Introduction: Chapter 1
Question: What is the cause of soul’s ignorance of God (1,
1-3)? Answer: Reverence for earthly things and lack of
respect
for itself are the causes of its ignorance (1, 3-22).
Remedy:
Remind the soul of its parentage and its excellence (1, 22-35).
1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the
father,
God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to
ignore
at once themselves and It?
The evil that has overtaken them has its
source
in self-will, 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 self-depreciation; 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 bring about their utter ignoring of the
divine.
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 could ever form any notion of either the
nature
or the power of God.
A double discipline must be applied if human
beings in this pass are to be reclaimed, and brought back to their
origins,
lifted once more towards the Supreme and One and First.
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 truth, and, clearly brought out, is
the
evidence of the other.
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 relationship the solution of our
problem
is at once desirable and possible.
Part One: the nature of the soul (Chapter 2)
Statement of soul’s activity (2, 1-9). Argument (2, 10-51).
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 Gods."
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 expanse so that every interval, small and
great
alike, all has been ensouled.
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 virtue of soul; for "dead is viler than dung."
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 water and air added to them?
If, then, it is the presence of soul that
brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things?
You honour the Soul elsewhere; honour then yourself.
Part Two: the nature of Intellect (Chapters 3 - 4)
Nature of Intellect from the point of view of its relationship with
soul (3, 3-23). The fullness and perfection of the Intelligible
World
(4, 1-25). The internal life of Intellect (4, 26-43).
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 attain: there is not much between.
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 Intellectual-Principle:
reason
uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the
same
way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: 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
Intellectual-Principle, 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 development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself.
Thus its substantial existence comes from
the Intellectual-Principle; 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 soul-acts 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 course of its peculiar task.
In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle
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
ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme
Intelligence,
is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and
uncompounded.
What the Intellectual-Principle must be is
carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still
inferior.
4. But there is yet another way to this knowledge:
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 self-springing 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 Intellectual-Principle 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
Intellectual-Principle
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 Intellectual-Principle and Authentic Existence; and the
total
of all is Intellectual-Principle entire and Being entire.
Intellectual-Principle
by its intellective act establishes Being, which in turn, as the object
of intellection, becomes the cause of intellection and of existence to
the Intellectual-Principle - though, of course, there is another cause
of intellection which is also a cause to Being, both rising in a source
distinct from either.
Now while these two are coalescents, having
their existence in common, and are never apart, still the unity they
form
is two-sided; there is Intellectual-Principle as against Being, the
intellectual
agent as against the object of intellection; we consider the
intellective
act and we have the Intellectual-Principle; we think of the object of
that
act and we have Being.
Such difference there must be if there is
to be any intellection; but similarly there must also be identity
[since,
in perfect knowing, subject and object are identical.]
Thus the Primals [the first "Categories"]
are seen to be: Intellectual-Principle; 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
self-concentration
of the principle which is their common ground- must still be distinct
each
from another; this distinction constitutes Difference.
The Intellectual Kosmos thus a manifold,
Number
and Quantity arise: Quality is the specific character of each of these
ideas which stand as the principles from which all else derives.
Part Three: the nature of the One (5, 1 - 7, 27)
Introduction (5, 1-6). Relationship between Intellect and
the One in terms of Platonic number (5, 6-19). The genesis of
Intellect
(6, 1-41). Relationship between the One and its product (6, 41 -
7, 4). Interruptions, and restatement of problem of Intellect’s
genesis
(7, 4-26).
5. As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle,
exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands linked
a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy.
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 sense-thought; 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 the Reason-Principle [of the
product
to be].
Thus by what we call the Number and the Dyad
of that higher realm, we mean Reason Principles and the
Intellectual-Principle:
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 [Intellectual-Principle] and The One -
is
not Matter to the later existents but is their forming-Idea, 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:
intellection
[the Act of the Dyad] is vision occupied upon The One.
6. But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and,
especially,
how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its
vision?
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 self-gathered so that
there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we observe in
existence
and yet are compelled to trace to that absolute unity?
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
- self-gathered, tranquilly remote above all else- we begin by
considering
the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the
moment,
the first image that appears. How the Divine Mind comes into being must
be explained:
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
self-intention;
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 hypostasis.
Given this immobility in the Supreme, it can
neither have yielded assent nor uttered decree nor stirred in any way
towards
the existence of a secondary.
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, outward-facing
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 from them and perceived wherever they are
present.
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 All-Perfect 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 Intellectual-Principle 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 attached by a bond of sheer necessity, separated
only
in being distinct.
7. We must be more explicit: The Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle; how then
does it engender an Intellectual-Principle?
Simply by the fact that in its self-quest
it has vision: this very seeing is the Intellectual-Principle. Any
perception
of the external indicates either sensation or intellection, sensation
symbolized
by a line, intellection by a circle... [corrupt passage].
Of course the divisibility belonging to the
circle does not apply to the Intellectual-Principle; all, there too, is
a unity, though a unity which is the potentiality of all existence.
The items of this potentiality the divine
intellection brings out, so to speak, from the unity and knows them in
detail, as it must if it is to be an intellectual principle.
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.
To be all in itself would place it in the
realm of Being. And so the First is not a thing among the things
contained by the Intellectual-Principle 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 and form, the foundations of their substantial existence.
Part Four: synthetic conclusion of Chapters 2 - 7 (7, 27-49)
A being of this quality, like the
Intellectual-Principle,
must be felt to be worthy of the all-pure: 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 Intellectual-Principle 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 life-principle 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 progenitor.
Yet any offspring of the
Intellectual-Principle
must be a Reason-Principle; 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 with the Divine.
Part Five: doxography (Chapters 8 - 9)
Plato (8, 1-14). Parmenides (8, 14-27). Other
Presocratics
who believed in ‘the One’ (9, 1-7). Critique of Aristotle (9,
2-17).
Conclusion (9, 27-32).
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
containing
the Tertiaries.
He teaches, also, that there is an author
of the Cause, that is of the Intellectual-Principle, 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 Intellectual-Principle 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
Intellectual-Principle;
from the Intellectual-Principle, 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 Plato himself.
Earlier, Parmenides made some approach to
the doctrine in identifying Being with Intellectual-Principle while
separating
Real Being from the realm of sense.
"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 turns out to be a multiplicity.
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 One-Many and a third which is a
One-and-many;
thus he too is in accordance with our thesis of the Three Kinds.
9. Anaxagoras, again, in his assertion of a Mind pure and
unmixed,
affirms a simplex First and a sundered One, though writing long ago he
failed in precision.
Heraclitus, with his sense of bodily forms
as things of ceaseless process and passage, knows the One as eternal
and
intellectual.
In Empedocles, similarly, we have a dividing
principle, "Strife," set against "Friendship" - which is The One and is
to him bodiless, while the elements represent Matter.
Later there is Aristotle; he begins by making
the First transcendent and intellective but cancels that primacy by
supposing
it to have self-intellection. 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 their First;
or whether the Principles in the Intellectual are many.
If from one, then clearly the Intellectual
system will be analogous to that of the universe of sense-sphere
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 reality.
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 many when there is no Matter to serve as the basis of
difference?
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
entirely.
Part Six: The hypostaes are ‘in’ the soul and may be
grasped
by us (Chapters 10 - 12).
Recapitulation of the theory of three hypostases (10, 1-4).
The hypostatses exist ‘in us’, in the inner man (10, 5-10). Soul
(10, 10-30). Intellect (11, 1-7). The One (11, 7-15).
Apprehension of the hypostases (12, 1-20).
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 once Being and the Intellectual-Principle.
Third
comes the Principle, Soul.
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 Interior
Man.
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 life-principle] there is the soul perfected as containing
Intellectual-Principle
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 upwards towards the heights.
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 over-world, 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 Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle and its
Prior
always self-intent; 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 sense-perception; 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 keep the
soul's perception bright and quick to the sounds from above.
Part One: The primacy of the One and the One-Many problem (Chapter 1).
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 to be referred to The First, any third to the second.
Standing before all things, there must exist
a Simplex, differing from all its sequel, self-gathered not
inter-blended
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 self-sufficing, an
absolute
First, whereas any not-first demands its earlier, and any non-simplex
needs
the simplicities within itself as the very foundations of its composite
existence.
There can be only one such being: if there
were another, the two (as indiscernible) would resolve into one, for we
are not dealing with two corporal entities.
Our One-First 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 be The First.
Any unity, then, later than The First must
be no longer simplex; it can be no more than a unity in diversity.
Whence must such a sequent arise? It must
be an offspring of The First; for suppose it the product of chance,
that
First ceases to be the Principle of All.
But how does it arise from The First? 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 self-closed; 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 to service.
How then could the most perfect remain
self-set
- 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 offspring, its secondary, must
be the best of all that follows.
Part Two: Solution - the two-act theory (Chapter 2)
2. If the Intellectual-Principle were the engendering Source,
then the engendered secondary, while less perfect than the
Intellectual-Principle,
would be close to it and similar to it: but since the engendering
Source
is above the Intellectual-Principle, the secondary can only be that
principle.
But why is the Intellectual-Principle not
the generating source? Because (it is not a self-sufficing simplex):
the
Act of the Intellectual-Principle 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 Ideas and the numbers": for the dyad is the
Intellectual-Principle.
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 the Order following upon itself.
But how can the Intellectual-Principle be
a product of the Intellectual Object?
In this way: the intellectual object is
self-gathered
[self-compact] and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing principle
must be - deficient, I mean, as needing an object - it is therefore no
unconscious thing: all its content and accompaniment are its
possession;
it is self-distinguishing throughout; it is the seat of life as of all
things; it is, itself, that self-intellection which takes place in
eternal
repose, that is to say, in a mode other than that of the
Intellectual-Principle.
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
Intellectual-Principle,
that is to say, becoming another intellectual being, resembling its
source,
a reproduction and image of that.
But how from amid perfect rest can an Act
arise? 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 emanation distinct from the thing itself.
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, utters the Act native to its essential reality.
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 secondary is the All made actual.
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 Intellectual-Principle as well. There is thus something
transcending Intellectual-Principle, for we must remember that real
being
is no corpse, the negation of life and of intellection, but is in fact
identical with the Intellectual-Principle. The Intellectual-Principle
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 the immaterial is the
universe
of things.