not. And

12. Or take it another way: Since in our view this universe stands to that as copy to original, the living total

must exist There beforehand; that is the realm of complete Being and everything must exist There.

The sky There must be living and therefore not bare of stars, here known as the heavens for stars are

included in the very meaning of the word. Earth too will be There, and not void but even more intensely

living and containing all that lives and moves upon our earth and the plants obviously rooted in life; sea will

be There and all waters with the movement of their unending life and all the living things of the water; air too

The content of that living thing must surely be alive as in this sphere and all that lives must of necessity be

There. The nature of the major parts determines that of the living forms they comprise; by the being and

content of the heaven There are determined all the heavenly forms of life; if those lesser forms were not

To ask how those forms of life come to be There is simply asking how that heaven came to be; it is asking

whence comes life, whence the AllLife, whence the AllSoul, whence collective Intellect: and the answer is

that There no indigence or impotence can exist but all must be teeming, seething, with life. All flows, so to

speak, from one fount not to be thought of as one breath or warmth but rather as one quality englobing and

safeguarding all qualities sweetness with fragrance, wine quality and the savours of everything that may be

tasted, all colours seen, everything known to touch, all that ear may hear, all melodies, every rhythm.

13. For IntellectualPrinciple is not a simplex, nor is the soul that proceeds from it: on the contrary things

include variety in the degree of their simplicity, that is to say in so far as they are not compounds but

Principles and Activities; the activity of the lowest is simple in the sense of being a fadingout, that of the

First as the total of all activity. IntellectualPrinciple is moved in a movement unfailingly true to one course,

but its unity and identity are not those of the partial; they are those of its universality; and indeed the partial

We know that IntellectualPrinciple has a source and advances to some term as its ultimate; now, is the

intermediate between source and term to thought of as a line or as some distinct kind of body uniform and

Where at that would be its worth? it had no change, if no differentiation woke it into life, it would not be a

Force; that condition would in no way differ from mere absence of power and, even calling it movement, it

would still be the movement of a life not allvaried but indiscriminate; now it is of necessity that life be

allembracing, covering all the realms, and that nothing fail of life. IntellectualPrinciple, therefore, must

A simplex moving retains its character; either there is no change, movement has been null, or if there has

been advance it still remains a simplex and at once there is a permanent duality: if the one member of this

duality is identical with the other, then it is still as it was, there has been no advance; if one member differs

from the other, it has advanced with differentiation, and, out of a certain identity and difference, it has

produced a third unity. This production, based on Identity and Difference, must be in its nature identical and

different; it will be not some particular different thing but Collective Difference, as its Identity is Collective

Being, thus, at once Collective Identity and Collective Difference, IntellectualPrinciple must reach over all

different things; its very nature then is to modify into a universe. If the realm of different things existed

before it, these different things must have modified it from the beginning; if they did not, this

Beings could not exist save by the activity of IntellectualPrinciple; wandering down every way it produces

thing after thing, but wandering always within itself in such selfbound wandering as authentic Intellect may

know; this wandering permitted to its nature is among real beings which keep pace with its movement; but it

is always itself; this is a stationary wandering, a wandering within the Meadow of Truth from which it does

It holds and covers the universe which it has made the space, so to speak, of its movement, itself being also

that universe which is space to it. And this Meadow of Truth is varied so that movement through it may be

possible; suppose it not always and everywhere varied, the failing of diversity is a failure of movement;

failure in movement would mean a failing of the Intellectual Act; halting, it has ceased to exercise its

The IntellectualPrinciple is the Intellectual Act; its movement is complete, filling Being complete; And the

entire of Being is the Intellectual Act entire, comprehending all life and the unfailing succession of things.

Because this Principle contains Identity and Difference its division is ceaselessly bringing the different things

to light. Its entire movement is through life and among living things. To a traveller over land, all is earth but

earth abounding in difference: so in this journey the life through which IntellectualPrinciple passes is one

Throughout this endless variation it maintains the one course because it is not, itself, subject to change but on

the contrary is present as identical and unvarying Being to the rest of things. For if there be no such principle

of unchanging identity to things, all is dead, activity and actuality exist nowhere. These "other things"

through which it passes are also IntellectualPrinciple itself; otherwise it is not the allcomprehending

principle: if it is to be itself, it must be allembracing; failing that, it is not itself. If it is complete in itself,

complete because allembracing, and there is nothing which does not find place in this total, then there can

be nothing belonging to it which is not different; only by difference can there be such cooperation towards a

total. If it knew no otherness but was pure identity its essential Being would be the less for that failure to

14. On the nature of the IntellectualPrinciple we get light from its manifestations; they show that it demands

such diversity as is compatible with its being a monad. Take what principle you will, that of plant or animal:

if this principle were a pure unity and not a specifically varied thing, it could not so serve as principle; its

product would be Matter, the principle not having taken all those forms necessary if Matter is to be permeated

and utterly transformed. A face is not one mass; there are nose and eyes; and the nose is not a unity but has

There is infinity in IntellectualPrinciple since, of its very nature, it is a multiple unity, not with the unity of a

house but with that of a ReasonPrinciple, multiple in itself: in the one Intellectual design it includes within

itself, as it were in outline, all the outlines, all the patterns. All is within it, all the powers and intellections;

the division is not determined by a boundary but goes ever inward; this content is held as the living universe

holds the natural forms of the living creatures in it from the greatest to the least, down even to the minutest

powers where there is a halt at the individual form. The discrimination is not of items huddled within a sort of

unity; this is what is known as the Universal Sympathy, not of course the sympathy known here which is a

copy and prevails amongst things in separation; that authentic Sympathy consists in all being a unity and

15. That Life, the various, the allincluding, the primal and one, who can consider it without longing to be of

All other life is darkness, petty and dim and poor; it is unclean and polluting the clean for if you do but look

upon it you no longer see nor live this life which includes all living, in which there is nothing that does not

live and live in a life of purity void of all that is ill. For evil is here where life is in copy and Intellect in copy;

There is the archetype, that which is good in the very Idea we read as holding The Good in the pure Idea.

That Archetype is good; IntellectualPrinciple is good as holding its life by contemplation of the archetype;

and it sees also as good the objects of its contemplation because it holds them in its act of contemplating the

Principle of Good. But these objects come to it not as they are There but in accord with its own condition, for

it is their source; they spring thence to be here, and IntellectualPrinciple it is that has produced them by its

vision There. In the very law, never, looking to That, could it fail of Intellectual Act; never, on the other

hand, could it produce what is There; of itself it could not produce; Thence it must draw its power to bring

forth, to teem with offspring of itself; from the Good it takes what itself did not possess. From that Unity

came multiplicity to IntellectualPrinciple; it could not sustain the power poured upon it and therefore broke

All its production, effected in the power of The Good, contains goodness; it is good, itself, since it is

constituted by these things of good; it is Good made diverse. It might be likened to a living sphere teeming

with variety, to a globe of faces radiant with faces all living, to a unity of souls, all the pure souls, not faulty

but the perfect, with Intellect enthroned over all so that the place entire glows with Intellectual splendour.

But this would be to see it from without, one thing seeing another; the true way is to become

16. But even there we are not to remain always, in that beauty of the multiple; we must make haste yet

higher, above this heaven of ours and even that; leaving all else aside we ask in awe "Who produced that

realm and how?" Everything There is a single Idea in an individual impression and, informed by The Good,

possesses the universal good transcendent over all. Each possessing that Being above, possesses also the total

LivingForm in virtue of that transcendent life, possesses, no doubt, much else as well.

But what is the Nature of this Transcendent in view of which and by way of which the Ideas are good?

The best way of putting the question is to ask whether, when IntellectualPrinciple looked towards The

Good, it had Intellection of that unity as a multiplicity and, itself a unity, plied its Act by breaking into parts

No: that would not be Intellection looking upon the Good; it would be a looking void of Intellection. We

must think of it not as looking but as living; dependent upon That, it kept itself turned Thither; all the

tendance taking place There and upon That must be a movement teeming with life and must so fill the

looking Principle; there is no longer bare Act, there is a filling to saturation. Forthwith IntellectualPrinciple

becomes all things, knows that fact in virtue of its selfknowing and at once becomes IntellectualPrinciple,

filled so as to hold within itself that object of its vision, seeing all by the light from the Giver and bearing that

In this way the Supreme may be understood to be the cause at once of essential reality and of the knowing of

reality. The sun, cause of the existence of sensethings and of their being seen, is indirectly the cause of

sight, without being either the faculty or the object: similarly this Principle, The Good, cause of Being and

IntellectualPrinciple, is a light appropriate to what is to be seen There and to their seer; neither the Beings

nor the IntellectualPrinciple, it is their source and by the light it sheds upon both makes them objects of

Intellection. This filling procures the existence; after the filling, the being; the existence achieved, the seeing

followed: the beginning is that state of not yet having been filled, though there is, also, the beginning which

means that the Filling Principle was outside and by that act of filling gave shape to the filled.

17. But in what mode are these secondaries, and IntellectualPrinciple itself, within the First? They are not in

the Filling Principle; they are not in the filled since before that moment it did not contain them.

Giving need not comport possessing; in this order we are to think of a giver as a greater and of a gift as a

lower; this is the meaning of origin among real Beings. First there must be an actualized thing; its laters must

be potentially their own priors; a first must transcend its derivatives; the giver transcends the given, as a

superior. If therefore there is a prior to actuality, that prior transcends Activity and so transcends Life. Our

sphere containing life, there is a Giver of Life, a principle of greater good, of greater worth than Life; this

possessed Life and had no need to look for it to any giver in possession of Life's variety.

But the Life was a vestige of that Primal not a life lived by it; Life, then, as it looked towards That was

undetermined; having looked it had determination though That had none. Life looks to unity and is

determined by it, taking bound, limit, form. But this form is in the shaped, the shaper had none; the limit was

not external as something drawn about a magnitude; the limit was that of the multiplicity of the Life There,

limitless itself as radiated from its great Prior; the Life itself was not that of some determined being, or it

would be no more than the life of an individual. Yet it is defined; it must then have been defined as the Life

of a unity including multiplicity; certainly too each item of the multiplicity is determined, determined as

As IntellectualPrinciple: determined Life is IntellectualPrinciple. And the multiplicity?

As the multiplicity of IntellectualPrinciples: all its multiplicity resolves itself into IntellectualPrinciples

on the one hand the collective Principle, on the other the particular Principles.

But does this collective IntellectualPrinciple include each of the particular Principles as identical with itself?

No: it would be thus the container of only the one thing; since there are many IntellectualPrinciples within

It takes its characteristic difference by becoming entirely a unity within the collective whose totality could

Thus the Life in the Supreme was the collectivity of power; the vision taking place There was the potentiality

of all; IntellectualPrinciple, thus arising, is manifested as this universe of Being. It stands over the Beings

not as itself requiring base but that it may serve as base to the Form of the Firsts, the Formless Form. And it

takes position towards the soul, becoming a light to the soul as itself finds its light in the First; whenever

IntellectualPrinciple becomes the determinant of soul it shapes it into Reasoning Soul, by communicating a

Thus IntellectualPrinciple is a vestige of the Supreme; but since the vestige is a Form going out into

extension, into plurality, that Prior, as the source of Form, must be itself without shape and Form: if the Prior

were a Form, the IntellectualPrinciple itself could be only a ReasonPrinciple. It was necessary that The

First be utterly without multiplicity, for otherwise it must be again referred to a prior.

18. But in what way is the content of IntellectualPrinciple participant in good? Is it because each member of

Anything coming from The Good carries the image and type belonging to that original or deriving from it, as

anything going back to warmth or sweetness carries the memory of those originals: Life entered into

IntellectualPrinciple from The Supreme, for its origin is in the Activity streaming Thence;

IntellectualPrinciple springs from the Supreme, and with it the beauty of the Ideas; at once all these, Life,

But what is the common element in them? Derivation from the First is not enough to procure identical

quality; there must be some element held in common by the things derived: one source may produce many

differing things as also one outgoing thing may take difference in various recipients: what enters into the First

Act is different from what that Act transmits and there is difference, again, in the effect here. Nonetheless

every item may be good in a degree of its own. To what, then, is the highest degree due?

But first we must ask whether Life is a good, bare Life, or only the Life streaming Thence, very different

from the Life known here? Once more, then, what constitutes the goodness of Life?

But if in that higher Life there must be something from That, something which is the Authentic Life, we must

admit that since nothing worthless can come Thence Life in itself is good; so too we must admit, in the case

of Authentic IntellectualPrinciple, that its Life because good derives from that First; thus it becomes clear

that every Idea is good and informed by the Good. The Ideas must have something of good, whether as a

common property or as a distinct attribution or as held in some distinct measure.

Thus it is established that the particular Idea contains in its essence something of good and thereby becomes a

good thing; for Life we found to be good not in the bare being but in its derivation from the Authentic, the

Supreme whence it sprung: and the same is true of IntellectualPrinciple: we are forced therefore admit a

When, with all their differences, things may be affirmed to have a measure of identity, the matter of the

identity may very well be established in their very essence and yet be mentally abstracted; thus life in man or

horse yields the notion of animal; from water or fire we may get that of warmth; the first case is a definition

of Kind, the other two cite qualities, primary and secondary respectively. Both or one part of Intellect, then,

Is The Good, then, inherent in the Ideas essentially? Each of them is good but the goodness is not that of the

No doubt The Good is a unity; but here it has become particularized. The First Activity is good and anything

determined in accord with it is good as also is any resultant. There is the good that is good by origin in The

First, the good that is in an ordered system derived from that earlier, and the good that is in the actualization

[in the thing participant]. Derived, then, not identical like the speech and walk and other characteristics of

Here, it is obvious, goodness depends upon order, rhythm, but what equivalent exists There?

We might answer that in the case of the senseorder, too, the good is imposed since the ordering is of things

But why are they thus good in themselves? We cannot be content with the conviction of their goodness on the

ground of their origin in that realm: we do not deny that things deriving Thence are good, but our subject

19. Are we to rest all on pursuit and on the soul? Is it enough to put faith in the soul's choice and call that

good which the soul pursues, never asking ourselves the motive of its choice? We marshal demonstration as

Several absurdities would be entailed. The good becomes a mere attribute of things; objects of pursuit are

many and different so that mere choice gives no assurance that the thing chosen is the best; in fact, we cannot

This is to make Idea and ReasonPrinciple the test: all very well; but arrived at these, what explanation have

we to give as to why Idea and ReasonPrinciple themselves are good? In the lower, we recognise goodness

in its less perfect form by comparison with what is poorer still; we are without a standard There where no

evil exists, the Bests holding the field alone. Reason demands to know what constitutes goodness; those

principles are good in their own nature and we are left in perplexity because cause and fact are identical: and

even though we should state a cause, the doubt still remains until our reason claims its rights There. But we

20. Since we are not entitled to make desire the test by which to decide on the nature and quality of the good,

We would apply the opposition of things order, disorder; symmetry, irregularity; health, illness; form,

shapelessness; realbeing, decay: in a word continuity against dissolution. The first in each pair, no one could

doubt, belong to the concept of good and therefore whatever tends to produce them must be ranged on the

Thus virtue and IntellectualPrinciple and life and soul reasoning soul, at least belong to the idea of good

Why not halt, then it will be asked at IntellectualPrinciple and make that The Good? Soul and life are

traces of IntellectualPrinciple; that principle is the Term of Soul which on judgement sets itself towards

IntellectualPrinciple, pronouncing right preferable to wrong and virtue in every form to vice, and thus

The soul aiming only at that Principle would need a further lessoning; it must be taught that

IntellectualPrinciple is not the ultimate, that not all things look to that while all do look to the good. Not all

that is outside of IntellectualPrinciple seeks to attain it; what has attained it does not halt there but looks still

towards good. Besides, IntellectualPrinciple is sought upon motives of reasoning, the good before all

reason. And in any striving towards life and continuity of existence and activity, the object is aimed at not as

IntellectualPrinciple but as good, as rising from good and leading to it: life itself is desirable only in view of

21. Now what in all these objects of desire is the fundamental making them good?

IntellectualPrinciple and that life are of the order of good and hold their desirability, even they, in virtue of

belonging to that order; they have their goodness, I mean, because Life is an Activity in The Good, Or

rather, streaming from The Good while IntellectualPrinciple is an Activity already defined Therein; both

are of radiant beauty and, because they come Thence and lead Thither, they are sought after by the

soulsought, that is, as things congenial though not veritably good while yet, as belonging to that order not to

be rejected; the related, if not good, is shunned in spite of that relationship, and even remote and ignobler

The intense love called forth by Life and IntellectualPrinciple is due not to what they are but to the

consideration of their nature as something apart, received from above themselves.

Material forms, containing light incorporated in them, need still a light apart from them that their own light

may be manifest; just so the Beings of that sphere, all lightsome, need another and a lordlier light or even

22. That light known, then indeed we are stirred towards those Beings in longing and rejoicing over the

radiance about them, just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the Beauty manifested upon it.

Every one of those Beings exists for itself but becomes an object of desire by the colour cast upon it from The

Good, source of those graces and of the love they evoke. The soul taking that outflow from the divine is

stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love. Before that, even

IntellectualPrinciple with all its loveliness did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the light

of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all, unquickened even to IntellectualPrinciple there before it.

But when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and

however urged by its nearer environing, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something greater to its

memory: so long as there exists anything loftier than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the

giver of that love. Beyond IntellectualPrinciple it passes but beyond The Good it cannot, for nothing stands

above That. Let it remain in IntellectualPrinciple and it sees the lovely and august, but it is not there

possessed of all it sought; the face it sees is beautiful no doubt but not of power to hold its gaze because

Even here we have to recognise that beauty is that which irradiates symmetry rather than symmetry itself and

Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and only some faint trace of it upon the dead,

though the face yet retains all its fulness and symmetry? Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful,

even though the others happen to be more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the

sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this because there is soul

there, because there is more of the Idea of The Good, because there is some glow of the light of The Good

and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won over to

23. That which soul must quest, that which sheds its light upon IntellectualPrinciple, leaving its mark

wherever it falls, surely we need not wonder that it be of power to draw to itself, calling back from every

wandering to rest before it. From it came all, and so there is nothing mightier; all is feeble before it. Of all

things the best, must it not be The Good? If by The Good we mean the principle most wholly selfsufficing,

utterly without need of any other, what can it be but this? Before all the rest, it was what it was, when evil

If evil is a Later, there found where there is no trace of This among the very ultimates, so that on the

downward side evil has no beyond then to This evil stands full contrary with no linking intermediate: This

therefore is The Good: either good there is none, or if there must be, This and no other is it.

And to deny the good would be to deny evil also; there can then be no difference in objects coming up for

It has produced IntellectualPrinciple, it has produced Life, the souls which IntellectualPrinciple sends forth

and everything else that partakes of Reason, of IntellectualPrinciple or of Life. Source and spring of so

Even now it is preserver of what it produced; by it the Intellectual Beings have their Intellection and the

living their life; it breathes Intellect in breathes Life in and, where life is impossible, existence.

We may recall what we have said of the nature of the light shining from it into IntellectualPrinciple and so

by participation into the soul. But for the moment let us leave that aside and put another question:

Does The Good hold that nature and name because some outside thing finds it desirable? May we put it that a

thing desirable to one is good to that one and that what is desirable to all is to be recognised as The Good?

No doubt this universal questing would make the goodness evident but still there must be in the nature

Further, is the questing determined by the hope of some acquisition or by sheer delight? If there is

acquisition, what is it? If it is a matter of delight, why here rather than in something else?

The question comes to this: Is goodness in the appropriate or in something apart, and is The Good good as

And we must not overlook what some surly critic will surely bring up against us:

What's all this: you scatter praises here, there and everywhere: Life is good, IntellectualPrinciple is good:

and yet The Good is above them; how then can IntellectualPrinciple itself be good? Or what do we gain by

seeing the Ideas themselves if we see only a particular Idea and nothing else [nothing "substantial"]? If we

are happy here we may be deceived into thinking life a good when it is merely pleasant; but suppose our lot

unhappy, why should we speak of good? Is mere personal existence good? What profit is there in it? What is

the advantage in existence over utter nonexistence unless goodness is to be founded upon our love of self?

It is the deception rooted in the nature of things and our dread of dissolution that lead to all the "goods" of

25. It is in view, probably, of this difficulty that Plato, in the Philebus, makes pleasure an element in the

Term; the good is not defined as a simplex or set in IntellectualPrinciple alone; while he rightly refrains

from identifying the good with the pleasant, yet he does not allow IntellectualPrinciple, foreign to pleasure,

to be The Good, since he sees no attractive power in it. He may also have had in mind that the good, to

answer to its name, must be a thing of delight and that an object of pursuit must at least hold some pleasure

for those that acquire and possess it, so that where there is no joy the good too is absent, further that pleasure,

All this was very well; there the enquiry was not as to the Primal Good but as to ours; the good dealt with in

that passage pertains to very different beings and therefore is a different good; it is a good falling short of that

higher; it is a mingled thing; we are to understand that good does not hold place in the One and Alone whose

The good must, no doubt, be a thing pursued, not, however, good because it is pursued but pursued because it

To the lowest of things the good is its immediate higher; each step represents the good to what stands lower

so long as the movement does not tend awry but advances continuously towards the superior: thus there is a

halt at the Ultimate, beyond which no ascent is possible: that is the First Good, the authentic, the supremely

Matter would have FormingIdea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would

look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands

IntellectualPrinciple; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. Each of these progressive priors

must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place,

others life, others wisdom and the good life: IntellectualPrinciple will draw upon the Authentic Good which

we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking light

26. Any conscious being, if the good come to him, will know the good and affirm his possession of it.

In that case there must be some resemblance to account for the error: the good will be the original which the

delusion counterfeited and whenever the true presents itself we turn from the spurious.

All the striving, all the pain, show that to everything something is a good: the lifeless finds its share in

something outside itself; where there is life the longing for good sets up pursuit; the very dead are cared for

and mourned for by the living; the living plan for their own good. The witness of attainment is betterment,

cleaving to state, satisfaction, settlement, suspension of pursuit. Here pleasure shows itself inadequate; its

choice does not hold; repeated, it is no longer the same; it demands endless novelty. The good, worthy of the

name, can be no such tasting of the casual; anyone that takes this kind of thing for the good goes empty,

carrying away nothing but an emotion which the good might have produced. No one could be content to take

his pleasure thus in an emotion over a thing not possessed any more than over a child not there; I cannot think

that those setting their good in bodily satisfactions find tablepleasure without the meal, or lovepleasure

Some Idea, we maintain. There is a Form to which Matter aspires: to soul, moral excellence is this Form.

But is this Form a good to the thing as being apt to it, does the striving aim at the apt?

No: the aptest would be the most resemblant to the thing itself, but that, however sought and welcomed, does

not suffice for the good: the good must be something more: to be a good to another a thing must have

something beyond aptness; that only can be adopted as the good which represents the apt in its better form

and is best to what is best in the quester's self, to that which the quester tends potentially to be.

A thing is potentially that to which its nature looks; this, obviously, it lacks; what it lacks, of its better, is its

good. Matter is of all that most in need; its next is the lowest Form; Form at lowest is just one grade higher

than Matter. If a thing is a good to itself, much more must its perfection, its Form, its better, be a good to it;

this better, good in its own nature, must be good also to the quester whose good it procures.

But why should the Form which makes a thing good be a good to that thing? As being most appropriate?

No: but because it is, itself, a portion of the Good. This is why the least alloyed and nearest to the good are

It is surely out of place to ask why a thing good in its own nature should be a good; we can hardly suppose it

dissatisfied with its own goodness so that it must strain outside its essential quality to the good which it

There remains the question with regard to the Simplex: where there is utter absence of distinction does this

If thus far we have been right, the striving of the lower possesses itself of the good as of a thing resident in a

certain Kind, and it is not the striving that constitutes the good but the good that calls out the striving: where

the good is attained something is acquired and on this acquisition there follows pleasure. But the thing must

be chosen even though no pleasure ensued; it must be desirable for its own sake.

Universally, what approaches as a good is a Form; Matter itself contains this good which is Form: are we to

No: that would be desiring its own destruction, for the good seeks to subject everything to itself. But perhaps

Matter would not wish to remain at its own level but would prefer to attain Being and, this acquired, to lay

If we are asked how the evil thing can have tendency towards the good, we answer that we have not attributed

tendency to Matter; our argument needed the hypothesis of sensation in Matter in so far as possible

consistently with retention of its character and we asserted that the entry of Form, that dream of the Good,

must raise it to a nobler order. If then Matter is Evil, there is no more to be said; if it is something else a

wrong thing, let us say then in the hypothesis that its essence acquire sensation would not the appropriate

upon the next or higher plane be its good, as in the other cases? But not what is evil in Matter would be the

quester of good but that element in it [lowest Form] which in it is associated with evil.

This question implies that if Evil were selfconscious it would admire itself: but how can the unadmirable be

There that question may rest. But if universally the good is Form and the higher the ascent the more there is

of FormSoul more truly Form than body is and phases of soul progressively of higher Form and

IntellectualPrinciple standing as Form to soul collectively then the Good advances by the opposite of

Matter and, therefore, by a cleansing and casting away to the utmost possible at each stage: and the greatest

good must be there where all that is of Matter has disappeared. The Principle of Good rejecting Matter

entirely or rather never having come near it at any point or in any way must hold itself aloft with that

29. Suppose, however, that pleasure did not result from the good but there were something preceding pleasure

But what if accepting its existence, we think of that existence as leaving still the possibility that it were not a

This would mean the good being present and the sentient possessor failing, nonetheless, to perceive it.

It would seem possible, however, to perceive and yet be unmoved by the possession; this is quite likely in the

case of the wiser and least dependent and indeed it is so with the First, immune not merely because simplex,

But all this will become clear on the solution of our remaining difficulties and the rebuttal of the argument

brought up against us. This takes the form of the question: "What gain is there in the Good to one who, fully

conscious, feels nothing when he hears of these things, whether because he has no grasp of them but takes

merely the words or because he holds to false values, perhaps being all in search of sense, finding his good in

The answer is that even in his disregard of the good proposed he is with us in setting a good before him but

fails to see how the good we define fits into his own conception. It is impossible to say "Not that" if one is

utterly without experience or conception of the "That"; there will generally have been, even, some inkling of

the good beyond Intellection. Besides, one attaining or approaching the good, but not recognising it, may

assure himself in the light of its contraries; otherwise he will not even hold ignorance an evil though everyone

prefers to know and is proud of knowing so that our very sensations seek to ripen into knowledge.

If the knowing principle and specially primal IntellectualPrinciple is valuable and beautiful, what must be

present to those of power to see the Author and Father of Intellect? Anyone thinking slightingly of this

principle of Life and Being brings evidence against himself and all his state: of course, distaste for the life

30. Whether pleasure must enter into the good, so that life in the contemplation of the divine things and

especially of their source remains still imperfect, is a question not to be ignored in any enquiry into the nature

Now to found the good upon the Intellect and upon that state of soul or mind which springs from wisdom

does not imply that the end or the absolute good is the conjunction [of Intellect and state]: it would follow

merely that Intellect is the good and that we feel happy in possession of that good. That is one theory; another

associates pleasure with Intellect in the sense that the Good is taken to be some one thing founded upon both

but depending upon our attaining or at least contemplating an Intellect so modified; this theory would

maintain that the isolated and unrelated could be the good, could be an object of desire.

But how could Intellect and pleasure combine into one mutually complementary nature?

Bodily pleasure no one, certainly, would think capable of blending in with Intellect; the unreasoning

Every activity, state, and life, will be followed and as it were escorted by the overdwelling consciousness;

sometimes as these take their natural course they will be met by hindrance and by intrusion of the conflicting

so that the life is the less selfguided; sometimes the natural activity is unmixed, wholly free, and then the

life goes brilliantly; this last state is judged the pleasantest, the most to be chosen; so, for lack of an accurate

expression, we hear of "Intellect in conjunction with pleasure." But this is no more than metaphor, like a

hundred others drawn by the poets from our natural likings "Drunk with nectar," "To banquet and feast,"

"The Father smiled." No: the veritably pleasant lies away in that other realm, the most to be loved and sought

for, not something brought about and changing but the very principle of all the colour and radiance and

brightness found here. This is why we read of "Truth introduced into the Mixture" and of the "measuring

standard as a prior condition" and are told that the symmetry and beauty necessary to the Mixture come

Thence into whatever has beauty; it is in this way that we have our share in Beauty; but in another way, also,

we achieve the truly desirable, that is by leading our selves up to what is best within us; this best is what is

31. But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that IntellectualPrinciple took the

brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in

virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. IntellectualPrinciple was raised thus to that Supreme and remains

with it, happy in that presence. Soul too, that soul which as possessing knowledge and vision was capable,

clung to what it saw; and as its vision so its rapture; it saw and was stricken; but having in itself something of

that principle it felt its kinship and was moved to longing like those stirred by the image of the beloved to

desire of the veritable presence. Lovers here mould themselves to the beloved; they seek to increase their

attraction of person and their likeness of mind; they are unwilling to fall short in moral quality or in other

graces lest they be distasteful to those possessing such merit and only among such can true love be. In the

same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. The soul which has

never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love perhaps

unawares it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with

one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter,

befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could

By only noting the flux of things it knows at once that from elsewhere comes the beauty that floats upon them

and so it is urged Thither, passionate in pursuit of what it loves: never unless someone robs it of that love

There indeed all it saw was beautiful and veritable; it grew in strength by being thus filled with the life of the

True; itself becoming veritable Being and attaining veritable knowledge, it enters by that neighbouring into

32. Where, then? where exists the author of this beauty and life, the begetter of the veritable?

You see the splendour over the things of the universe with all the variety begotten of the Ideas; well might we

linger here: but amid all these things of beauty we cannot but ask whence they come and whence the beauty.

This source can be none of the beautiful objects; were it so, it too would be a thing of parts. It can be no

shape, no power, nor the total of powers and shapes that have had the becoming that has set them here; it

must stand above all the powers, all the patterns. The origin of all this must be the formless formless not as

In the realm of process anything coming to be must come to be something; to every thing its distinctive

shape: but what shape can that have which no one has shaped? It can be none of existing things; yet it is all:

none, in that beings are later; all, as the wellspring from which they flow. That which can make all can have,

itself, no extension; it must be limitless and so without magnitude; magnitude itself is of the Later and cannot

be an element in that which is to bring it into being. The greatness of the Authentic cannot be a greatness of

quantity; all extension must belong to the subsequent: the Supreme is great in the sense only that there can be

nothing mightier, nothing to equal it, nothing with anything in common with it: how then could anything be

equal to any part of its content? Its eternity and universal reach entail neither measure nor measurelessness;

given either, how could it be the measure of things? So with shape: granted beauty, the absence of shape or

form to be grasped is but enhancement of desire and love; the love will be limitless as the object is, an infinite

Its beauty, too, will be unique, a beauty above beauty: it cannot be beauty since it is not a thing among things.

It is lovable and the author of beauty; as the power to all beautiful shape, it will be the ultimate of beauty, that

which brings all loveliness to be; it begets beauty and makes it yet more beautiful by the excess of beauty

streaming from itself, the source and height of beauty. As the source of beauty it makes beautiful whatsoever

springs from it. And this conferred beauty is not itself in shape; the thing that comes to be is without shape,

though in another sense shaped; what is denoted by shape is, in itself, an attribute of something else,

33. When therefore we name beauty, all such shape must be dismissed; nothing visible is to be conceived, or

at once we descend from beauty to what but bears the name in virtue of some faint participation. This

formless Form is beautiful as Form, beautiful in proportion as we strip away all shape even that given in

thought to mark difference, as for instance the difference between Justice and Sophrosyne, beautiful in their

The IntellectualPrinciple is the less for seeing things as distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the

multiple content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual

shape; but, even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us still with the question how we are to

envisage that which stands beyond this alllovely, beyond this principle at once multiple and above

multiplicity, the Supreme for which the soul hungers though unable to tell why such a being should stir its

longingreason, however, urging that This at last is the Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to

be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. Bring something under Form and

present it so before the mind; immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers that

while there exists the giver having shape to give a giver that is shape, idea, an entirely measured thing yet

this is not alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own right but is a mingled thing. Shape and

idea and measure will always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the BeyondBeauty cannot be under

measure and therefore cannot have admitted shape or be Idea: the primal existent, The First, must be without

Take an example from love: so long as the attention is upon the visible form, love has not entered: when from

that outward form the lover elaborates within himself, in his own partless soul, an immaterial image, then it is

that love is born, then the lover longs for the sight of the beloved to make that fading image live again. If he

could but learn to look elsewhere, to the more nearly formless, his longing would be for that: his first

Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and

Matter is needed for the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest away, since of itself it has

not even the lowest degree of shape. Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws

upon Form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more

lovable; IntellectualPrinciple, nearer still, is even more to be loved: by these steps we are led to know that

34. No longer can we wonder that the principle evoking such longing should be utterly free from shape. The

very soul, once it has conceived the straining love towards this, lays aside all the shape it has taken, even to

the Intellectual shape that has informed it. There is no vision, no union, for those handling or acting by any

thing other; the soul must see before it neither evil nor good nor anything else, that alone it may receive the

Suppose the soul to have attained: the highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has

turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the

divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision she

has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a

duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved

here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will

give herself no foreign name, not "man," not "living being," not "being," not "all"; any observation of such

things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on

This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. Once There she

will barter for This nothing the universe holds; not though one would make over the heavens entire to her;

than This there is nothing higher, nothing of more good; above This there is no passing; all the rest, however

lofty, lies on the downgoing path: she is of perfect judgement and knows that This was her quest, that nothing

higher is. Here can be no deceit; where could she come upon truer than the truth? and the truth she affirms,

that she is, herself; but all the affirmation is later and is silent. In this happiness she knows beyond delusion

that she is happy; for this is no affirmation of an excited body but of a soul become again what she was in the

time of her early joy. All that she had welcomed of oldoffice, power, wealth, beauty, knowledge of all she

tells her scorn as she never could had she not found their better; linked to This she can fear no disaster nor

even know it; let all about her fall to pieces, so she would have it that she may be wholly with This, so huge

35. Such in this union is the soul's temper that even the act of Intellect, once so intimately loved, she now

dismisses; Intellection is movement and she has no wish to move; she has nothing to say of this very

IntellectualPrinciple by means of which she has attained the vision, herself made over into

IntellectualPrinciple and becoming that principle so as to be able to take stand in that Intellectual space.

Entered there and making herself over to that, she at first contemplates that realm, but once she sees that

higher still she leaves all else aside. Thus when a man enters a house rich in beauty he might gaze about and

admire the varied splendour before the master appears; but, face to face with that great person no thing of

ornament but calling for the truest attention he would ignore everything else and look only to the master. In

this state of absorbed contemplation there is no longer question of holding an object: the vision is continuous

so that seeing and seen are one thing; object and act of vision have become identical; of all that until then

filled the eye no memory remains. And our comparison would be closer if instead of a man appearing to the

visitor who had been admiring the house it were a god, and not a god manifesting to the eyes but one filling

IntellectualPrinciple, thus, has two powers, first that of grasping intellectively its own content, the second

that of an advancing and receiving whereby to know its transcendent; at first it sees, later by that seeing it

takes possession of IntellectualPrinciple, becoming one only thing with that: the first seeing is that of

Intellect knowing, the second that of Intellect loving; stripped of its wisdom in the intoxication of the nectar,

it comes to love; by this excess it is made simplex and is happy; and to be drunken is better for it than to be

No: reason unravelling gives process; IntellectualPrinciple has unbroken knowledge and has, moreover, an

Act unattended by knowing, a vision by another approach. In this seeing of the Supreme it becomes pregnant

and at once knows what has come to be within it; its knowledge of its content is what is designated by its

Intellection; its knowing of the Supreme is the virtue of that power within it by which, in a later [lower] stage

As for soul, it attains that vision by so to speak confounding and annulling the IntellectualPrinciple

within it; or rather that Principle immanent in soul sees first and thence the vision penetrates to soul and the

The Good spreading out above them and adapting itself to that union which it hastens to confirm is present to

them as giver of a blessed sense and sight; so high it lifts them that they are no longer in space or in that

realm of difference where everything is root,ed in some other thing; for The Good is not in place but is the

The soul now knows no movement since the Supreme knows none; it is now not even soul since the Supreme

is not in life but above life; it is no longer IntellectualPrinciple, for the Supreme has not Intellection and the

likeness must be perfect; this grasping is not even by Intellection, for the Supreme is not known

36. We need not carry this matter further; we turn to a question already touched but demanding still some

Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the allimportant: this we read is the grand learning, the

learning we are to understand, not of looking towards it but attaining, first, some knowledge of it. We come

to this learning by analogies, by abstractions, by our understanding of its subsequents, of all that is derived

from The Good, by the upward steps towards it. Purification has The Good for goal; so the virtues, all right

ordering, ascent within the Intellectual, settlement therein, banqueting upon the divine by these methods one

becomes, to self and to all else, at once seen and seer; identical with Being and IntellectualPrinciple and the

entire living all, we no longer see the Supreme as an external; we are near now, the next is That and it is close

Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty, the quester holds

knowledge still of the ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very crest of the wave of

Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with light, but

it is not a light showing some other object, the light is itself the vision. No longer is there thing seen and light

to show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection; this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect

and Intellectual object into being for the later use and allowed them to occupy the quester's mind. With This

he himself becomes identical, with that radiance whose Act is to engender IntellectualPrinciple, not losing

in that engendering but for ever unchanged, the engendered coming to be simply because that Supreme exists.

37. Those ascribing Intellection to the First have not supposed him to know the lesser, the emanant though,

indeed, some have thought it impossible that he should not know everything. But those denying his knowing

of the lesser have still attributed selfknowing to him, because they find nothing nobler; we are to suppose

that so he is the more august, as if Intellection were something nobler than his own manner of being not

But we ask in what must his grandeur lie, in his Intellection or in himself. If in the Intellection, he has no

worth or the less worth; if in himself, he is perfect before the Intellection, not perfected by it. We may be told

that he must have Intellection because he is an Act, not a potentiality. Now if this means that he is an essence

eternally intellective, he is represented as a duality essence and Intellective Act he ceases to be a simplex;

an external has been added: it is just as the eyes are not the same as their sight, though the two are

inseparable. If on the other hand by this actualization it is meant that he is Act and Intellection, then as being

The Beings, yes, but they are to us manifold and differentiated: the First we make a simplex; to us

Intellection begins with the emanant in its seeking of its essence, of itself, of its author; bent inward for this

vision and having a present thing to know, there is every reason why it should be a principle of Intellection;

but that which, never coming into being, has no prior but is ever what it is, how could that have motive to

An Intelligence not exercising Intellection would be unintelligent; where the nature demands knowing, not to

know is to fail of intelligence; but where there is no function, why import one and declare a defect because it

is not performed? We might as well complain because the Supreme does not act as a physician. He has no

task, we hold, because nothing can present itself to him to be done; he is sufficient; he need seek nothing

beyond himself, he who is over all; to himself and to all he suffices by simply being what he is.

38. And yet this "He Is" does not truly apply: the Supreme has no need of Being: even "He is good" does not

apply since it indicates Being: the "is" should not suggest something predicated of another thing; it is to state

identity. The word "good" used of him is not a predicate asserting his possession of goodness; it conveys an

identification. It is not that we think it exact to call him either good or The Good: it is that sheer negation

does not indicate; we use the term The Good to assert identity without the affirmation of Being.

But how admit a Principle void of selfknowledge, selfawareness; surely the First must be able to say "I

But surely he may affirm merely the goodness, adding nothing: the goodness would be taken without the

No: such selfawareness as good must inevitably carry the affirmation "I am the Good"; otherwise there

would be merely the unattached conception of goodness with no recognition of identity; any such intellection

If that intellection were the Good, then the intellection would not be selfintellection but intellection of the

Good; not the Supreme but that intellection would be the Good: if on the contrary that intellection of the

Good is distinct from the Good, at once the Good exists before its knowing; allsufficiently good in itself, it

No such foreign matter is present to it: it can have only an immediate intuition selfdirected.

39. Since the Supreme has no interval, no selfdifferentiation what can have this intuitional approach to it but

itself? Therefore it quite naturally assumes difference at the point where IntellectualPrinciple and Being are

Intellect, to act at all, must inevitably comport difference with identity; otherwise it could not distinguish

itself from its object by standing apart from it, nor could it ever be aware of the realm of things whose

Again, if the Supreme is to have intellection it cannot know only itself; that would not be intellection, for, if it

did know itself, nothing could prevent it knowing all things; but this is impossible. With selfintellection it

would no longer be simplex; any intellection, even in the Supreme, must be aware of something distinct; as

we have been saying, the inability to see the self as external is the negation of intellection. That act requires a

manifoldagent, object, movement and all the other conditions of a thinking principle. Further we must

remember what has been indicated elsewhere that, since every intellectual act in order to be what it must be

requires variety, every movement simple and the same throughout, though it may comport some form of

It follows that the Supreme will know neither itself nor anything else but will hold an august repose. All the

rest is later; before them all, This was what This was; any awareness of that other would be acquired, the

shifting knowledge of the instable. Even in knowing the stable he would be manifold, for it is not possible

that, while in the act of knowing the laters possess themselves of their object, the Supreme should know only

As regards Providence, that is sufficiently saved by the fact that This is the source from which all proceeds;

the dependent he cannot know when he has no knowledge of himself but keeps that august repose. Plato

dealing with essential Being allows it intellection but not this august repose: intellection then belongs to

Essential Being; this august repose to the Principle in which there is no intellection. Repose, of course, is

used here for want of a fitter word; we are to understand that the most august, the truly so, is That which

40. That there can be no intellection in the First will be patent to those that have had such contact; but some

further confirmation is desirable, if indeed words can carry the matter; we need overwhelming persuasion.

It must be borne in mind that all intellection rises in some principle and takes cognisance of an object. But a

There is the intellection that remains within its place of origin; it has that source as substratum but becomes a

sort of addition to it in that it is an activity of that source perfecting the potentiality there, not by producing

anything but as being a completing power to the principle in which it inheres. There is also the intellection

inbound with Being Being's very author and this could not remain confined to the source since there it

could produce nothing; it is a power to production; it produces therefore of its own motion and its act is

RealBeing and there it has its dwelling. In this mode the intellection is identical with Being; even in its

selfintellection no distinction is made save the logical distinction of thinker and thought with, as we have

This is a first activity and the substance it produces is Essential Being; it is an image, but of an original so

great that the very copy stands a reality. If instead of moving outward it remained with the First, it would be

At the earliest activity and earliest intellection, it can be preceded by no act or intellection: if we pass beyond

this being and this intellection we come not to more being and more intellection but to what overpasses both,

to the wonderful which has neither, asking nothing of these products and standing its unaccompanied self.

That alltranscending cannot have had an activity by which to produce this activity acting before act

existed or have had thought in order to produce thinking applying thought before thought exists all

In sum, this intellection of the Good is impossible: I do not mean that it is impossible to have intellection of

the Good we may admit the possibility but there can be no intellection by The Good itself, for this would be

If intellection is the lower, then it will be bound up with Being; if intellection is the higher, its object is lower.

Intellection, then, does not exist in the Good; as a lesser, taking its worth through that Good, it must stand

apart from it, leaving the Good unsoiled by it as by all else. Immune from intellection the Good remains

incontaminably what it is, not impeded by the presence of the intellectual act which would annul its purity

Anyone making the Good at once Thinker and Thought identifies it with Being and with the Intellection

vested in Being so that it must perform that act of intellection: at once it becomes necessary to find another

principle, one superior to that Good: for either this act, this intellection, is a completing power of some such

principle, serving as its ground, or it points, by that duality, to a prior principle having intellection as a

characteristic. It is because there is something before it that it has an object of intellection; even in its

selfintellection, it may be said to know its content by its vision of that prior.

What has no prior and no external accompaniment could have no intellection, either of itself or of anything

else. What could it aim at, what desire? To essay its power of knowing? But this would make the power

something outside itself; there would be, I mean, the power it grasped and the power by which it grasped: if

41. Intellection seems to have been given as an aid to the diviner but weaker beings, an eye to the blind. But

the eye itself need not see Being since it is itself the light; what must take the light through the eye needs the

light because of its darkness. If, then, intellection is the light and light does not need the light, surely that

brilliance (The First) which does not need light can have no need of intellection, will not add this to its

What could it do with intellection? What could even intellection need and add to itself for the purpose of its

act? It has no selfawareness; there is no need. It is no duality but, rather, a manifold, consisting of itself, its

intellective act, distinct from itself, and the inevitable third, the object of intellection. No doubt since knower,

knowing, and known, are identical, all merges into a unity: but the distinction has existed and, once more,

such a unity cannot be the First; we must put away all otherness from the Supreme which can need no such

To us intellection is a boon since the soul needs it; to the IntellectualPrinciple it is appropriate as being one

thing with the very essence of the principle constituted by the intellectual Act so that principle and act

coincide in a continuous selfconsciousness carrying the assurance of identity, of the unity of the two. But

"Know yourself" is a precept for those who, being manifold, have the task of appraising themselves so as to

become aware of the number and nature of their constituents, some or all of which they ignore as they ignore

their very principle and their manner of being. The First on the contrary if it have content must exist in a way

too great to have any knowledge, intellection, perception of it. To itself it is nothing; accepting nothing,

selfsufficing, it is not even a good to itself: to others it is good for they have need of it; but it could not lack

It does not see itself: seeing aims at acquisition: all this it abandons to the subsequent: in fact nothing found

elsewhere can be There; even Being cannot be There. Nor therefore has it intellection which is a thing of the

lower sphere where the first intellection, the only true, is identical with Being. Reason, perception,

intelligence, none of these can have place in that Principle in which no presence can be affirmed.

42. Faced by the difficulty of placing these powers, you must in reason allocate to the secondaries what you

count august: secondaries must not be foisted upon the First, or tertiaries upon the secondaries. Secondaries

are to be ranged under the First, tertiaries under the secondaries: this is giving everything its place, the later

This is included in that true saying "About the King of All, all has being and in view of Him all is": we are to

understand from the attribution of all things to Him, and from, the words "in view of Him" that He is their

cause and they reach to Him as to something differing from them all and containing nothing that they contain:

Thus, IntellectualPrinciple, finding place in the universe, cannot have place in Him. Where we read that He

is the cause of all beauty we are clearly to understand that beauty depends upon the Forms, He being set

above all that is beautiful here. The Forms are in that passage secondaries, their sequels being attached to

them as dependent thirds: it is clear thus that by "the products of the thirds" is meant this world, dependent

Soul dependent upon IntellectualPrinciple and IntellectualPrinciple upon the Good, all is linked to the

Supreme by intermediaries, some close, some nearing those of the closer attachment, while the order of sense

1. Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that, while we

may well enquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods

must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power entire, freedom

of action in all things, to be reserved to one alone, of the rest some being powerful, others powerless, others

All this must come to the test: we must dare it even of the Firsts and of the AllTranscendent and, if we find

omnipotence possible, work out how far freedom extends. The very notion of power must be scrutinized lest

in this ascription we be really making power identical with Essential Act, and even with Act not yet achieved.

But for the moment we may pass over these questions to deal with the traditional problem of freedom of

To begin with, what must be intended when we assert that something is in our power; what is the conception

To establish this will help to show whether we are to ascribe freedom to the gods and still more to God, or to

refuse it, or again, while asserting it, to question still, in regard both to the higher and lower the mode of its

What then do we mean when we speak of freedom in ourselves and why do we question it?

My own reading is that, moving as we do amid adverse fortunes, compulsions, violent assaults of passion

crushing the soul, feeling ourselves mastered by these experiences, playing slave to them, going where they

lead, we have been brought by all this to doubt whether we are anything at all and dispose of ourselves in any

This would indicate that we think of our free act as one which we execute of our own choice, in no servitude

to chance or necessity or overmastering passion, nothing thwarting our will; the voluntary is conceived as an

event amenable to will and occurring or not as our will dictates. Everything will be voluntary that is produced

under no compulsion and with knowledge; our free act is what we are masters to perform.

Differing conceptually, the two conditions will often coincide but sometimes will clash. Thus a man would be

master to kill, but the act will not be voluntary if in the victim he had failed to recognise his own father.

Perhaps however that ignorance is not compatible with real freedom: for the knowledge necessary to a

voluntary act cannot be limited to certain particulars but must cover the entire field. Why, for example,

should killing be involuntary in the failure to recognise a father and not so in the failure to recognise the

wickedness of murder? If because the killer ought to have learned, still ignorance of the duty of learning and

2. A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of action ascribed to us.

It must be founded in impulse or in some appetite, as when we act or omit in lust or rage or upon some

But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow freedom to animals, infants, maniacs, the distraught, the

victims of malpractice producing incontrollable delusions. And if freedom turns on calculation with desire,

does this include faulty calculation? Sound calculation, no doubt, and sound desire; but then comes the

question whether the appetite stirs the calculation or the calculation the appetite.

Where the appetites are dictated by the very nature they are the desires of the conjoint of soul and body and

then soul lies under physical compulsions: if they spring in the soul as an independent, then much that we

take to be voluntary is in reality outside of our free act. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meagre

reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave

us masters in the ensuing act? Need, inexorably craving satisfaction, is not free in face of that to which it is

forced: and how at all can a thing have efficiency of its own when it rises from an extern, has an extern for

very principle, thence taking its Being as it stands? It lives by that extern, lives as it has been moulded: if this

be freedom, there is freedom in even the soulless; fire acts in accordance with its characteristic being.

We may be reminded that the Living Form and the soul know what they do. But, if this is knowledge by

perception, it does not help towards the freedom of the act; perception gives awareness, not mastery: if true

knowing is meant, either this is the knowing of something happening once more awareness with the

motive force still to seek, or the reasoning and knowledge have acted to quell the appetite; then we have to

ask to what this repression is to be referred and where it has taken place. If it is that the mental process sets

up an opposing desire we must assure ourselves how; if it merely stills the appetite with no further efficiency

and this is our freedom, then freedom does not depend upon act but is a thing of the mind and in truth all

that has to do with act, the very most reasonable, is still of mixed value and cannot carry freedom.

3. All this calls for examination; the enquiry must bring us close to the solution as regards the gods.

We have traced selfdisposal to will, will to reasoning and, next step, to right reasoning; perhaps to right

reasoning we must add knowledge, for however sound opinion and act may be they do not yield true freedom

when the adoption of the right course is the result of hazard or of some presentment from the fancy with no

Taking it that the presentment of fancy is not a matter of our will and choice, how can we think those acting

at its dictation to be free agents? Fancy strictly, in our use, takes it rise from conditions of the body; lack of

food and drink sets up presentments, and so does the meeting of these needs; similarly with seminal

abundance and other humours of the body. We refuse to range under the principle of freedom those whose

conduct is directed by such fancy: the baser sort, therefore, mainly so guided, cannot be credited with

selfdisposal or voluntary act. Selfdisposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the

IntellectualPrinciple, live above the states of the body. The spring of freedom is the activity of

IntellectualPrinciple, the highest in our being; the proposals emanating thence are freedom; such desires as

are formed in the exercise of the Intellectual act cannot be classed as involuntary; the gods, therefore, that

live in this state, living by IntellectualPrinciple and by desire conformed to it, possess freedom.

4. It will be asked how act rising from desire can be voluntary, since desire pulls outward and implies need;

IntellectualPrinciple itself comes under the doubt; having a certain nature and acting by that nature can it be

said to have freedom and selfdisposal in an act which it cannot leave unenacted? It may be asked, also,

whether freedom may strictly be affirmed of such beings as are not engaged in action.

However that may be, where there is such act there is compulsion from without, since, failing motive, act will

not be performed. These higher beings, too, obey their own nature; where then is their freedom?

But, on the other hand, can there be talk of constraint where there is no compulsion to obey an extern; and

how can any movement towards a good be counted compulsion? Effort is free once it is towards a fully

recognised good; the involuntary is, precisely, motion away from a good and towards the enforced, towards

something not recognised as a good; servitude lies in being powerless to move towards one's good, being

debarred from the preferred path in a menial obedience. Hence the shame of slavedom is incurred not when

one is held from the hurtful but when the personal good must be yielded in favour of another's.

Further, this objected obedience to the characteristic nature would imply a duality, master and mastered; but

an undivided Principle, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be

free; there can be no thought of "action according to the nature," in the sense of any distinction between the

being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical. Where act is performed neither because of

another nor at another's will, there surely is freedom. Freedom may of course be an inappropriate term: there

is something greater here: it is selfdisposal in the sense, only, that there is no disposal by the extern, no

In a principle, act and essence must be free. No doubt IntellectualPrinciple itself is to be referred to a yet

higher; but this higher is not extern to it; IntellectualPrinciple is within the Good; possessing its own good in

virtue of that indwelling, much more will it possess freedom and selfdisposal which are sought only for the

sake of the good. Acting towards the good, it must all the more possess selfdisposal for by that Act it is

directed towards the Principle from which it proceeds, and this its act is selfcentred and must entail its very

5. Are we, however, to make freedom and selfdisposal exclusive to IntellectualPrinciple as engaged in its

characteristic Act, IntellectualPrinciple unassociated, or do they belong also to soul acting under that

If freedom is to be allowed to soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not

master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by IntellectualPrinciple, that may very well be

Because there is war, we perform some brave feat; how is that our free act since had there been no war it

could not have been performed? So in all cases of fine conduct; there is always some impinging event leading

out our quality to show itself in this or that act. And suppose virtue itself given the choice whether to find

occasion for its exercise war evoking courage; wrong, so that it may establish justice and good order;

poverty that it may show independence or to remain inactive, everything going well, it would choose the

peace of inaction, nothing calling for its intervention, just as a physician like Hippocrates would prefer no one

If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how

Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and

But in setting freedom in those preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and selfdisposal

apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the selfdisposal attributed to virtue as state or

disposition. Are we to put it that virtue comes in to restore the disordered soul, taming passions and

appetites? In what sense, at that, can we hold our goodness to be our own free act, our fine conduct to be

uncompelled? In that we will and adopt, in that this entry of virtue prepares freedom and selfdisposal,

ending our slavery to the masters we have been obeying. If then virtue is, as it were, a second

IntellectualPrinciple, and heightens the soul to Intellectual quality, then, once more, our freedom is found to

6. How then did we come to place freedom in the will when we made out free action to be that produced or

If what we have been saying is true and our former statement is consistent with it, the case must stand thus:

Virtue and IntellectualPrinciple are sovereign and must be held the sole foundation of our selfdisposal and

freedom; both then are free; IntellectualPrinciple is selfconfined: Virtue, in its government of the soul

which it seeks to lift into goodness, would wish to be free; in so far as it does so it is free and confers

freedom; but inevitably experiences and actions are forced upon it by its governance: these it has not planned

for, yet when they do arise it will watch still for its sovereignty calling these also to judgement. Virtue does

not follow upon occurrences as a saver of the emperilled; at its discretion it sacrifices a man; it may decree

the jettison of life, means, children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to the safeguarding of

anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our selfdisposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the

external thing done but to the inner activity, to the Intellection, to virtue's own vision.

So understood, virtue is a mode of IntellectualPrinciple, a mode not involving any of the emotions or

passions controlled by its reasonings, since such experiences, amenable to morality and discipline, touch

This makes it all the more evident that the unembodied is the free; to this our selfdisposal is to be referred;

herein lies our will which remains free and selfdisposing in spite of any orders which it may necessarily

utter to meet the external. All then that issues from will and is the effect of will is our free action; and in the

highest degree all that lies outside of the corporeal is purely within the scope of will, all that will adopts and

The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has selfdisposal to the point that its operation is utterly

independent; it turns wholly upon itself; its very action is itself; at rest in its good it is without need,

complete, and may be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it is called will because it expresses

the IntellectualPrinciple in the willingphase and, besides, what we know as will imitates this operation

taking place within the IntellectualPrinciple. Will strives towards the good which the act of

IntellectualPrinciple realizes. Thus that principle holds what will seeks, that good whose attainment makes

But if selfdisposal is founded thus on the will aiming at the good, how can it possibly be denied to that

Any one scrupulous about setting selfdisposal so high may find some loftier word.

7. Soul becomes free when it moves, through IntellectualPrinciple, towards The Good; what it does in that

spirit is its free act; IntellectualPrinciple is free in its own right. That principle of Good is the sole object of

desire and the source of selfdisposal to the rest, to soul when it fully attains, to IntellectualPrinciple by

How then can the sovereign of all that august sequence the first in place, that to which all else strives to

mount, all dependent upon it and taking from it their powers even to this power of selfdisposal how can

This be brought under the freedom belonging to you and me, a conception applicable only by violence to

It is rash thinking drawn from another order that would imagine a First Principle to be chance made what it

is, controlled by a manner of being imposed from without, void therefore of freedom or selfdisposal, acting

or refraining under compulsion. Such a statement is untrue to its subject and introduces much difficulty; it

utterly annuls the principle of freewill with the very conception of our own voluntary action, so that there is

no longer any sense in discussion upon these terms, empty names for the nonexistent. Anyone upholding

this opinion would be obliged to say not merely that free act exists nowhere but that the very word conveys

nothing to him. To admit understanding the word is to be easily brought to confess that the conception of

freedom does apply where it is denied. No doubt a concept leaves the reality untouched and unappropriated,

for nothing can produce itself, bring itself into being; but thought insists upon distinguishing between what is

subject to others and what is independent, bound under no allegiance, lord of its own act.

This state of freedom belongs in the absolute degree to the Eternals in right of that eternity and to other

beings in so far as without hindrance they possess or pursue The Good which, standing above them all, must

To say that The Good exists by chance must be false; chance belongs to the later, to the multiple; since the

First has never come to be, we cannot speak of it either as coming by chance into being or as not master of its

being. Absurd also the objection that it acts in accordance with its being if this is to suggest that freedom

demands act or other expression against the nature. Neither does its nature as the unique annul its freedom

when this is the result of no compulsion but means only that The Good is no other than itself, is

The objection would imply that where there is most good there is least freedom. If this is absurd, still more

absurd to deny freedom to The Good on the ground that it is good and selfconcentred, not needing to lean

upon anything else but actually being the Term to which all tends, itself moving to none.

Where since we must use such words the essential act is identical with the being and this identity must

obtain in The Good since it holds even in IntellectualPrinciple there the act is no more determined by the

Being than the Being by the Act. Thus "acting according to its nature" does not apply; the Act, the Life, so to

speak, cannot be held to issue from the Being; the Being accompanies the Act in an eternal association: from

the two [Being and Act] it forms itself into The Good, selfspringing and unspringing.

8. But it is not, in our view, as an attribute that this freedom is present in the First. In the light of free acts,

from which we eliminate the contraries, we recognise There selfdetermination, selfdirected and, failing

more suitable terms, we apply to it the lesser terms brought over from lesser things and so tell it as best we

may: no words could ever be adequate or even applicable to that from which all else the noble, the august

is derived. For This is principle of all, or, more strictly, unrelated to all and, in this consideration, cannot be

made to possess such laters as even freedom and selfdisposal, which in fact indicate manifestation upon the

extern unhindered but implying the existence of other beings whose opposition proves ineffective.

We cannot think of the First as moving towards any other; He holds his own manner of being before any

Nor may we speak of any "conforming to the nature"; this again is of the later; if the term be applicable at all

in that realm it applies only to the secondaries primally to Essential Existence as next to this First. And if a

"nature" belongs only to things of time, this conformity to nature does not apply even to Essential Existence.

On the other hand, we are not to deny that it is derived from Essential Existence for that would be to take

No; that would be just as false; nothing "happens" to the First; it stands in no such relationship; happening

belongs only to the multiple where, first, existence is given and then something is added. And how could the

Source "happen to be"? There has been no coming so that you can put it to the question "How does this come

to be? What chance brought it here, gave it being?" Chance did not yet exist; there was no "automatic action":

9. If we cannot but speak of Happening we must not halt at the word but look to the intention. And what is

that? That the Supreme by possession of a certain nature and power is the Principle. Obviously if its nature

were other it would be that other and if the difference were for the worse it would manifest itself as that lesser

being. But we must add in correction that, as Principle of All, it could not be some chance product; it is not

enough to say that it could not be inferior; it could not even be in some way good, for instance in some less

perfect degree; the Principle of All must be of higher quality than anything that follows it. It is therefore in a

sense determined determined, I mean, by its uniqueness and not in any sense of being under compulsion;

compulsion did not coexist with the Supreme but has place only among secondaries and even there can

This, then, it is; This and no other; simply what it must be; it has not "happened" but is what by a necessity

prior to all necessities it must be. We cannot think of it as a chance existence; it is not what it chanced to be

All the rest waits for the appearing of the king to hail him for himself, not a being of accident and happening

but authentically king, authentically Principle, The Good authentically, not a being that acts in conformity

with goodness and so, recognisably, a secondary but the total unity that he is, no moulding upon goodness

Even Being is exempt from happening: of course, anything happening happens to Being, but Being itself has

not happened nor is the manner of its Being a thing of happening, of derivation; it is the very nature of Being

to be; how then can we think that this happening can attach to the Transcendent of Being, That in whose

Certainly this Transcendent never happened to be what it is; it is so, just as Being exists in complete identity

with its own essential nature and that of IntellectualPrinciple. Certainly that which has never passed outside

of its own orbit, unbendingly what it is, its own unchangeably, is that which may most strictly be said to

possess its own being: what then are we to say when we mount and contemplate that which stands yet higher;

can we conceivably say "Thus, as we see it, thus has it happened to be"? Neither thus nor in any mode did it

happen to be; there is no happening; there is only a "Thus and No Otherwise than Thus." And even "Thus" is

false; it would imply limit, a defined form: to know This is to be able to reject both the "Thus" and the

"NotThus," either of which classes among Beings to which alone Manner of Being can attach.

A "Thus" is something that attaches to everything in the world of things: standing before the indefinable you

may name any of these sequents but you must say This is none of them: at most it is to be conceived as the

total power towards things, supremely selfconcentred, being what it wills to be or rather projecting into

existence what it wills, itself higher than all will, will a thing beneath it. In a word it neither willed its own

10. The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false happening can be supposed to have come about,

taking it that it did, and haw the happening, then, is not universally prevalent. If there is to be a natural

scheme at all, it must be admitted that this happening does not and cannot exist: for if we attribute to chance

the Principle which is to eliminate chance from all the rest, how can there ever be anything independent of

chance? And this Nature does take away the chanced from the rest, bringing in form and limit and shape. In

the case of things thus conformed to reason the cause cannot be identified with chance but must lie in that

very reason; chance must be kept for what occurs apart from choice and sequence and is purely concurrent.

When we come to the source of all reason, order and limit, how can we attribute the reality there to chance?

Chance is no doubt master of many things but is not master of IntellectualPrinciple, of reason, of order, so

as to bring them into being. How could chance, recognised as the very opposite of reason, be its Author? And

if it does not produce IntellectualPrinciple, then certainly not that which precedes and surpasses that

Principle. Chance, besides, has no means of producing, has no being at all, and, assuredly, none in the

Since there is nothing before Him who is the First, we must call a halt; there is nothing to say; we may

But perhaps, never having come to be but being as He is, He is still not master of his own essence: not master

of his essence but being as He is, not selforiginating but acting out of his nature as He finds it, must He not

No: What He is, He is not because He could not be otherwise but because so is best. Not everything has

power to move towards the better though nothing is prevented by any external from moving towards the

worse. But that the Supreme has not so moved is its own doing: there has been no inhibition; it has not moved

simply because it is That which does not move; in this stability the inability to degenerate is not

powerlessness; here permanence is very Act, a selfdetermination. This absence of declination comports the

fulness of power; it is not the yielding of a being held and controlled but the Act of one who is necessity, law,

Does this indicate a Necessity which has brought itself into existence? No: there has been no coming into

being in any degree; This is that by which being is brought to all the rest, its sequents. Above all origins, This

We can but withdraw, silent, hopeless, and search no further. What can we look for when we have reached

Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the nature of a thing, its quality, its cause or its

essential being. In this case the being in so far as we can use the word is knowable only by its sequents: the

question as to cause asks for a principle beyond, but the principle of all has no principle; the question as to

quality would be looking for an attribute in that which has none: the question as to nature shows only that we

must ask nothing about it but merely take it into the mind if we may, with the knowledge gained that nothing

The difficulty this Principle presents to our mind in so far as we can approach to conception of it may be

We begin by posing space, a place, a Chaos; into this existing container, real or fancied, we introduce God

and proceed to enquire: we ask, for example, whence and how He comes to be there: we investigate the

presence and quality of this newcomer projected into the midst of things here from some height or depth.

But the difficulty disappears if we eliminate all space before we attempt to conceive God: He must not be set

in anything either as enthroned in eternal immanence or as having made some entry into things: He is to be

conceived as existing alone, in that existence which the necessity of discussion forces us to attribute to Him,

with space and all the rest as later than Him space latest of all. Thus we conceive as far as we may, the

spaceless; we abolish the notion of any environment: we circumscribe Him within no limit; we attribute no

extension to Him; He has no quality since no shape, even shape Intellectual; He holds no relationship but

How can we think any longer of that "Thus He happened to be"? How make this one assertion of Him of

whom all other assertion can be no more than negation? It is on the contrary nearer the truth to say "Thus He

has happened not to be": that contains at least the utter denial of his happening.

12. Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being?

The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered:

In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we

participate in reality, are in some degree real. This is a compound state, a mingling of Reality and Difference,

not, therefore reality in the strictest sense, not reality pure. Thus far we are not masters of our being; in some

sense the reality in us is one thing and we another. We are not masters of our being; the real in us is the

master, since that is the principle establishing our characteristic difference; yet we are again in some sense

that which is sovereign in us and so even on this level might in spite of all be described as selfdisposing.

But in That which is wholly what it is selfexisting reality, without distinction between the total thing and

its essence the being is a unit and is sovereign over itself; neither the being nor the essence is to be referred

to any extern. Besides, the very question as to self. disposal falls in the case of what is First in reality; if it can

be raised at all, we must declare that there can be no subjection whatever in That to which reality owes its

freedom, That in whose nature the conferring of freedom must clearly be vested, preeminently to be known as

Still, is not this Principle subject to its essential Being? On the contrary, it is the source of freedom to Being.

Even if there be Act in the Supreme an Act with which it is to be identified this is not enough to set up a

duality within it and prevent it being entirely master of that self from which the Act springs; for the Act is not

distinct from that self. If we utterly deny Act in it holding that Act begins with others moving about it we

are all the less able to allow either selfmastery or subjection in it: even selfmastery is absent here, not that

anything else is master over it but that selfmastery begins with Being while the Supreme is to be set in a

Where we speak of selfmastery there is a certain duality, Act against essence; from the exercise of the Act

arises the conception of the mastering principle though one identical with the essence hence arises the

separate idea of mastery, and the being concerned is said to possess selfmastery. Where there is no such

duality joining to unity but solely a unity pure either because the Act is the whole being or because there is

no Act at all then we cannot strictly say that the being has this mastery of self.

13. Our enquiry obliges us to use terms not strictly applicable: we insist, once more, that not even for the

purpose of forming the concept of the Supreme may we make it a duality; if now we do, it is merely for the

If, then, we are to allow Activities in the Supreme and make them depend upon will and certainly Act

cannot There be willless and these Activities are to be the very essence, then will and essence in the

Supreme must be identical. This admitted, as He willed to be so He is; it is no more true to say that He wills

and acts as His nature determines than that His essence is as He wills and acts. Thus He is wholly master of

Consider also that every being in its pursuit of its good seeks to be that good rather than what it is it judges

itself most truly to be when it partakes of its good: in so far as it thus draws on its good its being is its choice:

much more, then, must the very Principle, The Good, be desirable in itself when any fragment of it is very

desirable to the extern and becomes the chosen essence promoting that extern's will and identical with the

As long as a thing is apart from its good it seeks outside itself; when it holds its good it itself as it is: and this

is no matter of chance; the essence now is not outside of the will; by the good it is determined, by the good it

If then this Principle is the means of determination to everything else, we see at once that selfpossession

must belong primally to it, so that, through it, others in their turn may be selfbelonging: what we must call

its essence comports its will to possess such a manner of being; we can form no idea of it without including

in it the will towards itself as it is. It must be a consistent self willing its being and being what it wills; its will

and itself must be one thing, all the more one from the absence of distinction between a given nature and one

which would be preferred. What could The Good have wished to be other than what it is? Suppose it had the

choice of being what it preferred, power to alter the nature, it could not prefer to be something else; it could

have no fault to find with anything in its nature, as if that nature were imposed by force; The Good is what

from always it wished and wishes to be. For the really existent Good is a willing towards itself, towards a

good not gained by any wiles or even attracted to it by force of its nature; The Good is what it chose to be

It may be added that nothing else contains in its essence the principle of its own satisfaction; there will be

inner discord: but this hypostasis of the Good must necessarily have selfoption, the will towards the self; if

it had not, it could not bring satisfaction to the beings whose contentment demands participation in it or

Once more, we must be patient with language; we are forced to apply to the Supreme terms which strictly are

ruled out; everywhere we must read "So to speak." The Good, then, exists; it holds its existence through

choice and will, conditions of its very being: yet it cannot be a manifold; therefore the will and the essential

being must be taken as one identity; the act of the will must be selfdetermined and the being selfcaused;

thus reason shows the Supreme to be its own Author. For if the act of will springs from God Himself and is

as it were His operation and the same will is identical with His essence, He must be selfestablished. He is

14. Another approach: Everything to which existence may be attributed is either one with its essence or

distinct from it. Thus any given man is distinct from essential man though belonging to the order Man: a soul

and a soul's essence are the same that is, in case of soul pure and unmingled Man as type is the same as

man's essence; where the thing, man, and the essence are different, the particular man may be considered as

accidental; but man, the essence, cannot be so; the type, Man, has Real Being. Now if the essence of man is

real, not chanced or accidental, how can we think That to be accidental which transcends the order man,

author of the type, source of all being, a principle more nearly simplex than man's being or being of any kind?

As we approach the simplex, accident recedes; what is utterly simplex accident never touches at all.

Further we must remember what has been already said, that where there is true being, where things have been

brought to reality by that Principle and this is true of whatsoever has determined condition within the order

of sense all that reality is brought about in virtue of something emanating from the divine. By things of

determined condition I mean such as contain, inbound with their essence, the reason of their being as they

are, so that, later, an observer can state the use for each of the constituent parts why the eye, why feet of

such and such a kind to such and such a being and can recognise that the reason for the production of each

organ is inherent in that particular being and that the parts exist for each other. Why feet of a certain length?

Because another member is as it is: because the face is as it is, therefore the feet are what they are: in a word

the mutual determinant is mutual adaptation and the reason of each of the several forms is that such is the

Thus the essence and its reason are one and the same. The constituent parts arise from the one source not

because that source has so conceived each separately but because it has produced simultaneously the plan of

the thing and its existence. This therefore is author at once of the existence of things and of their reasons,

both produced at the one stroke. It is in correspondence with the things of process but far more nearly

archetypal and authentic and in a closer relation with the Better, their source, than they can be.

Of things carrying their causes within, none arises at hazard or without purpose; this "So it happened to be" is

applicable to none. All that they have comes from The Good; the Supreme itself, then, as author of reason, of

causation, and of causing essence all certainly lying far outside of chance must be the Principle and as it

were the examplar of things, thus independent of hazard: it is, the First, the Authentic, immune from chance,

from blind effect and happening: God is cause of Himself; for Himself and of Himself He is what He is, the

15. Lovable, very love, the Supreme is also selflove in that He is lovely no otherwise than from Himself and

in Himself. Selfpresence can hold only in the identity of associated with associating; since, in the Supreme,

associated and associating are one, seeker and sought one the sought serving as Hypostasis and substrate of

the seeker once more God's being and his seeking are identical: once more, then, the Supreme is the

selfproducing, sovereign of Himself, not happening to be as some extern willed but existing as He wills it.

And when we say that neither does He absorb anything nor anything absorb Him, thus again we are setting

Him outside of all happening not only because we declare Him unique and untouched by all but in another

way also. Suppose we found such a nature in ourselves; we are untouched by all that has gathered round us

subjecting us to happening and chance; all that accruement was of the servile and lay exposed to chance: by

this new state alone we acquire selfdisposal and free act, the freedom of that light which belongs to the

order of the good and is good in actuality, greater than anything IntellectualPrinciple has to give, an

actuality whose advantage over Intellection is no adventitious superiority. When we attain to this state and

become This alone, what can we say but that we are more than free, more than selfdisposing? And who then

could link us to chance, hazard, happening, when thus we are become veritable Life, entered into That which

Isolate anything else and the being is inadequate; the Supreme in isolation is still what it was. The First

cannot be in the soulless or in an unreasoning life; such a life is too feeble in being; it is reason dissipated, it

is indetermination; only in the measure of approach towards reason is there liberation from happening; the

rational is above chance. Ascending we come upon the Supreme, not as reason but as reason's better: thus

The Supreme is the Term of all; it is like the principle and ground of some vast tree of rational life; itself

16. We maintain, and it is evident truth, that the Supreme is everywhere and yet nowhere; keeping this

If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He "happened to be"; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in

entirety: at once, He is that everywhere and everywise: He is not in the everywhere but is the everywhere as

well as the giver to the rest of things of their being in that everywhere. Holding the supreme place or rather

no holder but Himself the Supreme all lies subject to Him; they have not brought Him to be but happen, all,

to Him or rather they stand there before Him looking upon Him, not He upon them. He is borne, so to

speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is, He Himself being that which He.

loves. That is to say, as selfdwelling Act and IntellectualPrinciple, the most to be loved, He has given

Himself existence. IntellectualPrinciple is the issue of Act: God therefore is issue of Act, but, since no other

has generated Him, He is what He made Himself: He is not, therefore, "as He happened to be" but as He

Again; if He preeminently is because He holds firmly, so to speak, towards Himself, looking towards

Himself, so that what we must call his being is this selflooking, He must again, since the word is inevitable,

make Himself: thus, not "as He happens to be" is He but as He Himself wills to be. Nor is this will a hazard, a

That his being is constituted by this selforiginating selftendence at once Act and repose becomes clear if

we imagine the contrary; inclining towards something outside of Himself, He would destroy the identity of

his being. This selfdirected Act is, therefore, his peculiar being, one with Himself. If, then, his act never

came to be but is eternal a waking without an awakener, an eternal wakening and a supraIntellection He

is as He waked Himself to be. This awakening is before being, before IntellectualPrinciple, before rational

life, though He is these; He is thus an Act before IntellectualPrinciple and consciousness and life; these

come from Him and no other; his being, then, is a selfpresence, issuing from Himself. Thus not "as He

17. Or consider it another way: We hold the universe, with its content entire, to be as all would be if the

design of the maker had so willed it, elaborating it with purpose and prevision by reasonings amounting to a

Providence. All is always so and all is always so reproduced: therefore the reasonprinciples of things must

lie always within the producing powers in a still more perfect form; these beings of the divine realm must

therefore be previous to Providence and to preference; all that exists in the order of being must lie for ever

There in their Intellectual mode. If this regime is to be called Providence it must be in the sense that before

our universe there exists, not expressed in the outer, the IntellectualPrinciple of all the All, its source and

Now if there is thus an IntellectualPrinciple before all things, their founding principle, this cannot be a thing

lying subject to chance multiple, no doubt, but a concordance, ordered so to speak into oneness. Such a

multiple the coordination of all particulars and consisting of all the ReasonPrinciples of the universe

gathered into the closest union this cannot be a thing of chance, a thing "happening so to be." It must be of a

very different nature, of the very contrary nature, separated from the other by all the difference between

reason and reasonless chance. And if the Source is precedent even to this, it must be continuous with this

reasoned secondary so that the two be correspondent; the secondary must participate in the prior, be an

expression of its will, be a power of it: that higher therefore [as above the ordering of reason] is without part

or interval [implied by reasoned arrangement], is a one all ReasonPrinciple, one number, a One greater

than its product, more powerful, having no higher or better. Thus the Supreme can derive neither its being nor

the quality of its being. God Himself, therefore, is what He is, selfrelated, selftending; otherwise He

18. Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not

attempt. He is, Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all things; or rather He is within, at

the innermost depth; the outer, circling round Him, so to speak, and wholly dependent upon Him, is

ReasonPrinciple and IntellectualPrincipleor becomes IntellectualPrinciple by contact with Him and in

the degree of that contact and dependence; for from Him it takes the being which makes it

A circle related in its path to a centre must be admitted to owe its scope to that centre: it has something of the

nature of that centre in that the radial lines converging on that one central point assimilate their impinging

ends to that point of convergence and of departure, the dominant of radii and terminals: the terminals are of

one nature with the centre, separate reproductions of it, since the centre is, in a certain sense, the total of

terminals and radii impinging at every point upon it; these lines reveal the centre; they are the development of

In the same way we are to take IntellectualPrinciple and Being. This combined power springs from the

Supreme, an outflow and as it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that Intellective

nature, showing forth That which, in the purity of its oneness, is not IntellectualPrinciple since it is no

duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or circumference to be identified with that Centre which is the

source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by indwelling power and, as products of a certain

Thus the Intellective power circles in its multiple unity around the Supreme which stands to it as archetype to

image; the image in its movement round about its prior has produced the multiplicity by which it is

constituted IntellectualPrinciple: that prior has no movement; it generates IntellectualPrinciple by its sheer

Such a power, author of IntellectualPrinciple, author of being how does it lend itself to chance, to hazard,

What is present in IntellectualPrinciple is present, though in a far transcendent mode, in the One: so in a

light diffused afar from one light shining within itself, the diffused is vestige, the source is the true light; but

IntellectualPrinciple, the diffused and image light, is not different in kind from its prior; and it is not a thing

The Supreme is cause of the cause: it is cause preeminently, cause as containing cause in the deepest and

truest mode; for in it lie the Intellective causes which are to be unfolded from it, author as it is not of the

chance made but of what the divine willed: and this willing was not apart from reason, was not in the realm

Thus Plato, seeking the best account of the necessary and appropriate, says they are far removed from hazard

and that what exists is what must exist: if thus the existence is as it must be it does not exist without reason: if

its manner of being is the fitting, it is the utterly selfdisposing in comparison with its sequents and, before

that, in regard to itself: thus it is not "as it happened to be" but as it willed to be: all this, on the assumption

that God wills what should be and that it is impossible to separate right from realization and that this

Necessary is not to God an outside thing but is, itself, His first Activity manifesting outwardly in the exactly

representative form. Thus we must speak of God since we cannot tell Him as we would.

19. Stirred to the Supreme by what has been told, a man must strive to possess it directly; then he too will

One seeing That as it really is will lay aside all reasoning upon it and simply state it as the selfexistent; such

that if it had essence that essence would be subject to it and, so to speak, derived from it; none that has seen

would dare to talk of its "happening to be," or indeed be able to utter word. With all his courage he would

stand astounded, unable at any venture to speak of This, with the vision everywhere before the eyes of the

soul so that, look where one may, there it is seen unless one deliberately look away, ignoring God, thinking

no more upon Him. So we are to understand the BeyondEssence darkly indicated by the ancients: is not

merely that He generated Essence but that He is subject neither to Essence nor to Himself; His essence is not

His Principle; He is Principle to Essence and not for Himself did He make it; producing it He left it outside of

Himself: He had no need of being who brought it to be. Thus His making of being is no "action in accordance

20. The difficulty will be raised that God would seem to have existed before thus coming into existence; if He

makes Himself, then in regard to the self which He makes He is not yet in being and as maker He exists

The answer is that we utterly must not speak of Him as made but sheerly as maker; the making must be taken

as absolved from all else; no new existence is established; the Act here is not directed to an achievement but

is God Himself unalloyed: here is no duality but pure unity. Let no one suspect us of asserting that the first

Activity is without Essence; on the contrary the Activity is the very reality. To suppose a reality without

activity would be to make the Principle of all principles deficient; the supremely complete becomes

incomplete. To make the Activity something superadded to the essence is to shatter the unity. If then Activity

is a more perfect thing than essence and the First is all perfect, then the Activity is the First.

By having acted, He is what He is and there is no question of "existing before bringing Himself into

existence"; when He acted He was not in some state that could be described as "before existing." He was

Now assuredly an Activity not subjected essence is utterly free; God's selfhood, then, is of his own Act. If his

being has to be ensured by something else, He is no longer the selfexistent First: if it be true to say that He

is his own container, then He inducts Himself; for all that He contains is his own production from the

beginning since from the beginning He caused the being of all that by nature He contains.

If there had been a moment from which He began to be, it would be possible assert his selfmaking in the

literal sense; but, since what He is He is from before all time, his selfmaking is to be understood as

simultaneous with Himself; the being is one and the same with the making and eternal "coming into

This is the source also of his selfdisposal strictly applicable if there were a duality, but conveying, in the

case of a unity, a disposing without a disposed, an abstract disposing. But how a disposer with nothing to

dispose? In that there is here a disposer looking to a prior when there is none: since there is no prior, This is

the First but a First not in order but in sovereignty, in power purely selfcontrolled. Purely; then nothing can

be There that is under any external disposition; all in God is selfwilling. What then is there of his content

that is not Himself, what that is not in Act, what not his work? Imagine in Him anything not of his Act and at

once His existence ceases to be pure; He is not selfdisposing, not allpowerful: in that at least of whose

If He could we must deny Him the power to produce goodness for He certainly cannot produce evil. Power,

There, is no producer of the inapt; it is that steadfast constant which is most decidedly power by inability to

depart from unity: ability to produce the inapt inability to hold by the fitting; that selfmaking must be

definite once for all since it is the right; besides, who could upset what is made by the will of God and is itself

But whence does He draw that will seeing that essence, source of will, is inactive in Him?

The will was included in the essence; they were identical: or was there something, this will for instance, not

existing in Him? All was will, nothing unwilled in Him. There is then nothing before that will: God and will

God, therefore, is what He willed, is such as He willed; and all that ensued upon that willing was what that

definite willing engendered: but it engendered nothing new; all existed from the first.

As for his "selfcontaining," this rightly understood can mean only that all the rest is maintained in virtue of

Him by means of a certain participation; all traces back to the Supreme; God Himself, selfexisting always,

needs no containing, no participating; all in Him belongs to Him or rather He needs nothing from them in

When therefore you seek to state or to conceive Him, put all else aside; abstracting all, keep solely to Him;

see that you add nothing; be sure that your theory of God does not lessen Him. Even you are able to take

contact with Something in which there is no more than That Thing itself to affirm and know, Something

which lies away above all and is it alone veritably free, subject not even to its own law, solely and

This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered

among beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is

called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity,

one house, one ship; unity gone, neither remains thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist without an

inherent unity; break them apart and their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity.

Take plant and animal; the material form stands a unity; fallen from that into a litter of fragments, the things

have lost their being; what was is no longer there; it is replaced by quite other things as many others,

Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a coordinate unity. Beauty appears when limbs and

features are controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of a soul acting as a concordant total,

Come thus to soul which brings all to unity, making, moulding, shaping, ranging to order there is a

temptation to say "Soul is the bestower of unity; soul therefore is the unity." But soul bestows other

characteristics upon material things and yet remains distinct from its gift: shape, IdealForm and the rest are

all distinct from the giving soul; so, clearly, with this gift of unity; soul to make things unities looks out upon

the unity just as it makes man by looking upon Man, realizing in the man the unity belonging to Man.

Anything that can be described as a unity is so in the precise degree in which it holds a characteristic being;

the less or more the degree of the being, the less or more the unity. Soul, while distinct from unity's very self,

is a thing of the greater unity in proportion as it is of the greater, the authentic, being. Absolute unity it is not:

it is soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul's unity as

there is body with body's unity. The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are furthest from unity, the more

Is soul to be identified with unity on the ground that unless it were one thing it could not be soul? No; unity is

equally necessary to every other thing, yet unity stands distinct from them; body and unity are not identical;

Besides, the soul, even the collective soul for all its absence of part, is a manifold: it has diverse powers

reasoning, desiring, perceiving all held together by this chain of unity. Itself a unity, soul confers unity, but

2. It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the unity are distinct, yet

in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when we have grasped Being we hold unity;

Real Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, taking the IntellectualPrinciple as Essential Being, that

principle and the Unity Absolute would be at once Primal Being and Pure Unity, purveying, accordingly, to

the rest of things something of Being and something, in proportion, of the unity which is itself.

There is nothing with which the unity would be more plausibly identified than with Being; either it is Being

as a given man is man or it will correspond to the Number which rules in the realm of the particular; it will be

a number applying to a certain unique thing as the number two applies to others.

Now if Number is a thing among things, then clearly so this unity must be; we would have to discover what

thing of things it is. If Number is not a thing but an operation of the mind moving out to reckon, then the

We found that anything losing unity loses its being; we are therefore obliged to enquire whether the unity in

particulars is identical with the being, and unity absolute identical with collective being.

Now the being of the particular is a manifold; unity cannot be a manifold; there must therefore be a

distinction between Being and Unity. Thus a man is at once a reasoning living being and a total of parts; his

variety is held together by his unity; man therefore and unity are different man a thing of parts against unity

partless. Much more must Collective Being, as container of all existence, be a manifold and therefore distinct

Again, Collective Being contains life and intelligence it is no dead thing and so, once more, is a manifold.

If Being is identical with IntellectualPrinciple, even at that it is a manifold; all the more so when count is

taken of the Ideal Forms in it; for the Idea, particular or collective, is, after all, a numerable agglomeration

Above all, unity is The First: but IntellectualPrinciple, Ideas and Being, cannot be so; for any member of the

realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore since components must precede their

Other considerations also go to show that the IntellectualPrinciple cannot be the First. Intellect must be

above the Intellectual Act: at least in its higher phase, that not concerned with the outer universe, it must be

Considered as at once Thinker and Object of its Thought, it is dual, not simplex, not The Unity: considered as

looking beyond itself, it must look to a better, to a prior: looking simultaneously upon itself and upon its

There is no other way of stating IntellectualPrinciple than as that which, holding itself in the presence of

The Good and First and looking towards That, is selfpresent also, selfknowing and Knowing itself as

In sum: The Unity cannot be the total of beings, for so its oneness is annulled; it cannot be the

IntellectualPrinciple, for so it would be that total which the IntellectualPrinciple is; nor is it Being, for

No wonder that to state it is not easy; even Being and Form are not easy, though we have a way, an approach

The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or

to take impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips

away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense,

there to rest as on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold.

Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is

prevented by that very unification from recognising that it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the

object of this intuition. Nonetheless, this is our one resource if our philosophy is to give us knowledge of The

We are in search of unity; we are to come to know the principle of all, the Good and First; therefore we may

not stand away from the realm of Firsts and lie prostrate among the lasts: we must strike for those Firsts,

rising from things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared of all evil in our intention towards The Good, we must

ascend to the Principle within ourselves; from many, we must become one; only so do we attain to

knowledge of that which is Principle and Unity. We shape ourselves into IntellectualPrinciple; we make

over our soul in trust to IntellectualPrinciple and set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul will

waken to see; it is through the IntellectualPrinciple that we have this vision of The Unity; it must be our care

to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even of soul to enter into IntellectualPrinciple:

with Intellect pure, and with the summit of Intellect, we are to see the AllPure.

If quester has the impression of extension or shape or mass attaching to That Nature he has not been led by

IntellectualPrinciple which is not of the order to see such things; the activity has been of sense and of the

judgement following upon sense: only IntellectualPrinciple can inform us of the things of its scope; its

competence is upon its priors, its content and its issue: but even its content is outside of sense; and still purer,

The Unity, then, is not IntellectualPrinciple but something higher still: IntellectualPrinciple is still a being

but that First is no being but precedent to all Being; it cannot be a being, for a being has what we may call the

Generative of all, The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor intellect nor soul; not in

motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it is the selfdefined, unique in form or, better, formless, existing

before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are attachments of Being and make Being the manifold

The answer is that movement and rest are states pertaining to Being, which necessarily has one or the other or

both. Besides, anything at rest must be so in virtue of Rest as something distinct: Unity at rest becomes the

Note, similarly, that, when we speak of this First as Cause, we are affirming something happening not to it

but to us, the fact that we take from this SelfEnclosed: strictly we should put neither a This nor a That to it;

we hover, as it were, about it, seeking the statement of an experience of our own, sometimes nearing this

4. The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by knowing nor by the

Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence overpassing all knowledge. In knowing,

soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is taking account of things; that

accounting is multiple; the mind, thus plunging into number and multiplicity, departs from unity.

Our way then takes us beyond knowing; there may be no wandering from unity; knowing and knowable must

all be left aside; every object of thought, even the highest, we must pass by, for all that is good is later than

"Not to be told; not to be written": in our writing and telling we are but urging towards it: out of discussion

we call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path; our teaching is of the road and the travelling; the

There are those that have not attained to see. The soul has not come to know the splendour There; it has not

felt and clutched to itself that lovepassion of vision known to lover come to rest where he loves. Or struck

perhaps by that authentic light, all the soul lit by the nearness gained, we have gone weighted from beneath;

the vision is frustrate; we should go without burden and we go carrying that which can but keep us back; we

From none is that Principle absent and yet from all: present, it remains absent save to those fit to receive,

disciplined into some accordance, able to touch it closely by their likeness and by that kindred power within

themselves through which, remaining as it was when it came to them from the Supreme, they are enabled to

Failure to attain may be due to such impediment or to lack of the guiding thought that establishes trust;

impediment we must charge against ourselves and strive by entire renunciation to become emancipate; where

there is distrust for lack of convincing reason, further considerations may be applied:

5. Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material

forces have drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here addressing them but only

Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation from IntellectualPrinciple and as holding

its value by a ReasonPrinciple thence infused. Next this Intellect must be apprehended, an Intellect other

than the reasoning faculty known as the rational principle; with reasoning we are already in the region of

separation and movement: our sciences are ReasonPrinciples lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly

acquired their character by the presence in the soul of IntellectualPrinciple, source of all knowing.

Thus we come to see IntellectualPrinciple almost as an object of sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is

perceptible as standing above soul, father to soul: we know IntellectualPrinciple as the motionless, not

subject to change, containing, we must think, all things; a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting

difference. It is not discriminate as are the ReasonPrinciples, which can in fact be known one by one: yet its

content is not a confusion; every item stands forth distinctly, just as in a science the entire content holds as an

Now a plurality thus concentrated like the Intellectual Kosmos is close upon The First and reason certifies

its existence as surely as that of soul yet, though of higher sovereignty than soul, it is not The First since it is

Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the things of Being: there must be a prior to this

Principle which aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in unity's likeness. From this highest it is not

sundered; it too is selfpresent: so close to the unity, it cannot be articulated: and yet it is a principle which in

That awesome Prior, The Unity, is not a being, for so its unity would be vested in something else: strictly no

name is apt to it, but since name it we must there is a certain rough fitness in designating it as unity with the

Thus it eludes our knowledge, so that the nearer approach to it is through its offspring, Being: we know it as

cause of existence to IntellectualPrinciple, as fount of all that is best, as the efficacy which, selfperduring

and undiminishing, generates all beings and is not to be counted among these its derivatives, to all of which it

This we can but name The Unity, indicating it to each other by a designation that points to the concept of its

partlessness while we are in reality striving to bring our own minds to unity. We are not to think of such unity

and partlessness as belong to point or monad; the veritable unity is the source of all such quantity which

could not exist unless first there existed Being and Being's Prior: we are not, then, to think in the order of

point and monad but to use these in their rejection of magnitude and partition as symbols for the higher

6. In what sense, then, do we assert this Unity, and how is it to be adjusted to our mental processes?

Its oneness must not be entitled to that of monad and point: for these the mind abstracts extension and

numerical quantity and rests upon the very minutest possible, ending no doubt in the partless but still in

something that began as a partible and is always lodged in something other than itself. The Unity was never

in any other and never belonged to the partible: nor is its impartibility that of extreme minuteness; on the

contrary it is great beyond anything, great not in extension but in power, sizeless by its very greatness as even

its immediate sequents are impartible not in mass but in might. We must therefore take the Unity as infinite

not in measureless extension or numerable quantity but in fathomless depths of power.

Think of The One as Mind or as God, you think too meanly; use all the resources of understanding to

conceive this Unity and, again, it is more authentically one than God, even though you reach for God's unity

beyond the unity the most perfect you can conceive. For This is utterly a selfexistent, with no concomitant

whatever. This selfsufficing is the essence of its unity. Something there must be supremely adequate,

Any manifold, anything beneath The Unity, is dependent; combined from various constituents, its essential

nature goes in need of unity; but unity cannot need itself; it stands unity accomplished. Again, a manifold

depends upon all its factors; and furthermore each of those factors in turn as necessarily inbound with the

rest and not selfstanding sets up a similar need both to its associates and to the total so constituted.

The sovranly selfsufficing principle will be UnityAbsolute, for only in this Unity is there a nature above all

need, whether within itself or in regard to the rest of things. Unity seeks nothing towards its being or its

wellbeing or its safehold upon existence; cause to all, how can it acquire its character outside of itself or

know any good outside? The good of its being can be no borrowing: This is The Good. Nor has it station; it

needs no standing ground as if inadequate to its own sustaining; what calls for such underpropping is the

soulless, some material mass that must be based or fall. This is base to all, cause of universal existence and of

ordered station. All that demands place is in need; a First cannot go in need of its sequents: all need is effort

towards a first principle; the First, principle to all, must be utterly without need. If the Unity be seeking, it

must inevitably be seeking to be something other than itself; it is seeking its own destroyer. Whatever may be

said to be in need of a good is needing a preserver; nothing can be a good to The Unity, therefore.

Neither can it have will to anything; it is a BeyondGood, not even to itself a good but to such beings only as

may be of quality to have part with it. Nor has it Intellection; that would comport diversity: nor Movement; it

To what could its Intellection be directed? To itself? But that would imply a previous ignorance; it would be

dependent upon that Intellection in order to knowledge of itself; but it is the selfsufficing. Yet this absence

of selfknowing does not comport ignorance; ignorance is of something outside a knower ignorant of a

knowable but in the Solitary there is neither knowing nor anything unknown. Unity, selfpresent, it has no

need of selfintellection: indeed this "selfpresence" were better left out, the more surely to preserve the

unity; we must eliminate all knowing and all association, all intellection whether internal or external. It is not

to be though of as having but as being Intellection; Intellection does not itself perform the intellective act but

is the cause of the act in something else, and cause is not to be identified with caused: most assuredly the

This Principle is not, therefore, to be identified with the good of which it is the source; it is good in the

7. If the mind reels before something thus alien to all we know, we must take our stand on the things of this

realm and strive thence to see. But, in the looking, beware of throwing outward; this Principle does not lie

away somewhere leaving the rest void; to those of power to reach, it is present; to the inapt, absent. In our

daily affairs we cannot hold an object in mind if we have given ourselves elsewhere, occupied upon some

other matter; that very thing must be before us to be truly the object of observation. So here also; preoccupied

by the impress of something else, we are withheld under that pressure from becoming aware of The Unity; a

mind gripped and fastened by some definite thing cannot take the print of the very contrary. As Matter, it is

agreed, must be void of quality in order to accept the types of the universe, so and much more must the soul

be kept formless if there is to be no infixed impediment to prevent it being brimmed and lit by the Primal

In sum, we must withdraw from all the extern, pointed wholly inwards; no leaning to the outer; the total of

things ignored, first in their relation to us and later in the very idea; the self put out of mind in the

contemplation of the Supreme; all the commerce so closely There that, if report were possible, one might

Such converse, we may suppose, was that of Minos, thence known as the Familiar of Zeus; and in that

memory he established the laws which report it, enlarged to that task by his vision There. Some, on the other

hand, there will be to disdain such citizen service, choosing to remain in the higher: these will be those that

God we read is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break away from Him, or rather from

ourselves; what we turn from we cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a child

distraught will not recognise its father; to find ourselves is to know our source.

8. Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing

line; its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own

centre, the point to which it owes its rise. The soul's movement will be about its source; to this it will hold,

poised intent towards that unity to which all souls should move and the divine souls always move, divine in

virtue of that movement; for to be a god is to be integral with the Supreme; what stands away is man still

We must look yet further: we must admit a Principle in which all these centres coincide: it will be a centre by

analogy with the centre of the circle we know. The soul is not a circle in the sense of the geometric figure but

in that it at once contains the Primal Nature [as centre] and is contained by it [as circumference], that it owes

its origin to such a centre and still more that the soul, uncontaminated, is a selfcontained entity.

In our present state part of our being weighed down by the body, as one might have the feet under water

with all the rest untouched we bear ourselves aloft by that intact part and, in that, hold through our own

centre to the centre of all the centres, just as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that of

If these circles were material and not spiritual, the link with the centres would be local; they would lie round

it where it lay at some distant point: since the souls are of the Intellectual, and the Supreme still loftier, we

understand that contact is otherwise procured, that is by those powers which connect Intellectual agent with

Intellectual Object; this all the more, since the Intellect grasps the Intellectual object by the way of similarity,

identity, in the sure link of kindred. Material mass cannot blend into other material mass: unbodied beings are

not under this bodily limitation; their separation is solely that of otherness, of differentiation; in the absence

Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away.

It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards the Supreme; it is we

that become present. We are always before it: but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due

order about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend: let it but face aright and

it sings with beauty, present effectively. We are ever before the Supreme cut off is utter dissolution; we can

no longer be but we do not always attend: when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of

9. In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of

Being, fount of Good, root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme lessening it as if it

were a thing of mass. At that the emanants would be perishable; but they are eternal; they spring from an

eternal principle, which produces them not by its fragmentation but in virtue of its intact identity: therefore

We have not been cut away; we are not separate, what though the bodynature has closed about us to press us

to itself; we breathe and hold our ground because the Supreme does not give and pass but gives on for ever,

Our being is the fuller for our turning Thither; this is our prosperity; to hold aloof is loneliness and lessening.

Here is the soul's peace, outside of evil, refuge taken in the place clean of wrong; here it has its Act, its true

knowing; here it is immune. Here is living, the true; that of today, all living apart from Him, is but a

shadow, a mimicry. Life in the Supreme is the native activity of Intellect; in virtue of that converse it brings

forth gods, brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, brings forth all moral good; for of all these the

soul is pregnant when it has been filled with God. This state is its first and its final, because from God it

comes, its good lies There, and, once turned to God again, it is what it was. Life here, with the things of earth,

That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the soul; hence the constant linking of the

LoveGod with the Psyches in story and picture; the soul, other than God but sprung of Him, must needs

love. So long as it is There, it holds the heavenly love; here its love is the baser; There the soul is Aphrodite

of the heavens; here, turned harlot, Aphrodite of the public ways: yet the soul is always an Aphrodite. This is

the intention of the myth which tells of Aphrodite's birth and Eros born with her.

The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble

father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a

But one day coming to hate her shame, she puts away the evil of earth, once more seeks the father, and finds

Those to whom all this experience is strange may understand by way of our earthly longings and the joy we

have in winning to what we most desire remembering always that here what we love is perishable, hurtful,

that our loving is of mimicries and turns awry because all was a mistake, our good was not here, this was not

what we sought; There only is our veritable love and There we may hold it and be with it, possess it in its

verity no longer submerged in alien flesh. Any that have seen know what I have in mind: the soul takes

another life as it approaches God; thus restored it feels that the dispenser of true life is There to see, that now

we have nothing to look for but, far otherwise, that we must put aside all else and rest in This alone, This

become, This alone, all the earthly environment done away, in haste to be free, impatient of any bond holding

us to the baser, so that with our being entire we may cling about This, no part in us remaining but through it

Thus we have all the vision that may be of Him and of ourselves; but it is of a selfwrought to splendour,

brimmed with the Intellectual light, become that very light, pure, buoyant, unburdened, raised to Godhood or,

better, knowing its Godhood, all aflame then but crushed out once more if it should take up the discarded

Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the time of vision unbroken, the self hindered no

longer by any hindrance of body. Not that those hindrances beset that in us which has veritably seen; it is the

other phase of the soul that suffers and that only when we withdraw from vision and take to knowing by

proof, by evidence, by the reasoning processes of the mental habit. Such logic is not to be confounded with

that act of ours in the vision; it is not our reason that has seen; it is something greater than reason, reason's

In our selfseeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, or rather we are merged into that self in

us which has the quality of that order. It is a knowing of the self restored to its purity. No doubt we should

not speak of seeing; but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement

of unity. In this seeing, we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed,

no longer himself nor selfbelonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre

coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there

duality; by our holding away, the Supreme is set outside. This is why the vision baffles telling; we cannot

detach the Supreme to state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of the Supreme which

11. This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme is not to

be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself

attained to see. There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity

apprehended. The man formed by this mingling with the Supreme must if he only remember carry its

image impressed upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no

movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and

all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self; caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect

stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to

himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the beautiful; he has

risen beyond beauty; he has overpassed even the choir of the virtues; he is like one who, having penetrated

the inner sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him though these become once more first objects of

regard when he leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with image, not with trace, but with the very

There, indeed, it was scarcely vision, unless of a mode unknown; it was a going forth from the self, a

simplifying, a renunciation, a reach towards contact and at the same time a repose, a meditation towards

adjustment. This is the only seeing of what lies within the holies: to look otherwise is to fail.

Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God is known; the

instructed priest reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the vision of the inaccessible.

Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they will know their source

and Principle since by principle they see principle and are linked with it, by like they have contact with like

and so they grasp all of the divine that lies within the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still

craving something, that which only the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have

It is not in the soul's nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into

nonbeing: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien

but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; selfgathered it is no longer in the

There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the

Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme: if from that heightened self

we pass still higher image to archetype we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we

awaken the virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the

burden and move by virtue towards IntellectualPrinciple and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme.

This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us

here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.