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THE THIRD ENNEAD
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FIRST TRACTATE.
FATE.
1. In the two orders of things -- those whose existence is that of
process and those in whom it is Authentic Being -- there is a variety
of possible relation to Cause.
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 and others not, or all are causeless.
Now, to begin with the Eternal Existents:
The Firsts among these, by the fact that they are Firsts, cannot be
referred to outside Causes; but all such as depend upon those Firsts
may be admitted to derive their Being from them.
And in all cases the Act may be referred to the Essence [as its cause],
for their Essence consists, precisely, in giving forth an appropriate
Act.
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 have no motion.
On the assumption that all happens by Cause, it is easy to discover the
nearest determinants of any particular act or state and to trace it
plainly to them.
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 a wife apt to childbirth.
And the general cause of all is Nature.
2. But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing to
penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a dullness to all that
calls us towards the primal and transcendent causes.
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 in manners, in
characters, in success, force us to go still further back.
Men therefore have never been able to rest at the surface causes.
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 impulses and states, even, are supposed
to be determined by these principles.
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 servile to the determination set up by them.
Others rise to the first-principle 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 dictation of the leading principle which animal
life presupposes.
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 warrant for the belief that this Circuit is the universal
determinant.
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 the others in their turn.
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 not compel us to admit
universal compulsion or any kind of "fate."
Suppose the atoms to exist:
These atoms are to move, one downwards -- admitting a down and an up --
another slant-wise, 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.
4. Another theory:
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 "destiny" of the plant.
But such an extremity of determination, a destiny so all-pervasive,
does away with the very destiny that is affirmed: it shatters the
sequence and co-operation of causes.
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; the mind itself is the prime mover.
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 are no more agents than our feet are
kickers when we use them to kick with.
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 to the charge of the All.
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 or rising or in mid-course and in various aspects with each
other.
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 All.
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
and what is thrust upon us: we are not to be immolated to the stars.
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 unreflecting states of the mind.
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 bodily
constitution and mental aspirations.
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 observes for divination must equally be taken as causing
what they indicate.
Some further considerations will help to clarify this matter:
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 prediction is based?
And consider still further:
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 wife.
Now, can we think that the star-grouping over any particular birth can
be the cause of what stands already announced in the facts about the
parents? Either the previous star-groupings 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 and beauty are so caused and not by astral
movements.
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 star-groupings
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
soaring bird tells of some lofty event.
7. It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-Principle 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 Reason-Forms -- Logoi
Spermatikoi -- elaborates all that exists and happens.
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 personal act -- within ourselves.
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
everything that follows the plan of its being, servilely.
No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate: unable
to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations
of our action.
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
prediction and augury?
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 life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore
supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for,
brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would
hold rank in a series.
Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when
it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes [or,
by chance-causes]: 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 concession, at least keeps its
innocence.
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 action.
But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Principle, 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 causes, those of the environment.
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 -- an act is fated when it is
contrary to wisdom.
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 themselves; simply, they
are for the time being unhindered.
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SECOND TRACTATE.
ON PROVIDENCE (1).
1. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend
upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.
Such a notion could be entertained only where there is neither
intelligence nor even ordinary perception; and reason enough has been
urged against it, though none is really necessary.
But there is still the question as to the process by which the
individual things of this sphere have come into being, how they were
made.
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
creator.
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 non-existent 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 relationship may be presented thus:
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
perfect.
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 themselves and be
their being.
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 non-action it magnificently operates and in its self-dwelling
it produces mightily.
2. By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, one within itself, there
subsists this lower kosmos, no longer a true unity.
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
self-sufficient, 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 sheer necessity of
a secondary Kind.
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 Reason-Form flowing from it. For the
Emanation of the Intellectual Principle is Reason, an emanation
unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle continues to have place
among beings.
The Reason-Principle 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 down.
So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the Reason-Form
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 proceeds by
destruction.
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 Reason-Principle. 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 Reason-Necessity pulling towards the lower,
towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the
Intellectual Principle remains sovereign over it.
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 act of presence.
3. Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than beautiful,
as less than the noblest possible in the corporeal; and neither can any
charge be laid against its source.
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
-- Thersites.
No: this thing that has come into Being is the Kosmos complete: do but
survey it, and surely this is the pleading you will hear:
I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of
life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, 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
Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness.
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 far-spread 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 may judge
inanimate.
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 its own business
-- to be finger and have finger power.
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 self-originating 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 every fire
quenched, another is kindled.
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 self-cloistered Life its
derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still
life of the divine.
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
escape what stands decreed in the law of the Universe.
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 own will sometimes take the right turn, sometimes
the wrong.
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; divine beings are happy only because they are good.
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 there must be ill health.
Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the
co-ordination and completion of the Universal system.
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 wrong-doers 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, to make it the material of
unknown forms.
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 such an allotment be approved?
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 handsome.
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 every kind of crime against
their prisoners.
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 functioning must consist
in neglecting no point.
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 sphere is just.
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
character.
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 produced,
no blame falls on Providence for what exists within it.
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 not reach
to earth?
That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules
in the lower things: animals and plants have their share in Reason,
Soul and Life.
Perhaps, then, it reaches to earth but is not master over all?
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
reason-principle, 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 even reverent to censure the entire structure.
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 wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder; we are
evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the Universe,
nothing wiser existent!
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 mid-folk 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 the good since
they have not trained themselves in self-defence.
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 their dainty clothes. What more is called for than a
laugh?
And surely even the lawgiver would be right in allowing the second
group to suffer this treatment, the penalty of their sloth and
self-indulgence: the gymnasium lies there before them, and they, in
laziness and luxury and listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall
like fat-loaded sheep, a prey to the wolves. But the evil-doers 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 bad, better to the good.
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 richer harvest if
they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.
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 well-being. 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 leaving the victory
to evil.
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 that law may enjoin.
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 others people think they are doing right
and only paying what is due.
Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect as the scheme allows; a
part, no doubt, in the fabric of the All, he yet holds a lot higher
than that of all the other living things of earth.
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
distrust us, and in their distrust attack, is that anything to wonder
at?
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 wrong-doers 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
Reason-Principle 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 act that the sin is in their own; if they were
not agents they could not sin.
The Necessity [held to underlie human wickedness] is not an outer force
[actually compelling the individual], but exists only in the sense of a
universal relationship.
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 cause.
11. Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by
Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that
everything is as good as anything can be?
No: the Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle 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 grudging but in the expression of
a Reason teeming with intellectual variety.
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 characters and the power
of the drama is gone; these are part and parcel of it.
12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the
Reason-Principle 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
Reason-Principle 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 some distinctive way.
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 ruin of many of them? And can this be right?
The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this
Reason-Principle 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 them.
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 fixing worth of place.
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 an Adrasteia, justice
itself and a wonderful wisdom.
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 Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth.
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 their being?
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 Reason-Principle 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 things of the realm of sense must remain one unbroken
identity for ever.
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 Reason-Principle 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 unless all part is to be absent.
This is why in the Over-World 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 beauty.
15. These considerations apply very well to things considered as
standing alone: but there is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we
think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in mutual
relationship.
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 order by Reason.
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 man and beast?
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 despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others?
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 make-up 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 sequence of
comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime.
Men directing their weapons against each other -- under doom of death
yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances 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 loss than to forfeit it.
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 trifles in the outer Socrates.
We must remember, too, that we cannot take tears and laments as proof
that anything is wrong; children cry and whimper where there is nothing
amiss.
16. But if all this is true, what room is left for evil? Where are we
to place wrong-doing and sin?
How explain that in a world organized in good, the efficient agents
[human beings] behave unjustly, commit sin? And how comes misery if
neither sin nor injustice exists?
Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can
the distinction be maintained between behaviour in accordance with
nature and behaviour in conflict with it?
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 Reason-Principle
of the Universe] once again, and more clearly, and to justify its
nature.
This Reason-Principle, 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 which is a Life holding restfully a
certain measure of Reason.
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 is
formative, shaping as it moves.
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.
Thus far to give us some idea of the nature of Life in general.
But this Reason-Principle 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 all-including 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 sum-total 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 Reason-Principle: 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
Reason-Principles.
Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of
Reason-Principles 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 sum-total; the Universe is a self-accordant entity,
its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation
of a Reason-Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then, must be the
unification of conflicting Reason-Principles 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 Reason-Principle; in the fact
of its being a Reason-Principle 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
Reason-Principle, bringing about differentiation to the uttermost
degree, will of necessity create contrarieties: it will be complete
only by producing itself not in merely diverse things but in contrary
things.
17. The nature of the Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle; 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 can.
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 design.
But, thus, the wicked disappear?
No: their wickedness remains; simply, their role is not of their own
planning.
But, surely, this excuses them?
No; excuse lies with the Reason-Principle -- and the Reason-Principle
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 by
that assignment fixes each man's standing.
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 actors bring to this
play what they were before it was ever staged.
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, while the first is cast for
whatever minor work there may be.
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
Reason-Principle 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 dreadful sounds whose utterance there is well.
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 Reason-Principle 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,
to its particular place and to the entire plan.
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 well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the
corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things
are, all is well.
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
Reason-Principle, as parts, they should be unequal by the fact of
becoming separate.
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 possible elucidation.
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 Reason-Principles, 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 nobler cities may rise
in their place.
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 Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle as the doings of
stage-actors are representative parts of the stage-drama? Why not admit
that the Reason-Principle 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 and that the Reason-Principle is the source of
all that exists?
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 divine; they would all be mere parts
of a Reason-Principle.
And, further -- unless all Reason-Principles are Souls -- why should
some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is
itself a Soul?
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
ON PROVIDENCE (2).
1. What is our answer?
All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the
Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts -- strictly
"included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but
encompasses them.
The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its
parts [i.e., events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts.
This unity, Soul, has different parts; the Reason-Principles,
correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the
ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being.
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 system by
the unity at the source.
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 their Kind; and so humanity.
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
"non-living"; if we choose to go further yet, living and non-living may
be included under the one Kind, "Beings," and, further still, under the
Source of Being.
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 belongs follow the
acts, and the good or evil of the life.
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 Leading-Principle 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 it, you and your personal disposition.
But what is the cause of this initial personality?
This question resolves itself into two: are we to make the Creator, if
Creator there is, the cause of the moral quality of the individual or
does the responsibility lie with the creature?
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 can it complain because
men do not stand above humanity?
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 has been given, as foolish in the
case of man as in plant and animal.
The question is not whether a thing is inferior to something else but
whether in its own Kind it suffices to its own part; universal equality
there cannot be.
Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose
of inequality?
Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things:
the Reason-Principle 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
Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul [a
lesser phase], not that [the Supreme Soul] from which the
Reason-Principle 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 the more exalted.
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 Over-World 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 Reason-Principle has two phases,
one which creates the things of process and another which links them
with the higher beings: these higher beings constitute the
over-providence on which depends that lower providence which is the
secondary Reason-Principle inseparably united with its primal: the two
-- the Major and Minor Providence -- acting together produce the
universal woof, the one all-comprehensive Providence.
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 idle;
everything performs its function.
"But," it will be said, "what reason can there be for their not acting
upon the man once they are present; inaction must mean absence?"
We maintain their presence always, nothing void of them.
But surely not where they exercise no action? If they necessarily
reside in all men, surely they must be operative in all -- this
Principle of free action, especially.
First of all, this free Principle is not an absolute possession of the
animal Kinds and is not even an absolute possession to all men.
So this Principle is not the only effective force in all men?
There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it alone
acts, giving its character to the life while all else is but Necessity
[and therefore outside of blame].
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
Reason-Principle; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle
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 within us.
The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a
former life; we may suppose that previous actions have made the
Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the
Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle of an ox
does not occur except in connection with the Matter appropriate to the
ox-Kind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which
we read takes place; the Soul must lose its nature, the
Reason-Principle be transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which
once was Man. The degradation, then, is just. 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 living as the source from which
the present takes its rise.
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 another.
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 Reason-Principle or its Priors-Divine Mind
and unmingled Soul-and 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 Reason-Principle 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, for the Reason-Principle of
providence is god-serving.
All such right-doing, 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
Reason-Principle which governs it sets to work to draw it together,
knit it anew, heal it, and put the affected part to rights.
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 state
of variance in ourselves.
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
answer to the society of their betters.
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 Reason-Principle. 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
medicine.
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
Reason-Principle is to be aware of the Matter on which the Shape has
been imposed.
The living-being 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 Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle and
yet subject in some degree to Necessity.
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 Universe.
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
task, and to every grade and task its effective organ.
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 Providence above, we mean an act upon
something below.
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
Reason-Principles of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in
their own minor order and producing, if at all, only what is in strict
gradation from themselves.
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 far-off
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 same parents.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
OUR TUTELARY SPIRIT.
1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at
rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, 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 expression-forms -- Nature and
all forms of life down to the vegetable order. Even as it is present in
human beings the Soul carries its Expression-form [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.
What does this imply?
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 running into the boundary of the Lower.
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 present there, is idle.
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 life-principle 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 Intellectual-Principle, towards God.
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 be-treeing 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, a bee or
the like.
3. What, then, is the spirit [guiding the present life and determining
the future]?
The Spirit of here and now.
And the God?
The God of here and now.
Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts every life; for, even here
and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.
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 sense-life, 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 loftier.
But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate?
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 evil-liver 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 has attained the
height.
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 some Act, which however leaves our
diviner part not in itself diminished.
4. But is this lower extremity of our intellective phase fettered to
body for ever?
No: if we turn, this turns by the same act.
And the Soul of the All -- are we to think that when it turns from this
sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws?
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 conditions?
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 anything be left to our independent
action here?
The answer is that very choice in the over-world is merely an
allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a total
character which it must express wherever it operates.
But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force 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 of act?
But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered
body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious?
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 allotted
conditions to their own particular quality.
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 Man.
6. What, then, is the achieved Sage?
One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul. 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 is?
The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth -- though, before
all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out
towards its own.
On instinct which the Sage finally rectifies in every respect?
Not in every respect: the Soul is so constituted that its life-history
and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but
also to the conditions among which it acts.
The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Underworld
ceases to be its guardian -- except when the Soul resumes [in its later
choice] the former state of life.
But, meanwhile, what happens to it?
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? No: theirs is still a Spirit,
but an evil or a foolish one.
And the Souls that attain to the highest? 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 as God or more exactly as tutelary
spirit.
But here some further precision is needed.
Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above,
have transcended the Spirit-nature 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 self-distribution 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
produced from one organism.
A power corresponding to this in the All must reach down and co-operate
in the life of our world -- in fact the very same power.
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 appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of
the lot in life.
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
constitutes destiny.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
ON LOVE.
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 Love, from a point of view entirely his own.
Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls; he also
makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the birth of Eros, under
definite circumstances and by a certain parentage.
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 the origin of the two phases.
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 brings
delight and the sense of kinship, its very image attracts.
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 and therefore by all reason cannot desire to procreate in the
ugly.
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 self-control, 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 Eternal-Nature is the first
shaping of beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from it.
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 know what the Authentic
Beauty is.
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 self-perpetuation: 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 -- for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into an
evil often.
So much for love, the state.
Now we have to consider Love, the God.
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 Poros,
Possession, the father.
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
child or born with her or in some way both her child and her
birth-fellow?
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, gathered cleanly within
itself.
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 its author whose power is certainly sufficient to
maintain it Above.
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
Real-Being; 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 beauty playing immediately above it.
3. That Love is a Hypostasis [a "Person"] a Real-Being sprung from a
Real-Being -- lower than the parent but authentically existent -- is
beyond doubt.
For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of
the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent
in the Real-Being of all that authentically is -- in the Real-Being
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 Real-Being 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 nothing but the contemplation of
the Gods.
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 All-Soul 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 Being.
As the All-Soul 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 All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together
constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds
to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the
individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul;
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 Aphrodite mean Soul, and
Love be an act of a Soul seeking good.
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.
5. But what is the Nature of this Spirit -- of the Supernals in
general?
The Spirit-Kind 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 much that is self-contradictory.
For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as
self-sufficing, while this "Love" is confessedly neither divine nor
self-sufficing but in ceaseless need.
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 Essential-Being? 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
quite out of the truth?
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 Spirits under the common name of Gods.
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 towards ourselves and stand between the divine and the human.
But by what process was the immunity lost? What in their nature led
them downwards to the inferior?
And other questions present themselves.
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 sub-celestial
too, the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and
the Powers down to the Moon being all Gods as well?
It is best not to use the word "Celestial" of any Being of that Realm;
the word "God" may be applied to the Essential-Celestial -- 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 Them, held about Them,
as the radiance about the star.
What, then, are these spirits?
A Celestial is the representative generated by each Soul when it enters
the Kosmos.
And why, by a Soul entering the Kosmos?
Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a
God; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite
the Pure Soul, as a God.
But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an
Eros, a Love? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods?
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 Spirit-Beings, 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 function
but to its entire charge.
But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what
Matter?
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
Celestial-Kind, 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 thereby enabled to enter
into the lower Matter, the corporeal.
7. This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of Love.
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
fore-intimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this
state Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love.
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 self-sufficient, but
unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving
and the self-sufficient Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle
but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration
ill-defined, 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
Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended
with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but
through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad; it is without
resource in itself; even winning its end, it is poor again.
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, on the other the resource
inherited from the Reason-Kind.
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 Spirit-Guides, 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 Love-Principles within them in the evil desires springing in
their hearts and allowed the right reason, which belongs to our kind,
to fall under the spell of false ideas from another source.
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 Real-Beings 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 Real-Being: 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
Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form.
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 entered? And what is the garden?
We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros,
Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to
explain Zeus and his garden.
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 says that there is in Zeus not only a royal Soul, but also a
royal Intellect.
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 and the same and call
Aphrodite's star the star of Hera.
9. This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle 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 lower principle].
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 Reason-Principle falling
from a loftier essence to a lower? This means that the Reason-Principle
upon "the birth of Aphrodite" left the Intellectual for the Soul,
breaking into the garden of Zeus.
A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness
that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the Reason-Principle
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 from him?
These Reason-Principles -- this Poros who is the lavishness, the
abundance of Beauty -- are at one and are made manifest; this is the
Nectar-drunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than
what the god-nature 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 Reason-Principle -- 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 the realm of Being.
10. "Our way of speaking" -- for myths, if they are to serve their
purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions 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 Reason-Principles 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 been.
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 good would ever go seeking the good.
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 Ideal-principle only when the
striving [with attainment] will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when
it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the
presentment of Matter to the incoming power.
Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same
time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from
its very birth, strives towards It.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE UNEMBODIED.
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
distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever.
Still, this leaves it undecided whether in the act of judgement the
judging faculty does or does not take to itself something of its
object.
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 such modes and modifications
as the warmth and cold of material frames.
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; we proceed to
examine its preliminaries.
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
stirring and shifting with everything that confronts it!
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 Reason-Principle, 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 non-possession and knows
affection without being affected. How this can be demands enquiry.
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 ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the Soul.
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; there will be harmony
when each faculty performs its appropriate part.
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 sealing-wax.
And note that we do not appeal to stored-up impressions to account for
memory: we think of the mind awakening its powers in such a way as to
possess something not present to it.
Very good: but is it not different before and after acquiring the
memory?
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 changed it.
Thus in the case of Sight, the seeing faculty is in act but the
material organ alone suffers change: judgements are similar to visual
experiences.
But how explain the alternation of timidity and daring in the
initiative faculty?
Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the Reason-Principle
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 these not changes, affectings,
present and stirring within the Soul?
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 organism, the animated body.
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; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows.
When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved -- as in desire,
reasoning, judging -- we do not mean that it is driven into its act;
these movements are its own acts.
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 sealing-wax; 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 comprehensively
contraries.
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 forming a
clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the Soul.
In general terms it means the centre about which we recognize the
affections to be grouped; and by affections we mean those states upon
which follow pleasure and pain.
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 Mind which is said under such
circumstances to harbour fear.
But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind?
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 sense-order; 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, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited.
None the less, there is an affective phase of the Soul or Mind and this
is not corporeal; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form.
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 Ideal-form.
No Ideal-form 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 it causes elsewhere.
The nature of an Ideal-form 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 sense-presentment 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
well-being 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 condition the mind that is breeding
them.
But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been
stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body to which it is
essentially a stranger?
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 towards the exact contrary of earthly things?
Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer
entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a light,
set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all.
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,
tranquilly, over all.
6. The Intellectual Essence, wholly of the order of Ideal-form, must be
taken as impassive has been already established.
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 Existent, about Essence, about Being.
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, otherwise it would be in default.
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
non-existence. 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 non-Being; and Real Being would be lifeless and mindless; but
mindlessness and lifelessness are the characteristics of non-being and
must belong to the lower order, to the outer borders of the existent;
for Intellect and Life rise from the Beyond-Existence [the Indefinable
Supreme] -- though Itself has no need of them -- and are conveyed from
It into the Authentic Existent.
If we have thus rightly described the Authentic Existent, we see that
it cannot be any kind of body nor the under-stuff of body; in such
entities the Being is simply the existing of things outside of Being.
But body, a non-existence? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a
non-existence? 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 resistance, things not even visible?
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, for fire begins, already, to flit up and away outside
of the body-kind.
In fact, it appears to be precisely the most self-sufficing 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 down-thrust 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 greater as the measure of Being is fuller.
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 non-being lacks the
strength to reknit its unity: the heavy and violent crash of body
against body works destruction, and weak is powerful against weak,
non-being against its like.
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 getting-up 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 neither Real-Being nor Matter.
Matter is no Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no
Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; 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 non-being, and
this in the sense not of movement [away from Being] or station (in
Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being, 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 can know only as
the Void.
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 presents itself before them.
8. It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be
opposed in faculty, and in quality to the forces that enter and act
upon it.
Thus where heat is present, the change comes by something that chills,
where damp by some drying agency: we say a subject is modified when
from warm it becomes cold, from dry wet.
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 process?
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 present in it has some action upon it.
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
drawing for being coloured.
The intermediary mass on which these surface changes appear is
certainly not transmuted by them; but might there not be a modification
of the underlying Matter?
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 colour-quality 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 all-recipient; it will have closed the entry against many
incomers. In other words, the Matter is no longer there: Matter is
destructible.
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 Matter as changing is to
speak of it as not being Matter.
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 modification.
Therefore there are only two possibilities: the first, that Matter
itself changes and so ceases to be itself, the second that it never
ceases to be itself and therefore never changes.
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 immutable Idea;
here we have Matter, itself similarly immutable.
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 of the relation between Matter and the Ideas.
The difficulty on this point is not really that which presented itself
to most of our predecessors -- how the Ideas enter into Matter -- it is
rather the mode of their presence in it.
It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact,
unaffected by Ideal-forms 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 Ideal-form, the compound being deficient through the
absence of a particular principle whose presence will complete it.
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 or decorate
something bare or ugly.
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, it could never participate in good.
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 pseudo-participation -- 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
evil.
In a word, when we call Matter evil we are right only if we mean that
it is not amenable to modification by The Good; but that means simply
that it is subject to no modification whatever.
12. This is Plato's conception: to him participation does not, in the
case of Matter, comport any such presence of an Ideal-form 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 Ideal-forms 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 is vast.
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 itself.
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 recipient?
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 by sheer custom of speech.
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 it on fire is like saying that a statue permeates its bronze.
Further, if what enters must be an Ideal-Principle 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, within the
Matter?
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 body it cannot know
the experiences of body.
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 Ideal-Form 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 passing into it.
In what sense, then, is it said to elude form?
By very nature and for ever?
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.
Matter [we read] is "the receptacle and nurse of all generation."
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 is
probing after its distinctive manner of being.
And what is that?
This which we think of as a Nature-Kind 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
Reason-Principles 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 them.
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 untruth.
But, at least, in a true entry?
No: How could there be a true entry into that which, by being falsity,
is banned from ever touching truth?
Is this then a pseudo-entry into a pseudo-entity -- something merely
brought near, as faces enter the mirror, there to remain just as long
as the people look into it?
Yes: if we eliminated the Authentic Existents from this Sphere nothing
of all now seen in sense would appear one moment longer.
Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an Ideal-Form 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 light and
remaining, even so, unseen because it is invisible whatever happens.
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 solid reality of
all that appears.
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 Substantial-Existence of the
Real-Beings, that Substantial-Existence 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.
14. But would this mean that if there were no Matter nothing would
exist?
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 the character of a
reflection to appear in something not itself.
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 disappointed, so that its poverty is enduring, its cry
unceasing.
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 get; in other words, what appears in Matter is not
Reality.
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 fact to imaging skill.
It is, of course, impossible that an outside thing belonging in any
degree to Real-Being -- whose Nature is to engender Real-Beings --
should utterly fail of participation in Reality: but here we have
something perplexing; we are dealing with utter Non-Being, absolutely
without part in Reality; what is this participation by the
non-participant, and how does mere neighbouring confer anything on that
which by its own nature is precluded from any association?
The answer is that all that impinges upon this Non-Being 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 mass.
It is in this sense and way that Matter becomes the cause of the
generated realm; the combinations within it hold together only after
some such reflective mode.
15. Now the objects attracting the sun-rays to themselves --
illuminated by a fire of the sense-order -- are necessarily of the
sense-order; 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 Reason-Principle
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
Being].
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 reason.
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
powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack.
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 shape and property
and appearing to follow -- yet in fact not even following.
16. An Ideal-Principle approaches and leads Matter towards some desired
dimension, investing this non-existent underlie with a magnitude from
itself which never becomes incorporate -- for Matter, if it really
incorporated magnitude, would be a mass.
Eliminate this Ideal-Form 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 horse-magnitude 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 and be fire once for all.
In a word, though Matter is far extended -- so vastly as to appear
co-extensive with all this sense-known 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 nothing of all that
which, in its own peculiar mode, it had hitherto exhibited.
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 was.
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 things.
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
undetermined Magnitude.
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 Ideal-Principle:
it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The
fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or
of the All-Soul, 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 Image-making phase [of Intellect or All-Soul] 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, therefore, has
Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe.
The Magnitude inherent in each Ideal-Principle -- 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 non-colour [=
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 non-quality: in precisely the same mode, the
Magnitude appearing upon Matter rises from non-Magnitude 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 non-existent.
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 all-receptivity] 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 characteristic indetermination.
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.
What then will it produce [in this Matter] by virtue of that power?
Not horse or cow: these are the product of other Ideas.
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 appearance.
To the thing which does not enjoy Magnitude in the sense of having
mass-extension 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 self-presentment, 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 exhibits the Magnitude of mass.
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 Real-Beings,
and itself an Ideal Principle -- includes all in concentration within
itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is
complete and self-contained: 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
Reason-Principle in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained
a degree of the partial object that is to be formed: in the
image-making impulse within the Reason-Principle there is already a
step [towards the lower manifestation] or we may put it that the
downward movement from the Reason-Principle 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 all-recipient 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 such others as are not able to enter
into combination?
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
Reason-Principle.
19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother [to be
"born into the Universe"] affect it neither for better nor for worse.
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
self-identity.
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 neither Principle is associated
with it as friend or enemy.
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 Ideal-Form; 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 the eunuchs surrounding it
in its representation as the All-Mother.
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 impregnating power which belongs only to the
unchangeably masculine.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
TIME AND ETERNITY.
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 certitude.
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.
2. What definition are we to give to Eternity?
Can it be identified with the [divine or] Intellectual Substance
itself?
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 Above-World; 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 Repose-There as Time has been
identified with Movement-Here?
This would bring on the counter-question whether Eternity is presented
to us as Repose in the general sense or as the Repose that envelops the
Intellectual Essence.
On the first supposition we can no more talk of Repose being eternal
than of Eternity being eternal: to be eternal is to participate in an
outside thing, Eternity.
Further, if Eternity is Repose, what becomes of Eternal Movement,
which, by this identification, would become a thing of Repose?
Again, the conception of Repose scarcely seems to include that of
perpetuity -- I am speaking of course not of perpetuity in the
time-order (which might follow on absence of movement) but of that
which we have in mind when we speak of Eternity.
If, on the other hand, Eternity is identified with the Repose of the
divine Essence, all species outside of the divine are put outside of
Eternity.
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 conception of Repose as such.
Lastly, this unchangeable Repose in unity is a predicate asserted of
Eternity, which, therefore, is not itself Repose, the absolute, but a
participant in Repose.
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 in conformity.
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 self-identity we call it
Repose; and we know it as, at once, Difference and Identity when we
recognize that all is unity with variety.
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 knowing this, we know
Eternity.
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, but what it is now, that it is
ever.
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 futurity but
eternally is.
What future, in fact, could bring to that Being anything which it now
does not possess; and could it come to be anything which it is not once
for all?
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 existence but that it be what it is.
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 to it, integral to it.
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 First-Eternity equally with The
Good that is among them and of them and equally with the truth that is
among them.
In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of the
All-Being; 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 cannot seek
change or be changed or ever have made its way into Being.
Engendered things are in continuous process of acquisition; eliminate
futurity, therefore, and at once they lose their being; if the
non-engendered 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 becoming, an
advancing from stage to stage.
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 perpetuity by way of futurity.
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 lodgement.
Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive 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, non-existent -- and this State
and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity: in our very word,
Eternity means Ever-Being.
5. This Ever-Being 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 Ever-Existent or, at least, no Ever-All-Existent.
But is perpetuity enough in itself to constitute an Eternal?
No: the object must, farther, include such a Nature-Principle 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,
co-eternal 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 substratum
carrying that state in manifestation.
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 change, and therefore as also the firmly living.
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 pre-eminently
the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its
own substance.
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
Living-Principle) all-comprehensive add that it never spends itself,
and we have the statement of a Life instantaneously infinite.
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
self-identical 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 [the Real-Being we have sought].
Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing variety
in the mode of existence: Being is, therefore, self-identical
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 any first or
last in it.
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 discussing, Eternity.
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 of perdurance.
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 All-Existent, and, as being
all, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one point
complete and at some other lacking.
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; completeness is
attributed to them only by an accident of language.
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 subsists before all quantity.
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 Life as in the essence.
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 some other order of Beings and
talking of matters alien to ourselves.
But how could that be? What understanding can there be failing some
point of contact? And what contact could there be with the utterly
alien?
We must then have, ourselves, some part or share in Eternity.
Still, how is this possible to us who exist in Time?
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 formed tallies with our own
doctrine.
But, as things are, our best beginning is to range over the most
noteworthy of the ancient opinions and see whether any of them accord
with ours.
Existing explanations of Time seem to fall into three classes:
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, in its
characteristic idea, it is concerned with change.
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 Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable.
In a word, Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes
place.
And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is
decisive: Movement can come to rest, can be intermittent; Time is
continuous.
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 that of the
first half.
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 same extension: in other
words, Time is not this movement.
And, if Time is not even the movement of the Kosmic Sphere much less is
it the sphere itself though that has been identified with Time on the
ground of its being in motion.
Is it, then, some phenomenon or connection of Movement?
Let us, tentatively, suppose it to be extent, or duration, of Movement.
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, since these speed-differences are limitless?
Is it the extent of the subordinate Movement [= movement of things of
earth]?
Again, this gives us no unit since the movement is infinitely variable;
we would have, thus, not Time but Times.
The extent of the Movement of the All, then?
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, like water
flowing ceaselessly, motion and extent of motion.
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 basic-stuff: 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, and, therefore, stands distinct from either.
What then is this thing of extension? To what order of beings does it
belong?
It obviously is not spatial, for place, too, is something outside it.
9. "A Number, a Measure, belonging to Movement?"
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: is Time the measure of any and
every Movement?
Have we any means of calculating disconnected and lawless Movement?
What number or measure would apply? What would be the principle of such
a Measure?
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 Movements -- but we are no nearer
understanding what it is in itself.
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 sense?
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 we have already rejected, or
to some similar collective figure.
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 foot-rule; 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 Movement, and we are to discover
what measures it.
Given a Movement measured, are we to suppose the measure to be a
magnitude?
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 yard-stick 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 must, like that decade, have some nature of its own.
Or "it is that which accompanies a Movement and measures it by its
successive stages"; but we are still left asking what this thing
recording the stages may be.
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 beginning
from a Now.
Time, therefore, is something other than the mere number measuring
Movement, whether Movement in general or any particular tract of
Movement.
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 magnitude has not its full
quantity unless we can estimate that quantity.
Again, if Time is, admittedly, endless, how can number apply to it?
Are we to take some portion of Time and find its numerical statement?
That simply means that Time existed before number was applied to it.
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 existence; measured or not, it has the full extent of its being.
And suppose it to be true that the Soul is the appraiser, using
Magnitude as the measuring standard, how does this help us to the
conception of Time?
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 the result would turn out to be Time.
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: and thus our definition is "Time is a sequence upon movement
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
All-Movement 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 -- applies to
the All as much as to particular Movement.
We are, thus, at the stage where we are to state what Time really is.
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; something thus its story would run:
Time at first -- in reality before that "first" was produced by desire
of succession -- Time lay, self-concentrated, 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 All-Soul], 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 ever-new difference, traversed a portion of the
outgoing path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time.
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 nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards,
makes way towards what seems to it a large life; but by that partition
it loses; it was a unity self-gathered, 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 Time.
Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in
movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another?
Yes; for Eternity, we have said, is Life in repose, unchanging,
self-identical, always endlessly complete; and there is to be an image
of Eternity-Time -- 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
all-comprehending, 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, self-realized, 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 seen upon Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as
Eternity to the Intellectual Realm.
12. We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle --
Time -- a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the
Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes
following silently upon each other -- a Principle, then, whose Act is
sequent.
But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and withdraw
from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and
unending activity of an ever-existent soul not self-contained or
self-intent 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 rest, turned to the Supreme, to Eternal Being, to the
tranquilly stable.
What would then exist but Eternity?
All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things?
What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or
short-lasting? 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 separation is the
necessary condition of tendency?
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 Soul-Act [which is the essence of Time] continuing, we
could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it.
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 concept of Number.
We observe the tract between a sunrise and its return and, as the
movement is uniform, we thus obtain a Time-interval 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 of that
movement.
And the reiterated observation of Movement -- the same extent found to
be traversed in such and such a period -- will lead to the conception
of a definite quantity of Time past.
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 being by it.
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; [its being measure or] its being measured cannot be of
its essence.
We are no nearer knowledge than if we said that the foot-rule 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 which the Movement has
traversed and say the one is equivalent to the other.
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,
measure, or measured object, is in itself.
Plato does not make the essence of Time consist in its being either a
measure or a thing measured by something else.
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 the work of the one Life.
Suppose that Life, then, to revert -- an impossibility -- to perfect
unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the Heavens, no
longer maintained by that Life, would end at once.
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 self-actuated movement which, engendering its own
every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all
which, it is the cause of existence, at once, and of every consequent.
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
Soul-Movement itself with all its endless progression: what is our
explanation of this paradox?
Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior Eternity which knows
neither its progression nor its extension. The descent towards Time
begins with this Soul-Movement; it made Time and harbours Time as a
concomitant to its Act.
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 situated: -- but this school demands another type of
argument.
Meanwhile we have a supplementary observation to make.
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 know also the movement that
exists in the man himself before the feet move.
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 man's soul.
But the Movement within the Soul -- to what are you to (relate) refer
that?
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.
And, as with Man's Soul, so with the Soul of the All.
"Is Time, then, within ourselves as well?"
Time in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, 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.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE.
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 among ourselves there is
no risk in a light handling of our own ideas.
Well -- in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of
Contemplation?
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 it does not possess.
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 wax-workers, 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
Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover;
this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity; it is the unmoved
Principle operating in the Kosmos.
We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt, unmoved, but
that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by motion.
But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the
Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the
Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, 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
Reason-Principle.
This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the
Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a Reason-Principle
producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring, which, in turn,
while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the
underlie, Matter.
The Reason-Principle 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 Reason-Principle -- brother
no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having life-giving power.
3. But if this Reason-Principle [Nature] is in act -- and produces by
the process indicated -- how can it have any part in Contemplation?
To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact,
a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, 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 Reason-Principle then, as
accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not
being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation.
Taking the Reason-Principle, 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 All-Soul and, next, that
operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle.
And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contemplation?
Wholly and solely?
From self-contemplation, then? Or what are we to think? It derives from
a Contemplation and some contemplating Being; how are we to suppose it
to have Contemplation itself?
The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty -- that, I mean,
of planning its own content, it does not possess.
But why not, since it is a phase of Life, a Reason-Principle 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
Reason-Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an
object of contemplation. In other words, the, Nature-Principle produces
by virtue of being an act of contemplation, an object of contemplation
and a Reason-Principle; on this triple character depends its creative
efficacy.
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 being a contemplation.
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 vision-loving and create vision by the
vision-seeing 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 All-Soul] 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
Reason-Principles, they contemplate themselves and I am born."
Now what does this tell us?
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 Self-Consciousness,
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 resplendent and
delicious spectacle, has no further aim.
Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of "understanding" or
"perception" in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense
applicable to other beings; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed
from the wake.
For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a self-intuition, a
spectacle laid before it by virtue of its unaccompanied
self-concentration 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
vision-attenuation if the doer was aiming only at the thing done;
complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the
mere work produced.
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, take to crafts and manual
labour.
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 present at the end,
only, of its course.
None the less that which goes forth cannot be equal to that which
remains.
In sum, then:
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 form, dwindled in the descent.
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 prior -- a Vision
creates the Vision.
[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 thing in every Soul; Vision is not cabined within the
bournes of magnitude.
This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same
strength in each and every place and thing -- any more than that it is
at the same strength in each of its own phases.
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 craved for -- and
that was vision, and an object of vision.
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 come at by the circuit.
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 Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul
can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more
certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper.
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 -- for now we come to the
serious treatment of the subject --
In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it
comes to identification with the object of its knowledge.
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 Ideal-Principles 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 so that he finds it really
his own.
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 Reason-Principle, even
an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a [lower] realm
which these do not see.
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 self-indwelling Soul inclines less
to such experiences.
The Sage, then, is the man made over into a Reason-Principle: 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 what is one and at rest: all his faculty and life are
inward-bent.
7. Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established -- some
self-evident, others brought out by our treatment above:
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 vision-manifest to sensation or to true
knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all
impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to
produce Ideal-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that
universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all
produce objects of vision, Ideal-forms. In the engendering of these
sub-existences, 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
Reason-Principles 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 Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as
nearly as possible, endless: to bring anything into being is to produce
an Idea-Form 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. So Love,
too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form.
8. From this basis we proceed:
In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to
that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle
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 Intellectual-Principle, are close to
identity with their container.
Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle 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 some mode of living-thing; it is not the Self-Living.
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 thought psychic.
What, then, makes them thoughts?
The fact that they are Reason-Principles. 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 perfect] and anything
else is no thought.
This is simply because they do not seek to establish what Life is.
The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that
whatever exists is a bye-work 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 thing, a Life, two
inextricably one.
The duality, thus, is a unity; but how is this unity also a plurality?
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 Intellectual-Principle 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 Whence-followed-by-a-Whither;
the Whence all alone is greater than with the Whither added to it.
The Intellectual-Principle on the other hand was never merely the
Principle of an inviolable unity; it was a universal as well and, being
so, was the Intellectual-Principle of all things. Being, thus, all
things and the Principle of all, it must essentially include this part
of itself [this element-of-plurality] which is universal and is all
things: otherwise, it contains a part which is not
Intellectual-Principle: it will be a juxtaposition of
non-Intellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass
of things into the Intellectual-Principle!
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 parts [to be diminished by any outgo].
9. Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent; there
must exist that which transcends it, that Being [the Absolute], to
which all our discussion has been leading.
In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The
Intellectual-Principle 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
Intellectual-Being with the object of its Intellection, so that it is a
duality; and, given this duality, we must find what exists before it.
What is this?
The Intellectual-Principle taken separately, perhaps?
No: an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible object;
eliminate the intelligible, and the Intellectual-Principle disappears
with it. If, then, what we are seeking cannot be the
Intellectual-Principle but must be something that rejects the duality
there present, then the Prior demanded by that duality must be
something on the further side of the Intellectual-Principle.
But might it not be the Intelligible object itself?
No: for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality with the
Intellectual-Principle.
If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible
Object can be the First Existent, what is?
Our answer can only be:
The source of both.
What will This be; under what character can we picture It?
It must be either Intellective or without Intellection: if Intellective
it is the Intellectual-Principle; 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 conception by which we define it.
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 direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our
grasp?
To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the degree
of human faculty: we indicate it by virtue of what in ourselves is like
it.
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 listen and you take the
voice entire -- entire though yet with a difference.
And what do we take when we thus point the Intelligence?
The Intellectual-Principle 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 something more than Intellect.
For the Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellect and of the
Universe.
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
Intellectual-Principle must be more simplex than the
Intellectual-Principle.
We may be told that this engendering Principle is the One-and-All.
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 co-existence, it is not a Source.
But what we are probing for must be a Source; it must exist before all,
that all may be fashioned as sequel to it.
As for the notion that it may be each separate entity of the All, this
would make a self-Identity 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.
10. And what will such a Principle essentially be?
The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence
would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the
Intellectual-Principle 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 pour their streams.
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. Thus we are always brought back to The One.
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
being-nothing?
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 knowing its greatness by the Beings that
follow upon it and exist by its power.
Another approach:
The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees;
therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective.
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 Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle demands, for
its completion, The Good.
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 nothing and therefore possesses nothing beyond itself.
Once you have uttered "The Good," add no further thought: by any
addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a
deficiency.
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 Intellectual-Principle 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 likeness with
the Good.
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 Intellectual-Principle.
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 Intellectual-Principle,
to which characteristically belongs the striving, the concentrated
strain towards its Form.
Yet: The Intellectual-Principle; 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 seen it, and penetrated it, to become a
unit of its Being.
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, this
Intellectual-Principle, this lovely abundance so abundantly endowed?
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 Intellection needed to know.
These are very near to the un-needing, 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.
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
DETACHED CONSIDERATIONS.
1. "The Intellectual-Principle" [= 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 find place in this lower
universe also."
Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before the
Intellectual-Principle so that it "sees them" as previously existent?
The first step is to make sure whether the "Living Being" of the text
is to be distinguished from the Intellectual-Principle as another thing
than it.
It might be argued that the Intellectual-Principle is the Contemplator
and therefore that the Living-Being contemplated is not the
Intellectual-Principle but must be described as the Intellectual Object
so that the Intellectual-Principle 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 form of particular things.
No: even though the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Object
are distinct, they are not apart except for just that distinction.
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 Intellectual-Principle 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 within itself.
The Intelligible Object is the Intellectual-Principle itself in its
repose, unity, immobility: the Intellectual-Principle, contemplator of
that object -- of the Intellectual-Principle thus in repose is an
active manifestation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its
unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating, stands as
Intellectual-Principle to that of which it has the intellection: it is
Intellectual-Principle 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, the four orders of living beings.
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
Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-Principle and this planning
Principle will, to others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a
common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the
discrimination.
We have dealt with the first two; but the third -- this Principle which
decides to work upon the objects [the Ideas] contemplated by the
Intellectual-Principle within the Essentially-Living, to create them,
to establish them in their partial existence -- what is this third?
It is possible that in one aspect the Intellectual-Principle is the
principle of partial existence, while in another aspect it is not.
The entities thus particularized from the unity are products of the
Intellectual-Principle 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 separative
principle.
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
Intellectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to
which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division.
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 is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to
the Supreme.
At no point did the All-Soul 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 All-Soul -- 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 All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that
Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by
the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun.
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 non-Being: 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 non-Being -- 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 Intellectual-Principle, far removed from
Authentic Being.
As long as it remains at the mid-stage 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.
3. (A) . . . How, then, does Unity give rise to Multiplicity?
By its omnipresence: there is nowhere where it is not; it occupies,
therefore, all that is; at once, it is manifold -- or, rather, it is
all things.
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 it in virtue of its being nowhere.
But why is it not merely present everywhere but in addition
nowhere-present?
Because, universality demands a previous unity. It must, therefore,
pervade all things and make all, but not be the universe which it
makes.
(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing -- with the
Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle.
(C) When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously,
observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to
have that intellection.
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 self-intellection is an act upon a reality and upon a
life; therefore, before the Life and Real-Being 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 self-intellection are intellective-forms, We, the
Authentic We, are the Intelligibles and self-intellection 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 Intellectual-Principle --
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 self-identical 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 some other form
of Being.
(F) . . . But the First is not to be envisaged as made up from Gods of
a transcendent order: no; the Authentic Existents constitute the
Intellectual-Principle 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, and the Primal aims
at nothing; what could the Summit aspire to?
Has It, even, no Intellection of Itself?
It possesses Itself and therefore is said in general terms to know
itself . . . But intellection does not mean self-ownership; 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 Intellection stands The Good itself.
The Good therefore needs no consciousness.
What sort of consciousness can be conceived in it?
Consciousness of the Good as existent or non-existent?
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 falls to the ground since it is, no longer consciousness
of The Good.
But would not all this mean that the First does not even live?
The First cannot be said to live since it is the source of Life.
All that has self-consciousness and self-intellection 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 is of its own nature lacking and to be made perfect
by Intellection.
All thinking and knowing must, here, be eliminated: the addition
introduces deprivation and deficiency.
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THE FOURTH ENNEAD
__________________________________________________________________
FIRST TRACTATE.
ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL (1).
1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the
Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but
containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come
thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world
belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division.
There the Intellectual-Principle 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.
But there is a difference:
The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to
partition. Soul, there without distinction and partition, has yet a
nature lending itself to divisional existence: its division is
secession, entry into body.
In view of this seceding and the ensuing partition we may legitimately
speak of it as a partible thing.
But if so, how can it still be described as indivisible?
In that the secession is not of the soul entire; something of it holds
its ground, that in it which recoils from separate existence.
The entity, therefore, described as "consisting of the undivided soul
and of the soul divided among bodies," contains a soul which is at once
above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this
sphere, like a radius from a centre.
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.
__________________________________________________________________
SECOND TRACTATE.
ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL (2).
1. In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to
be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony.
The theory that it is some final development, some entelechy, we pass
by, holding this to be neither true as presented nor practically
definitive.
No doubt we make a very positive statement about it when we declare it
to belong to the Intellectual Kind, to be of the divine order; but a
deeper penetration of its nature is demanded.
In that allocation we were distinguishing things as they fall under the
Intellectual or the sensible, and we placed the soul in the former
class; now, taking its membership of the Intellectual for granted, we
must investigate by another path the more specific characteristics of
its nature.
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 [Real-Being]; 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 stationary essence.
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 ideal-forms 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 from every other as the
mass is from the mass.
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 condition only, not the actual Essence.
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 thus bestowed itself.
In whatsoever bodies it occupies -- even the vastest of all, that in
which the entire universe is included -- it gives itself to the whole
without abdicating its unity.
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 of quality.
The nature, at once divisible and indivisible, which we affirm to be
soul has not the unity of an extended thing: it does not consist of
separate sections; its divisibility lies in its presence at every point
of the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in the total
and entire in any part.
To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and
its power, the divinity and wonder of its being, as a nature
transcending the sphere of Things.
Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass: it exists here and
yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered
identity: thus it is "parted and not parted," or, better, it has never
known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a
self-gathered integral, and is "parted among bodies" merely in the
sense that bodies, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot
receive it unless in some partitive mode; the partition, in other
words, is an occurrence in body not in soul.
2. It can be demonstrated that soul must, necessarily, be of just this
nature and that there can be no other soul than such a being, one
neither wholly partible but both at once.
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 leading-principle by progressive
stages" must be dismissed as mere illusion.
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 self-consistent whole of
unbroken unity?
Again, would perception be vested in that leading principle alone, or
in the other phases as well?
If a given experience bears only on that "leading principle," it would
not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism; if, on
the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul -- one not
constituted for sensation -- that phase cannot transmit any experience
to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation.
Again, suppose sensation vested in the "leading-principle" itself:
then, a first alternative, it will be felt in some one part of that
[some specifically sensitive phase], the other part excluding a
perception which could serve no purpose; or, in the second alternative,
there will be many distinct sensitive phases, an infinite number, with
difference from one to another. In that second case, one sensitive
phase will declare "I had this sensation primarily"; others will have
to say "I felt the sensation that rose elsewhere"; but either the site
of the experience will be a matter of doubt to every phase except the
first, or each of the parts of the soul will be deceived into
allocating the occurrence within its own particular sphere.
If, on the contrary, the sensation is vested not merely in the "leading
principle," but in any and every part of the soul, what special
function raises the one rather than the other into that leading rank,
or why is the sensation to be referred to it rather than elsewhere? And
how, at this, account for the unity of the knowledge brought in by
diverse senses, by eyes, by ears?
On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity -- utterly strange to
part, a self-gathered whole -- if it continuously eludes all touch of
multiplicity and divisibility -- then, no whole taken up into it can
ever be ensouled; soul will stand as circle-centre to every object
[remote on the circumference], and the entire mass of a living being is
soulless still.
There is, therefore, no escape: soul is, in the degree indicated, one
and many, parted and impartible. We cannot question the possibility of
a thing being at once a unity and multi-present, since to deny this
would be to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the
universe; there must be a Kind which encircles and supports all and
conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence
is multiple, and yet is one soul always since a container must be a
unity: by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the
multiplicity of the series of an all; by its impartible unity, it will
conduct a total to wise ends.
In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the
"leading-principle" is their mere unity -- a lower reproduction of the
soul's efficiency.
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 essence
partaking of both qualities."
Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many; the
Ideal-Form resident in body is many and one; bodies themselves are
exclusively many; the Supreme is exclusively one.
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (1).
1. The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or
where we must abide our doubt -- with, at least, the gain of
recognizing the problem that confronts us -- this is matter well worth
attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time
required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else,
it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of
what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself
springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who
bade us know ourselves.
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 offshoots from the soul of the universe [parts and an identity
modally parted].
Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against
the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the All-Soul -- the
considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is
intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that
equality of intellection.
They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form
with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view
where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says "As our body
is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the
soul of the All." It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne
along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that -- taking
character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it -- we must
derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within
ourselves every part absorbs from our soul so, analogically, we,
standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the Soul of the All as
parts of it. They will urge also that the dictum "The collective soul
cares for all the unensouled," carries the same implication and could
be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin
stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be
there to concern itself with the unensouled.
2. To this our first answer is that to place certain things under one
identical class -- by admitting an identical range of operation -- is
to make them of one common species, and puts an end to all mention of
part; the reasonable conclusion would be, on the contrary, that there
is one identical soul, every separate manifestation being that soul
complete.
Our opponents after first admitting the unity go on to make our soul
dependent on something else, something in which we have no longer the
soul of this or that, even of the universe, but a soul of nowhere, a
soul belonging neither to the kosmos, nor to anything else, and yet
vested with all the function inherent to the kosmic soul and to that of
every ensouled thing.
The soul considered as an entirety cannot be a soul of any one given
thing -- since it is an Essence [a divine Real-Being] -- or, at least,
there must be a soul which is not exclusively the soul of any
particular thing, and those attached to particulars must so belong
merely in some mode of accident.
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 ideal-form
[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 magnitude; has nothing whatever to do with
quantity.
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, of a section or
branch of knowledge.
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 ideal-form Quantity -- they are subject to increase and
decrease.
Now in such a sense as this, part cannot be affirmed of the soul.
The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the
All-Soul as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent
units.
Such a conception would entail many absurdities:
The Ten could not be [essentially] a unity [the Soul would be an
aggregation, not a self-standing Real-Being] and, further -- unless
every one of the single constituents were itself an All-Soul -- the
All-Soul would be formed of non-souls.
Again, it is admitted that the particular soul -- this "part of the
All-Soul -- is of one ideal-form with it, but this does not entail the
relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts
there is nothing inevitably making any portion uniform with the total:
take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we may divide it in
different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided
into triangles; all sorts of different figures are possible: yet an
absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul.
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
All-Soul being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they
would be doing, annulling the All-Soul -- if any collective soul
existed at all -- making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it
like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being
described as a portion of the total thing, wine.
Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the
sense in which we speak of some single proposition as a part of the
science entire.
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 whole science, which itself remains an unbroken total.
Is this the appropriate parallel?
No; in such a relationship the All-Soul, of which the particular souls
are to be a part, would not be the soul of any definite thing, but an
entity standing aloof; that means that it would not even be the soul of
the Kosmos; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls;
thus all alike would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there
would be no reason for making any such distinction.
3. Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being,
the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire?
This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside
of body, or that -- no soul being within body -- the thing described as
the soul of the universe is, none the less, outside the body of the
universe. That is a point to be investigated, but for the present we
must consider what kind of soul this parallel would give us.
If the particular soul is a part of the All-Soul only in the sense that
this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such
a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the
identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing,
multi-present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul
that is a part against a soul that is an all -- especially where an
identical power is present. Even difference of function, as in eyes and
ears, cannot warrant the assertion of distinct parts concerned in each
separate act -- with other parts again making allotment of faculty --
all is met by the notion of one identical thing, but a thing in which a
distinct power operates in each separate function. All the powers are
present either in seeing or in hearing; the difference in impression
received is due to the difference in the organs concerned; all the
varying impressions are our various responses to Ideal-forms that can
be taken in a variety of modes.
A further proof [of the unity of Soul] is that perception demands a
common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is
competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several
experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these impressions
must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all
that is said and done.
But again: "Everywhere, Unity": in the variety of functions if each
"part of the soul" were as distinct as are the entrant sensations, none
of those parts could have knowledge; awareness would belong only to
that judging faculty -- or, if local, every such act of awareness would
stand quite unrelated to any other. But since the soul is a rational
soul, by the very same title by which it is an All-Soul, and is called
the rational soul, in the sense of being a whole [and so not merely
"reasoning locally"] , then what is thought of as a part must in
reality be no part but the identity of an unparted thing.
4. But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be
able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one
thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly,
the difficulty of soul in body as against soul not embodied.
We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this
would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the
universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul
does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul,
while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied
thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the
human soul can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they
are one and the same?
There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle;
by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial
things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue
of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain
how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such
differentiated souls can remain one thing.
A possible solution may be offered:
The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the
differentiated souls -- the All-Soul, with the others -- issue from the
unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association.
They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to
any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they
strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as
light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that,
and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance.
The All-Soul 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] which invites
their care.
The one -- the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul -- would correspond
to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the
whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some
rotted part of the growth -- for this is the ratio of the animated body
to the universe -- while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with
the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener
concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to
amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the
healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the
service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent
upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound.
5. But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and mine and
another's?
May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to some
individual, but to belong on the higher to that other sphere?
At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in
body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the
highest.
Now nothing of Real Being is ever annulled.
In the Supreme, the Intellectual-Principles 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 of that identical being. It is exactly so with the souls.
By their succession they are linked to the several
Intellectual-Principles, for they are the expression, the Logos, of the
Intellectual-Principles, of which they are the unfolding; brevity has
opened out to multiplicity; by that point of their being which least
belongs to the partial order, they are attached each to its own
Intellectual original: they have already chosen the way of division;
but to the extreme they cannot go; thus they keep, at once,
identification and difference; each soul is permanently a unity [a
self] and yet all are, in their total, one being.
Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all;
those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the
Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which
abides in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the
Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles,
partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the
Supreme.
6. But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a kosmos, the
soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and
contains, it too, all things in itself?
We have indicated that a thing may enter and dwell at the same time in
various places; this ought to be explained, and the enquiry would show
how an identity resident simultaneously here and there may, in its
separate appearances, act or react -- or both -- after distinct modes;
but the matter deserves to be examined in a special discussion.
To return, then: how and why has the All-Soul produced a kosmos, while
the particular souls simply administer some one part of it?
In the first place, we are not surprised when men of identical
knowledge differ greatly in effective power.
But the reason, we will be asked.
The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among
these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but
dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received
their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when
their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already
prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one
[the creative All-Soul] looks towards the universal
Intellectual-Principle [the exemplar of all that can be], while the
others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that
which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could
have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator -- the
work accomplished before them -- an impediment inevitable whichsoever
of the souls were first to operate.
But it is safer to account for the creative act by nearer connection
with the over-world; 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 over-world: 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 towards the lower.
The "secondary and tertiary souls," of which we hear, must be
understood in the sense of closer or remoter position: it is much as in
ourselves the relation to the Supreme is not identical from soul to
soul; some of us are capable of becoming Uniate, others of striving and
almost attaining, while a third rank is much less apt; it is a matter
of the degree or powers of the soul by which our expression is
determined -- the first degree dominant in the one person, the second,
the third [the merely animal life] in others while, still, all of us
contain all the powers.
7. So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to
imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul?
The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it
expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the
heavens are ensouled -- a teaching which he maintains in the
observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when
we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul; how, he
asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total.
He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the
other souls brought into existence after the All-Soul, but compounded
from the same mixing bowl"; secondary and tertiary are duly marked off
from the primal but every form of soul is presented as being of
identical ideal-nature with the All-Soul.
As for saying of the Phaedrus. "All that is soul cares for all that is
soulless," this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be
controlled -- fashioned, set in place or brought into being -- by
anything but the Soul. And we cannot think that there is one soul whose
nature includes this power and another without it. "The perfect soul,
that of the All," we read, "going its lofty journey, operates upon the
kosmos not by sinking into it, but, as it were, by brooding over it";
and "every perfect soul exercises this governance"; he distinguishes
the other, the soul in this sphere as "the soul when its wing is
broken."
As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic circuit, and taking
character and condition thence; this is no indication that they are
parts: soul-nature 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 make-up of the body may have their influence
[upon our human souls which, yet, are no parts of place or of body].
We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over
something from the All-Soul; we do not deny the influence of the Kosmic
Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul in us [the
Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalizing] proven to be
distinct by that power of opposition.
As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in
motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother's.
8. These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question,
are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between
soul and soul is due to the mere fact that all spring from that
self-same soul [the next to Divine Mind] from which springs the Soul of
the All.
We have already stated that the one soul is also multiple; and we have
dealt with the different forms of relationship between part and whole:
we have investigated the different degrees existing within soul; we may
now add, briefly, that differences might be induced, also, by the
bodies with which the soul has to do, and, even more, by the character
and mental operations carried over from the conduct of the previous
lives. "The life-choice made by a soul has a correspondence" -- we read
-- "with its former lives."
As regards the nature of soul in general, the differences have been
defined in the passage in which we mentioned the secondary and tertiary
orders and laid down that, while all souls are all-comprehensive, each
ranks according to its operative phase -- one becoming Uniate in the
achieved fact, another in knowledge, another in desire, according to
the distinct orientation by which each is, or tends to become, what it
looks upon. The very fulfillment and perfectionment attainable by souls
cannot but be different.
But, if in the total the organization in which they have their being is
compact of variety -- as it must be since every Reason-Principle 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 nor can cease to be
what it is.
Even supposing Real-Beings [such as soul] to be produced by some other
principle, they are certainly not made from Matter; or, if they were,
the creating principle must infuse into them, from within itself,
something of the nature of Real-Being; but, at this, it would itself
suffer change, as it created more or less. And, after all, why should
it thus produce at any given moment rather than remain for ever
stationary?
Moreover the produced total, variable from more to less, could not be
an eternal: yet the soul, it stands agreed, is eternal.
But what becomes of the soul's infinity if it is thus fixed?
The infinity is a matter of power: there is question, not of the soul's
being divisible into an infinite number of parts, but of an infinite
possible effectiveness: it is infinity in the sense in which the
Supreme God, also, is free of all bound.
This means that it is no external limit that defines the individual
being or the extension of souls any more than of God; on the contrary
each in right of its own power is all that it chooses to be: and we are
not to think of it as going forth from itself [losing its unity by any
partition]: the fact is simply that the element within it, which is apt
to entrance into body, has the power of immediate projection any
whither: the soul is certainly not wrenched asunder by its presence at
once in foot and in finger. Its presence in the All is similarly
unbroken; over its entire range it exists in every several part of
everything having even vegetal life, even in a part cut off from the
main; in any possible segment it is as it is at its source. For the
body of the All is a unit, and soul is everywhere present to it as to
one thing.
When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the
Life-Principle now present is not the particular soul that was in the
larger body; that body has ceased to be receptive of soul, or there
would have been no death; what happens is that whatsoever in the
product of the decay is apt material for animal existence of one kind
or another becomes ensouled by the fact that soul is nowhere lacking,
though a recipient of soul may be. This new ensouling does not mean,
however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one
or, rather, all remains one: it is as with ourselves; some elements are
shed, others grow in their place; the soul abandons the discarded and
flows into the newcoming as long as the one soul of the man holds its
ground; in the All the one soul holds its ground for ever; its distinct
contents now retain soul and now reject it, but the total of spiritual
beings is unaffected.
9. But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body -- the manner
and the process -- a question certainly of no minor interest.
The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms.
Firstly, there is the entry -- metensomatosis -- of a soul present in
body by change from one [wholly material] frame to another or the entry
-- not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier
habitacle is not certainly definable -- of a soul leaving an aerial or
fiery body for one of earth.
Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of
body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul,
and this entry especially demands investigation.
What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from
body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature?
It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All.
Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use
such words as "entry" and "ensoulment," though never was this All
unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there
Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is
nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which
must in fact be co-existent.
The true doctrine may be stated as follows:
In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is
no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go
forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also,
exists.
While the Soul [as an eternal, a Divine Being] is at rest -- in rest
firmly based on Repose, the Absolute -- yet, as we may put it, that
huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the
extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness,
now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape;
for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul,
may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can
absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest.
Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never
been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he
has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that
can serve to its Being -- as far as it can share in Being -- or to its
beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends,
but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the
kosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present
to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul
bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing.
The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it
stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the
sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope,
for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so
far-reaching a nature -- a thing unbounded -- as to embrace the entire
body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends,
there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul
would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as
broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point
at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul
to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle
proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate
a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea [the Divine
forming power] which it conveys.
10. In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the
unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.
We ascend from air, light, sun -- or, moon and light and sun -- in
detail, to these things as constituting a total -- though a total of
degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the [kosmic]
Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our
survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it.
That suite [the lower and material world] we take to be the very last
effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach.
Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the
very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate [the material
world] itself receives its share of the general light, something of the
nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay
in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the
efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this
rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in
animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in
the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of
soul's own Real-Being.
We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to
any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any
such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied
art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing
dim and feeble copies -- toys, things of no great worth -- and it is
dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be
produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things
by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and
those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later
level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short
of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle
must be aiming; in that other world [under the soul but above the
material] the entire shape [as well as the idea] comes from soul, and
all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so
that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all
that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation,
the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some
peculiar purpose.
Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its
powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a
double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within
outwards towards the new production.
In soulless entities, the outgo [natural to everything] remains
dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness
whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to
bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of
possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and
an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to
all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is
commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it
communicates reason to the body -- an image of the reason within
itself, just as the life given to the body is an image of Real-Being --
and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of
which it contains the Reason-Forms.
The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and
of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains all.
11. I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure
the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues,
showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though
this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the
more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place
especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something
reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch
an image of it.
It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content
reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it
participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a
Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle:
thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose
likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated
and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and
representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for
the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to
descend into the created.
The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that
sphere -- let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos -- and
immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul
from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of
this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the
overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates
from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises -- as far
as, through soul, anything can -- from the lower to the highest.
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
position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.
These Beings [the Reason-Principles of this sphere] are divine in
virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul
thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and
through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of
the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that
soul in which they have their being.
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 mid-part of theirs is
compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they
have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes
the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in
due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell
there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has
ever dwelt.
For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing
entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under
its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it
reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration,
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 co-ordinate place,
under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and
return of souls and to every purpose of the system.
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.
Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way:
The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression
of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable
ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as
they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens,
sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is
Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from
its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate
to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of
neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the
Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of
the lower realm, one phase [the World-Soul] maintaining the unvarying
march [of the kosmic circuit] the other [the soul of the Individual]
adopting itself to times and season.
The depth of the descent, also, will differ -- sometimes lower,
sometimes less low -- and this even in its entry into any given Kind:
all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient
indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it
There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or
animal.
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 towards the image of its primal choice and constitution.
In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image [the
thing in the world of copy] to which its individual constitution
inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender or leader acting at
the right moment to bring it at the right moment whether into body or
into a definitely appropriate body: of its own motion it descends at
the precisely true time and enters where it must. To every Soul its own
hour; when that strikes it descends and enters the body suitable to it
as at the cry of a herald; thus all is set stirring and advancing as by
a magician's power or by some mighty traction; it is much as, in any
living thing, the soul itself effects the fulfillment of the natural
career, stirring and bringing forth, in due season, every element --
beard, horn, and all the successive stages of tendency and of output --
or, as it leads a tree through its normal course within set periods.
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 Intellectual-Principle, 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 within.
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
Intellectual-Principles 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 fore-thinking power. As
for the rejection of Prometheus' gift by after-thought, 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 that there is power in Prometheus, so
that he need not remain in bonds.
Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the
bestowal of gifts upon the kosmos as harmonizes with our explanation of
the universal system.
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
carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness.
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 combinations of them.
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
self-mastery 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
Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the kosmos, out of
soul-movements 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 by all appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt.
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 all in accordance with the
right.
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 cause in the general reason: are they therefore to
be charged to past misdoing?
No: such misfortunes do not answer to reasons established in the nature
of things; they are not laid up in the master-facts 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 doubt, that
nothing is unjust that finds justification in a past history.
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 Reason-Principle and a single set scheme, we must
admit that the minor equally with the major is fitted into that order
and pattern.
Wrong-doing 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, lacking light of its own, must borrow.
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 self-centred; 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 storm-tossed 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 All-perfect,
self-sufficing, in peril from no outside influence the soul now spoken
of as indwelling would not occupy the body; it would infuse life while
clinging, entire, within the Supreme.
18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether
the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it
has left the body.
Reasoning is for this sphere; it is the act of the soul fallen into
perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength: the need of
deliberation goes with the less self-sufficing intelligence; craftsmen
faced by a difficulty stop to consider; where there is no problem their
art works on by its own forthright power.
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 Intellectual-Principle 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 [= Beings].
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 becoming partible, not as being so once for all.
"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 non-transmitting] that divisibility in the sensitive agent will be
a condition of all other sensations, though in less degree than in the
case of touch. Similarly the vegetative function in the soul, with that
of growth, indicates divisibility; and, admitting such locations as
that of desire at the liver and emotional activity at the heart, we
have the same result. It is to be noted, however, as regards these [the
less corporeal] sensations, that the body may possibly not experience
them as a fact of the conjoint thing but in another mode, as rising
within some one of the elements of which it has been participant [as
inherent, purely, in some phase of the associated soul]: reasoning and
the act of the intellect, for instance, are not vested in the body;
their task is not accomplished by means of the body which in fact is
detrimental to any thinking on which it is allowed to intrude.
Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the
divisible; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole
consisting of parts, each part a self-standing thing having its own
peculiar virtue. None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible
in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power,
then this one same thing [the soul in body] may be at once indivisible
and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its
own divisible self with, in addition, the quality that it derives from
above itself.
20. Here a question rises to which we must find an answer: whether
these and the other powers which we call "parts" of the Soul are
situated, all, in place; or whether some have place and standpoint,
others not; or whether again none are situated in place.
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 contained
than containing.
Neither is it in body as in some vessel: whether as vessel or as place
of location, the body would remain, in itself, unensouled. If we are to
think of some passing-over from the soul -- that self-gathered thing --
to the containing vessel, then soul is diminished by just as much as
the vessel takes.
Space, again, in the strict sense is unembodied, and is not, itself,
body; why, then, should it need soul?
Besides [if the soul were contained as in space] contact would be only
at the surface of the body, not throughout the entire mass.
Many other considerations equally refute the notion that the soul is in
body as [an object] in space; for example, this space would be shifted
with every movement, and a thing itself would carry its own space
about.
Of course if by space we understand the interval separating objects, it
is still less possible that the soul be in body as in space: such a
separating interval must be a void; but body is not a void; the void
must be that in which body is placed; body [not soul] will be in the
void.
Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum: anything in a
substratum is a condition affecting that -- a colour, a form -- but the
soul is a separate existence.
Nor is it present as a part in the whole; soul is no part of body. If
we are asked to think of soul as a part in the living total we are
faced with the old difficulty: How it is in that whole. It is certainly
not there as the wine is in the wine jar, or as the jar in the jar, or
as some absolute is self-present.
Nor can the presence be that of a whole in its part: It would be absurd
to think of the soul as a total of which the body should represent the
parts.
It is not present as Form is in Matter; for the Form as in Matter is
inseparable and, further, is something superimposed upon an already
existent thing; soul, on the contrary, is that which engenders the Form
residing within the Matter and therefore is not the Form. If the
reference is not to the Form actually present, but to Form as a thing
existing apart from all formed objects, it is hard to see how such an
entity has found its way into body, and at any rate this makes the soul
separable.
How comes it then that everyone speaks of soul as being in body?
Because the soul is not seen and the body is: we perceive the body, and
by its movement and sensation we understand that it is ensouled, and we
say that it possesses a soul; to speak of residence is a natural
sequence. If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating
throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full force to the
very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in body; we
would say the minor was within the major, the contained within the
container, the fleeting within the perdurable.
21. What does all this come to? What answer do we give to him who, with
no opinion of his own to assert, asks us to explain this presence? And
what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of
presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase?
Of the modes currently accepted for the presence of one thing in
another, none really meets the case of the soul's relation to the body.
Thus we are given as a parallel the steersman in the ship; this serves
adequately to indicate that the soul is potentially separable, but the
mode of presence, which is what we are seeking, it does not exhibit.
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 seamanship is an indwelling directive force?
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 satisfied without further
search, a closer approach.
22. May we think that the mode of the soul's presence to body is that
of the presence of light to the air?
This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates
through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable
thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit
area it is dark; under the light it is lit: we have a true parallel to
what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the light
quite as much as the light in the air.
Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body
in its soul, and not its soul in the body, and says that, while there
is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region
to which body does not enter -- certain powers, that is, with which
body has no concern. And what is true of the All-Soul is true of the
others.
There are, therefore, certain soul-powers whose presence to body must
be denied.
The phases present are those which the nature of body demands: they are
present without being resident -- either in any parts of the body or in
the body as a whole.
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 soul-faculty under which the function is performed; thus the
seeing faculty acts through the eyes, the hearing faculty through the
ears, the tasting faculty through the tongue, the faculty of smelling
through the nostrils, and the faculty of sentient touch is present
throughout, since in this particular form of perception the entire body
is an instrument in the soul's service.
The vehicles of touch are mainly centred in the nerves -- which
moreover are vehicles of the faculty by which the movements of the
living being are affected -- in them the soul-faculty concerned makes
itself present; the nerves start from the brain. The brain therefore
has been considered as the centre and seat of the principle which
determines feeling and impulse and the entire act of the organism as a
living thing; where the instruments are found to be linked, there the
operating faculty is assumed to be situated. But it would be wiser to
say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating
faculty: the power to be exercised by the operator -- in keeping with
the particular instrument -- must be considered as concentrated at the
point at which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the
soul's faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the
point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act.
Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the
sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the Reason-Principle
immediately above itself; downward, it is in contact with an inferior
of its own: on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being
was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat; they lodged it in
the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which
is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the
brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to body --
at the point most receptive of the act of reason -- while something,
utterly isolated from body must be in contact with that superior thing
which is a form of soul [and not merely of the vegetative or other
quasi-corporeal forms but] of that soul apt to the appropriation of the
perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle.
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 well-spring, the place where
such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the
ebullition of the passionate nature.
24. Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it
go?
It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for
it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to
hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing
within itself something of that which lures it.
If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with
increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that element naturally
belongs and tends.
The space open to the soul's resort is vast and diverse; the difference
will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the
justice reigning in things. No one can ever escape the suffering
entailed by ill deeds done: the divine law is ineluctable, carrying
bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The
sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always
by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by
that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by
self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law
decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it
carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of
rising from those places of pain -- all by power of the harmony that
maintains the universal scheme.
Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer
drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their
very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of
body -- there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the
Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be.
If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are -- and in
your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one
seeking for body.
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 or merely for some period not very long after
their withdrawal.
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 memory exists.
Now a memory has to do with something brought into ken from without,
something learned or something experienced; the Memory-Principle,
therefore, cannot belong to such beings as are immune from experience
and from time.
No memory, therefore, can be ascribed to any divine being, or to the
Authentic-Existent or the Intellectual-Principle: 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 itself, such outside changes as, for
example, the kosmic periods?
Simply the fact that following the changes of the revolving kosmos it
would have perception of earlier and later: intuition and memory are
distinct.
We cannot hold its self-intellections 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 into this sphere, they are no longer the mainstay of its Act.
The Soul-action 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 Living-Being. And if
to that dimmer soul, when and how has it come to be present; if to the
Couplement, again when and how?
We are driven thus to enquire into these several points: in which of
the constituents of our nature is memory vested -- the question with
which we started -- if in the soul, then in what power or part; if in
the Animate or Couplement -- which has been supposed, similarly to be
the seat of sensation -- then by what mode it is present, and how we
are to define the Couplement; finally whether sensation and
intellectual acts may be ascribed to one and the same agent, or imply
two distinct principles.
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 and body as the remembering principle? Here, surely,
it must be soul alone?
We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of
something entirely distinct formed from the two elements [so that it
might have memory though neither soul nor body had it]. But, to begin
with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither body nor soul;
these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can
they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the
animate whole. And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory
would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness
will be due to the honey.
It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a
remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired
some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable
of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and
that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body, it may
reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in
such a manner as to retain them [thus in some sense possessing memory].
But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes [are not of
corporeal nature at all]; there is no resemblance to seal impressions,
no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust
[as of the seal] nor [the acceptance] as in the wax: the process is
entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense; and
what kind of resistance [or other physical action] can be affirmed in
matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or
bodily quality as a means?
Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to
the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its
desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing
never came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things
which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means
to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know.
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 in this sense --
and memory is a fact of the soul.
27. But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by
which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All?
Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared
memories; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as
one; when they stand apart, assuming that both exist and endure, each
soon for gets the other's affairs, retaining for a longer time its own.
Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions -- this
"Shade," as I take it, being the characteristically human part --
remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career
was mainly of the hero's personal shaping; the other souls [soulphases]
going to constitute the joint-being could, for all their different
standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same life,
doings which they knew from the time of their association: perhaps they
would add also some moral judgement.
What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told:
what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would
recount?
The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and
felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the
lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being
dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive
things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of
one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded
life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will
remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will
come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.
Then free and alone at last, what will it have to remember?
The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty
of the soul memory resides.
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 object with the same
attraction?
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 distinctive names merely indicate the function which happens
to be uppermost.
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, seeing nothing, who springs to the scent
or the sound.
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 forgetfulness could not be.
29. Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make
one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance?
Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of
Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold.
[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is not
the faculty that perceives, but some other thing, then the remembering
faculty is twofold.]
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 require two separate faculties.
Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension [one covering
both sense perceptions and ideas] and assign memory in both orders to
this?
The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for
objects of sense and objects of the Intellectual-Kind; but if these
stand in definite duality, then, for all we can say or do, we are left
with two separate principles of memory; and, supposing each of the two
orders of soul to possess both principles, then we have four.
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 sense-perception 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
sense-perception, this perception becomes a mere presentment, and that
to this image-grasping 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 remains present
to the imagination.
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 image-holding 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 not -- a point this, however,
which need not detain us here.
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 image-taking faculty, of the
Reason-Principle 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
Reason-Principle the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the
image-taking faculty exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the
apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the
enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.
This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon
intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking faculty does its
intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the
perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive
but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us
receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also
sense-perceptions.
31. But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said,
possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there
must be two such faculties. Now that is all very well as long as the
two souls stand apart; but, when they are at one in us, what becomes of
the two faculties, and in which of them is the imaging faculty vested?
If each soul has its own imaging faculty the images must in all cases
be duplicated, since we cannot think that one faculty deals only with
intellectual objects, and the other with objects of sense, a
distinction which inevitably implies the co-existence in man of two
life-principles utterly unrelated.
And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what
difference is there in the souls; and how does the fact escape our
knowledge?
The answer is that, when the two souls chime each with each, the two
imaging faculties no longer stand apart; the union is dominated by the
more powerful of the faculties of the soul, and thus the image
perceived is as one: the less powerful is like a shadow attending upon
the dominant, like a minor light merging into a greater: when they are
in conflict, in discord, the minor is distinctly apart, a self-standing
thing -- though its isolation is not perceived, for the simple reason
that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation.
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 those in whom we
recognize a higher quality.
32. But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all
that the better sort of man may reasonably remember? All these, the one
[the lower man] retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for
the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from
which, however, the best of such impressions pass over to the graver
soul in the degree in which the two are in communication.
The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the
activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is itself
of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are better from
the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher.
The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy
forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower: for one
reason, there is always the possibility that the very excellence of the
lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending to keep it down by sheer
force of vitality. In any case the more urgent the intention towards
the Supreme, the more extensive will be the soul's forgetfulness,
unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that
memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with: in this world itself,
all is best when human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore,
it must be with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that
the good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity; it seeks to
escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it free
from entanglement, light-footed, self-conducted. Thus it is that even
in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting
away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. It
brings there very little of what it has gathered here; as long as it is
in the heavenly regions only, it will have more than it can retain.
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 more than Hercules, proven in the combats in which the
combatants are the wise.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (2).
1. What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the
Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence?
Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of
that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is;
failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is not there. Of things
of earth it will know nothing; it will not, for example, remember an
act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had
contemplation of the Supreme.
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 passes away, there is
no change from old to new.
This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists in that
realm -- downwards from the Supreme to the Ideas, upward from the Ideas
to the Universal and to the Supreme. Admitting that the Highest, as a
self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the
soul which has attained to the Supreme from exerting its own
characteristic Act: it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages
and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part.
But that would be in the nature of grasping a pure unity?
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
Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a
reading of this.
First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not
bring time into the soul's intuition of earlier and later among them.
There is a grading by order as well: the ordered disposition of some
growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point, but, to
one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and last than
simply that of the order.
Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is
a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how explain this
grasping first of the unity and later of the rest?
The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such
as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the soul], to
which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one
indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like its
essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple in
virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually
become all things.
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 self-possession of contemplation] in
such a way as to be identified with what is all, then by the act of
self-intellection he has the simultaneous intellection of all: in such
a case self-intuition 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 ourselves have only now been
protesting?
The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the
Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the borders of
the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change; it has, for example, its
inward advance, and obviously anything that attains position near to
something motionless does so by a change directed towards that
unchanging goal and is not itself motionless in the same degree. Nor is
it really change to turn from the self to the constituents of self or
from those constituents to the self; and in this case the contemplator
is the total; the duality has become unity.
None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the
dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own?
No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same
unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it is in
that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the
Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for
by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is
taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the
Intellectual-Principle -- but not to its own destruction: the two are
one, and two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change:
the soul, without motion [but by right of its essential being] would be
intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of
its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with
the Supreme.
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 itself.
In this self-memory a distinction is to be made; the memory dealing
with the Intellectual Realm upbears the soul, not to fall; the memory
of things here bears it downwards to this universe; the intermediate
memory dealing with the heavenly sphere holds it there too; and, in all
its memory, the thing it has in mind it is and grows to; for this
bearing-in-mind must be either intuition [i.e., knowledge with
identity] or representation by image: and the imaging in the case of
the is not a taking in of something but is vision and condition -- so
much so, that, in its very sense -- sight, it is the lower in the
degree in which it penetrates the object. Since its possession of the
total of things is not primal but secondary, it does not become all
things perfectly [in becoming identical with the All in the
Intellectual]; it is of the boundary order, situated between two
regions, and has tendency to both.
4. In that realm it has also vision, through the
Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as
not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and
therefore is no hindrance -- and, indeed, where bodily forms do
intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the
tertiaries.
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 in us?
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 with him is invisible.
Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher
spheres; it is first known in the celestial period.
A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial
and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many
other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said,
it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition
would be natural if the bodies with which those souls are vested in the
celestial must reproduce the former appearance; supposing the spherical
form [of the stars inhabited by souls in the mid-realm] means a change
of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive
quality of personality: this is not fantastic; conditions changing need
not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation,
this too would mean recognition. But those whose descent from the
Intellectual is complete, how is it with them?
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 what was formerly present to them.
But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have
turned to the sense-known kosmos, and are to fall into this sphere of
process?
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
non-being begins] there is nothing to prevent them rising once more.
6. Souls that descend, souls that change their state -- these, then,
may be said to have memory, which deals with what has come and gone;
but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to
remain unchanged?
The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the
sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by
audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. The
enquiry entails the examination and identification of acts of
understanding and of reasoning in these beings, if such acts take
place.
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, what acts of the understanding?
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 effected by methods very different.
In other words, they have seen God and they do not remember?
Ah, no: it is that they see God still and always, and that, as long as
they see, they cannot tell themselves they have had the vision; such
reminiscence is for souls that have lost it.
7. Well but can they not tell themselves that yesterday, or last year,
they moved round the earth, that they lived yesterday or at any given
moment in their lives?
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 day; series has no place; no yesterday, no
last year.
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 sense-presentation, which is already known in the
larger knowledge, that of the Universe.
I will take this point by point:
First: it is not essential that everything seen should be laid up in
the mind; for when the object is of no importance, or of no personal
concern, the sensitive faculty, stimulated by the differences in the
objects present to vision, acts without accompaniment of the will, and
is alone in entertaining the impression. The soul does not take into
its deeper recesses such differences as do not meet any of its needs,
or serve any of its purposes. Above all, when the soul's act is
directed towards another order, it must utterly reject the memory of
such things, things over and done with now, and not even taken into
knowledge when they were present.
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 in our minds.
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 All-Soul] 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 unity.
9. But Zeus -- ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor
for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into
being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come,
administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the
kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished -- would it not seem
inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have
memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities?
Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be,
must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief
in producing?
Even this matter of Zeus' memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it
is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their
number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in
time [which is not so]; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know
the number of his works.
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 in its unity not in its process.
10. The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to
us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the
appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the
principle conducting the universe.
When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must
leave out all notions of stage and progress, and recognize one
unchanging and timeless life.
But the life in the kosmos, the life which carries the leading
principle of the universe, still needs elucidation; does it operate
without calculation, without searching into what ought to be done?
Yes: for what must be stands shaped before the kosmos, and is ordered
without any setting in order: the ordered things are merely the things
that come to be; and the principle that brings them into being is Order
itself; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably
established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. It is an
unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul
which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away
from it -- and in doubt because it has turned away -- but an
unremitting soul performing an unvarying task.
The leading principle of the universe is a unity -- and one that is
sovereign without break, not sometimes dominant and sometimes
dominated. What source is there for any such multiplicity of leading
principles as might result in contest and hesitation? And this
governing unity must always desire the one thing: what could bring it
to wish now for this and now for that, to its own greater perplexing?
But observe: no perplexity need follow upon any development of this
soul essentially a unity. The All stands a multiple thing no doubt,
having parts, and parts dashing with parts, but that does not imply
that it need be in doubt as to its conduct: that soul does not take its
essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals; it
has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it
flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains
one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. To suppose it pursuing
one new object after another is to raise the question whence that
novelty comes into being; the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to
its action; its very work, the kosmos, would be the less well done by
reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail.
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 follow
not the way of the doctor but the way of Nature.
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 Reason-Principle, the concentrated
totality of things: if it were not thus all things, it would be a
wisdom of the later and partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme.
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 memory.
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
real-being? 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 all-disposers, 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 Reason-Principles 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
handlings of the external.
13. But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the
universe and the principle known as Nature?
This Wisdom is a first [within the All-Soul] while Nature is a last:
for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul,
possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle: we may imagine a thick
waxen seal, in which the imprint has penetrated to the very uttermost
film so as to show on both sides, sharp cut on the upper surface, faint
on the under. Nature, thus, does not know, it merely produces: what it
holds it passes, automatically, to its next; and this transmission to
the corporeal and material constitutes its making power: it acts as a
thing warmed, communicating to what lies in next contact to it the
principle of which it is the vehicle so as to make that also warm in
some less degree.
Nature, being thus a mere communicator, does not possess even the
imaging act. There is [within the Soul] intellection, superior to
imagination; and there is imagination standing midway between that
intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. For
Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything; imagination [the
imaging faculty] has consciousness of the external, for it enables that
which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience
encountered, while Nature's function is to engender -- of itself though
in an act derived from the active principle [of the soul].
Thus the Intellectual-Principle possesses: the Soul of the All
eternally receives from it; this is the soul's life; its consciousness
is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it; what
proceeds from it into Matter and is manifested there is Nature, with
which -- or even a little before it -- the series of real being comes
to an end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual
order and the beginnings of the imitative.
There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul,
and receives from it: soul, near to Nature but superior, operates
towards Nature but without receiving in turn; and there is the still
higher phase [the purely Intellectual] with no action whatever upon
body or upon Matter.
14. Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental
materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and
vegetable forms stand to it?
Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them?
Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light and air
remain each itself, never coalescing: is this the relation of Nature to
the formed object?
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 connecting it with Nature, the general principle.
The difference between Nature and the Wisdom described as dwelling in
the All has been sufficiently dealt with.
15. But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement:
Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the
soul -- for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity
of the soul, and springs from soul -- and, since time is a thing of
division and comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing
it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that
past must imply that even the All-Soul has memory? We repeat, identity
belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity; otherwise
there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the
activities of the soul can themselves experience change.
Can we escape by the theory that, while human souls -- receptive of
change, even to the change of imperfection and lack -- are in time, yet
the Soul of the All, as the author of time, is itself timeless? But if
it is not in time, what causes it to engender time rather than
eternity?
The answer must be that the realm it engenders is not that of eternal
things but a realm of things enveloped in time: it is just as the souls
[under, or included in, the All-Soul] are not in time, but some of
their experiences and productions are. For a soul is eternal, and is
before time; and what is in time is of a lower order than time itself:
time is folded around what is in time exactly as -- we read -- it is
folded about what is in place and in number.
16. But if in the soul thing follows thing, if there is earlier and
later in its productions, if it engenders or creates in time, then it
must be looking towards the future; and if towards the future, then
towards the past as well?
No: prior and past are in the things its produces; in itself nothing is
past; all, as we have said, is one simultaneous grouping of
Reason-Principles. In the engendered, dissimilarity is not compatible
with unity, though in the Reason-Principles supporting the engendered
such unity of dissimilars does occur -- hand and foot are in unity in
the Reason-Principle [of man], but apart in the realm of sense. Of
course, even in that ideal realm there is apartness, but in a
characteristic mode, just as in a mode, there is priority.
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 serial order?
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.
But how are Order and this orderer one and the same?
Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is
soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the
Intellectual-Principle: and because the succession is a fact of the
things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity.
The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in
complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it
still, an outspreading without interval.
The total scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a
centre, the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a
circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration: the
Intellectual-Principle possesses and has ever embraced that which is
beyond being; the soul must seek it still: the sphere of the universe,
by its possession of the soul thus aspirant, is moved to the aspiration
which falls within its own nature; this is no more than such power as
body may have, the mode of pursuit possible where the object pursued is
debarred from entrance; it is the motion of coiling about, with
ceaseless return upon the same path -- in other words, it is circuit.
17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of
the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but
that here the later of order is converted into a later of time --
bringing in all these doubts?
Is it because in us the governing and the answering principles are many
and there is no sovereign unity?
That condition; and, further, the fact that our mental acts fall into a
series according to the succession of our needs, being not
self-determined but guided by the variations of the external: thus the
will changes to meet every incident as each fresh need arises and as
the external impinges in its successive things and events.
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.
But do variations of judgement affect that very highest in us?
No: the doubt and the change of standard are of the Conjoint [of the
soul-phase 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, overwhelmed by the uproar of his
inferiors.
The lowest human type exhibits the baser nature; the man is a compost
calling to mind inferior political organization: in the mid-type 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 lower elements.
18. There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of
its own -- so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some
individuality -- or whether all it has is this Nature we have been
speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with
it.
Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in
itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air
traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the body holding
animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is
body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures
which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to
produce knowledge without emotion. By "us, the true human being" I mean
the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien
but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason:
"attached," for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is
an accessory and dependent of the human being; "we" means the
master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an "ours";
and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in
proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than
working towards detachment.
The other, the most honourable phase of our being, is what we think of
as the true man and into this we are penetrating.
Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul
alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary between
soul and body and made up of both. A unity is independent: thus body
alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt -- in its dissolution there
is no damage to the body, but merely to its unity -- and soul in
similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very
nature is immune from evil.
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 [non-material]
conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain
is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think
of as proximity.
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 finger being painful, just
as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue.
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 thus stands midway, to that
Nature we described as the corporeal.
Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and
purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter: all this
must belong to what is specifically body but chooses to be something
else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the
soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects,
to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or
warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained
untouched by life.
In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows
the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is
causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily
affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction.
Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the
sensation [the sensitive phase of the soul] and in the next lower
phase, that described as the "Nature" which carries the imprint of the
soul to the body; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is
the culmination of the less formed desire in body; sensation knows the
image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the
sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes
procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and
paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that
which subsequently entertained it.
But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the body as a
determined entity [the living total] be the sole desirer?
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 experience her own.
In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a
fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and
because of, that living body; granting or withholding belongs to
another again, the higher soul.
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 every sort of vicissitude.
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 soul-phase] refusing its co-operation 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 void; all such services touch the body
only.
22. And as regards vegetal forms? Are we to imagine beneath the leading
principle [the "Nature" phase] some sort of corporeal echo of it,
something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them?
Or are we to think that, while the earth [which nourishes them]
contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the
vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire?
The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth.
Is it one coming from the sphere of the All, a radiation upon earth
from that which Plato seems to represent as the only thing possessing
soul primarily? Or are we to go by that other passage where he
describes earth as the first and oldest of all the gods within the
scope of the heavens, and assigns to it, as to the other stars, a soul
peculiar to itself?
It is difficult to see how earth could be a god if it did not possess a
soul thus distinct: but the whole matter is obscure since Plato's
statements increase or at least do not lessen the perplexity. It is
best to begin by facing the question as a matter of reasoned
investigation.
That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the
vegetation upon it. But we see also that it produces animals; why then
should we not argue that it is itself animated? And, animated, no small
part of the All, must it not be plausible to assert that it possesses
an Intellectual-Principle by which it holds its rank as a god? If this
is true of every one of the stars, why should it not be so of the
earth, a living part of the living All? We cannot think of it as
sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one
appropriate to itself.
Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul, and the earthly
globe not? The stars are equally corporeal, and they lack the flesh,
blood, muscle, and pliant material of earth, which, besides, is of more
varied content and includes every form of body. If the earth's
immobility is urged in objection, the answer is that this refers only
to spatial movement.
But how can perception and sensation [implied in ensoulment] be
supposed to occur in the earth?
How do they occur in the stars? Feeling does not belong to fleshy
matter: soul to have perception does not require body; body, on the
contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its efficiency,
judgement [the foundation of perception] belongs to the soul which
overlooks the body, and, from what is experienced there, forms its
decisions.
But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the
earth, upon which the earth-soul is thus to form its decisions:
certainly vegetal forms, in so far as they belong to earth have no
sensation or perception: in what then, and through what, does such
sensation take place, for sensation without organs is too rash a
notion. Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul? It
could not be necessary to knowledge: surely the consciousness of wisdom
suffices to beings which have nothing to gain from sensation?
This argument is not to be accepted: it ignores the consideration that,
apart from all question of practical utility, objects of sense provide
occasion for a knowing which brings pleasure: thus we ourselves take
delight in looking upon sun, stars, sky, landscape, for their own sake.
But we will deal with this point later: for the present we ask whether
the earth has perceptions and sensations, and if so through what vital
members these would take place and by what method: this requires us to
examine certain difficulties, and above all to decide whether earth
could have sensation without organs, and whether this would be directed
to some necessary purpose even when incidentally it might bring other
results as well.
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, self-acting,
or to soul in conjunction with some other entity.
Isolated, self-acting, how is it possible? Self-acting, 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
has been so assimilated.
Now as long as it remains self-centred 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 soul-phase 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 elemental-stuff: it, thus, will exhibit the
condition which the higher principle is to perceive; and the condition
must be such as to preserve something of the originating object, and
yet not be identical with it: the essential vehicle of knowledge is an
intermediary which, as it stands between the soul and the originating
object, will, similarly, present a condition midway between the two
spheres, of sense and the intellectual-linking the extremes, receiving
from one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to
assimilate itself to each. As an instrument by which something is to
receive knowledge, it cannot be identical with either the knower or the
known: but it must be apt to likeness with both -- akin to the external
object by its power of being affected, and to the internal, the knower,
by the fact that the modification it takes becomes an idea.
If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to
sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the
soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of
sense.
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 plank, is used as an intermediary by which the
operator proves his work.
Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere: Is it
necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception is to take
place should be in contact with the organ of perception, or can the
process occur across space upon an object at a distance? Thus, is the
heat of a fire really at a distance from the flesh it warms, the
intermediate space remaining unmodified; is it possible to see colour
over a sheer blank intervening between the colour and the eye, the
organ of vision reaching to its object by its own power?
For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of
sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the body.
24. The next question is whether perception is concerned only with
need.
The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with the
body; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the body to
which the sensations are due; it must be something brought about by
association with the body.
Thus either sensation occurs in a soul compelled to follow upon bodily
states -- since every graver bodily experience reaches at last to soul
-- or sensation is a device by which a cause is dealt with before it
becomes so great as actually to injure us or even before it has begun
to make contact.
At this, sense-impressions 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 star-system, all the heavens, the kosmos entire. For it would
follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt from modification,
sense-perception would occur in every part having relation to any other
part: in a whole, however -- having relation only to itself, immune,
universally self-directed and self-possessing -- what perception could
there be?
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 self-awareness, as we have; but sense-perception,
the constant attendant of another order, it cannot have.
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 earth and the earth's
content?
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
self-contemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not
have a seeing power like that of an eye able to announce to the
All-Soul 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 self-vision 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 why such a body should be incapable
of seeing.
25. But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception
of any kind: there must be a state of the soul inclining it towards the
sphere of sense.
Now it is the soul's character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere,
and even though it were apt to sense-perception, this could not
accompany that intention towards the highest; to ourselves when
absorbed in the Intellectual, vision and the other acts of sense are in
abeyance for the time; and, in general, any special attention blurs
every other. The desire of apprehension from part to part -- a subject
examining itself -- is merely curiosity even in beings of our own
standing, and, unless for some definite purpose, is waste of energy:
and the desire to apprehend something external -- for the sake of a
pleasant sight -- is the sign of suffering or deficiency.
Smelling, tasting flavours [and such animal perceptions] may perhaps be
described as mere accessories, distractions of the soul, while seeing
and hearing would belong to the sun and the other heavenly bodies as
incidentals to their being. This would not be unreasonable if seeing
and hearing are means by which they apply themselves to their function.
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.
This seems to oblige us to accord sense-perception to the earth.
But what perception?
Why not, to begin with, that of contact-feeling, 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 not be of trifles,
but of the graver movement of things.
But why even of them?
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 or restoring of their bodily part.
But we need not demand for earth the organs by which we, ourselves,
act: not even all the animals have these; some, without ears perceive
sound.
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 everywhere good.
27. If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things -- or
retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal
principle in them -- at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is,
and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its
bestowing: this phase of the soul is immanent in the body of the
growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it
differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere
lump of material.
But does the entire body of the earth similarly receive anything from
the soul?
Yes: for we must recognize that earthly material broken off from the
main body differs from the same remaining continuously attached; thus
stones increase as long as they are embedded, and, from the moment they
are separated, stop at the size attained.
We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries
its vestige of this principle of growth, an under-phase of that entire
principle which belongs not to this or that member but to the earth as
a whole: next in order is the nature [the soul-phase], concerned with
sensation, this not interfused [like the vegetal principle] but in
contact from above: then the higher soul and the
Intellectual-Principle, constituting together the being known as Hestia
[Earth-Mind] and Demeter [Earth-Soul] -- a nomenclature indicating the
human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a
divine name and nature.
28. Thus much established, we may return on our path: we have to
discuss the seat of the passionate element in the human being.
Pleasures and pains -- the conditions, that is, not the perception of
them -- and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a
determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life: are we
entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion? Are we to
consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined body or
in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile
necessarily taking condition within a body not dead? Or are we to think
that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct
entity, so we may reason in this case -- the passionate element being
one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or
percipient faculty?
Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal,
pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire
for the satisfaction of need are present all over it -- there is
possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may
suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed -- but in
general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting
point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal
principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver
and body -- the seat, because the spring.
But in this other case, of passion, we have to settle what it is, what
form of soul it represents: does it act by communicating a lower phase
of itself to the regions round the heart, or is it set in motion by the
higher soul-phase impinging upon the Conjoint [the animate-total], or
is there, in such conditions no question of soul-phase, but simply
passion itself producing the act or state of [for example] anger?
Evidently the first point for enquiry is what passion is.
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 elsewhere.
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 body-acts in its own mode when the breach of
order has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of that ready
passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil
disclosed.
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 soul-phase 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 soul-vestige, which determines the movements of passion is of
one essence [con-substantial] 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
relation of earlier phase to derivative.
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
movements of desire as such, not to the essence from which they rise.
That essence is not, of its own nature, desire; it is, however, the
force which by consolidating itself with the active manifestation
proceeding from it makes the desire a completed thing. And that
derivative which culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought
of as a vestige-phase lodged about the heart, since the heart is not
the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the
blood which is concerned in the movements of passion.
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 together.
But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration?
The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the
corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk
into body.
No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that much is
certain; but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into its source or
is simply no longer in existence.
How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been?
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 where the colour of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is.
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 now offer anything solid to perception.
May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies that
have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total, made up of
all that is characteristic, disappears?
It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law [of
our own nature], so that what we call qualities do not actually exist
in the substances.
But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon
the composition of the body; it would no longer be the
Reason-Principles 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 bodies something very different from what appears
in the heavens.
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 as in the coming.
But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the secondary
phases follow their priors -- the derivatives their sources -- or
whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from its predecessors
and able to stand alone; in a word, whether no part of the soul is
sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously one soul
and many, and, if so, by what mode; this question, however, is treated
elsewhere.
Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of
the soul actually present in the living body: if there is truly a soul,
then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as
soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body,
as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the
case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist
without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul
living above and acting upon the remote object.
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 unseemliness even including the connections of loose
carnality.
In view of all this it is especially necessary to study the question
with which we began, that of memory in the heavenly bodies.
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 to be thought of as beneficent to man.
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
spirit-beings 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 decision upon the first questions.
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 natural.
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 our earth.
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 ascertain what these arts come to
and what kind of power lies in them.
On all these points, in so far as they bear on our present purpose, we
must do what we can to work out some approximate explanation.
It is abundantly evident that the Circuit is a cause; it modifies,
firstly, itself and its own content, and undoubtedly also it tells on
the terrestrial, not merely in accordance with bodily conditions but
also by the states of the soul it sets up; and each of its members has
an operation upon the terrestrial and in general upon all the lower.
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 the opinions universally or very generally entertained.
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 think of some other
star operating by liquid fire.
Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and
there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these
causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences
-- determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a
reigning heat or cold -- does that give us a reasonable explanation of
envy, jealously, acts of violence? Or, if it does, what, at any rate,
are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle
blood, treasure-trove?
An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from
any corporeal quality that could enter the body and soul of a living
thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of
the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be
held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is
not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs
in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars,
temple-strippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending
themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is
unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing
being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained.
32. If we can trace neither to material agencies [blind elements] nor
to any deliberate intention the influences from without which reach to
us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general,
what cause satisfactory to reason remains?
The secret is: firstly, that this All is one universally comprehensive
living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a
soul, one soul, which extends to all its members in the degree of
participant membership held by each; secondly, that every separate
thing is an integral part of this All by belonging to the total
material fabric -- unrestrictedly a part by bodily membership, while,
in so far as it has also some participation in the All. Soul, it
possesses in that degree spiritual membership as well, perfect where
participation is in the All-Soul alone, partial where there is also a
union with a lower soul.
But, with all this gradation, each several thing is affected by all
else in virtue of the common participation in the All, and to the
degree of its own participation.
This One-All, 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 the affecting cause is
dissimilar the affection is alien and unpleasant.
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 animals in their march thrusting aside or trampling
under foot the smaller.
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 Reason-Principle 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 movement make up one total dance-play.
In our dance-plays 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 dance-movement 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 serves to the plan.
Now this is the mode in which the heavenly beings [the diviner members
of the All] must be held to be causes wherever they have any action,
and, when. they do not act, to indicate.
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 co-ordinated 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 once subject and object to its own activities.
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 less absolutely at
beck and call, as not being slaves, not utterly chattels.
The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be
produced as they are, since the moving bodies are not of equal speed.
Now the movement is guided by a Reason-Principle; 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 to have a natural tendency [or receptivity] of its
own.
The truth is that the configuration of any given group means merely the
relationship of the several parts, and, changing the members, the
relationship remains the same.
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 change of power.
But what power? That of causation or of indication?
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 because it would be unseemly to suppose divine beings to
produce unseemliness.
Let us keep in mind what we have laid down:
The being we are considering is a living unity and, therefore,
necessarily self-sympathetic: it is under a law of reason, and
therefore the unfolding process of its life must be self-accordant:
that life has no haphazard, but knows only harmony and ordinance: all
the groupings follow reason: all single beings within it, all the
members of this living whole in their choral dance are under a rule of
Number.
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 Reason-Principles has brought them into
being. The groupings [within the All] are themselves in the nature of
Reason-Principles since they are the out-spacing of a living-being, its
reason-determined rhythms and conditions, and the entities thus
spaced-out 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, not contributory to the nature of the
living All.
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, but the good servant is the one whose purpose is in union with
his master's.
In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we
can but believe that though the heavenly body is intent upon the
Supreme yet -- to keep to the sun -- its warming of terrestrial things,
and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own
act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of
Nature. Each of the heavenly bodies, similarly, gives forth a power,
involuntary, by its mere radiation: all things become one entity,
grouped by this diffusion of power, and so bring about wide changes of
condition; thus the very groupings have power since their diversity
produces diverse conditions; that the grouped beings themselves have
also their efficiency is clear since they produce differently according
to the different membership of the groups.
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
which in another pass without effect.
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 ideal-quality by the action of Reason-Principles 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
Reason-Principles 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, the bodies moving through the
heavens will be most richly endowed.
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 it.
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 self-moved: 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 powers have many servitors.
37. We must not rob the universe of any factor in its being. If any of
our theorists of to-day 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 forces in
common use.
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 ignorance the efficacy vested in it.
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, not a mental act?]
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 self-moving 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 quality].
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 co-ordination 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 to us.
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
beings, an alloy from the underlying nature, something added by the
self.
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 in the
hands of the diviner beings in whom our world is participant.
39. We cannot, then, refer all that exists to Reason-Principles
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 is due to the mere interaction of existences.
No: the Reason-Principle 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 infamy earned by their
conduct; and all coalesces by a kind of automatism.
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 due to the gods.
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 unable to make the best of
what it takes.
40. But magic spells; how can their efficacy be explained?
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 spell-binding 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 love-drawing whose
practitioners, by the force of contact implant in others a new
temperament, one favouring union as being informed with love; they knit
soul to soul as they might train two separate trees towards each other.
The magician too draws on these patterns of power, and by ranging
himself also into the pattern is able tranquilly to possess himself of
these forces with whose nature and purpose he has become identified.
Supposing the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations and
invocations would no longer avail to draw up or to call down; but as
things are he operates from no outside standground, he pulls knowing
the pull of everything towards any other thing in the living system.
The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the
operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon
which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns
or tragic sounds -- for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or
wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no
question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the
performers. Similarly with regard to prayers; there is no question of a
will that grants; the powers that answer to incantations do not act by
will; a human being fascinated by a snake has neither perception nor
sensation of what is happening; he knows only after he has been caught,
and his highest mind is never caught. In other words, some influence
falls from the being addressed upon the petitioner -- or upon someone
else -- but that being itself, sun or star, perceives nothing of it
all.
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 being brought blundered in taking
it.
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 is ebb
or inflow, it is of something going unfelt and coming unawares.
43. And the Proficient [the Sage], how does he stand with regard to
magic and philtre-spells?
In the soul he is immune from magic; his reasoning part cannot be
touched by it, he cannot be perverted. But there is in him the
unreasoning element which comes from the [material] All, and in this he
can be affected, or rather this can be affected in him. Philtre-Love,
however, he will not know, for that would require the consent of the
higher soul to the trouble stiffed in the lower. And, just as the
unreasoning element responds to the call of incantation, so the adept
himself will dissolve those horrible powers by counter-incantations.
Death, disease, any experience within the material sphere, these may
result, yes; for anything that has membership in the All may be
affected by another member, or by the universe of members; but the
essential man is beyond harm.
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 that are closest
to this sphere, and in the degree of their concern about it.
For everything that looks to another is under spell to that: what we
look to, draws us magically. Only the self-intent 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, not in local contact but in the fellowship of the
philtre.
44. Contemplation alone stands untouched by magic; no man self-gathered
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 career and accomplishing its task.
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 forth-summoning 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 of life.
We may be told that no such magic underlies good action, since, at
that, Contemplation itself, certainly a good action, implies a magic
attraction.
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 non-good 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 particular functions of a living being.
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 Plato's metaphor of the puppets, draws towards the best].
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 end, and having the good hope that he will be with gods.
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 wrong-doing 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 no longer.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (3).
[ALSO ENTITLED "ON SIGHT"].
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 sense-perception can occur
only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence
of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere.
Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the
sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of
knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in
some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap.
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 illumined object?
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 substance, even of some substance capable,
itself, of being affected.
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 contact with the
eye [and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision].
Those who have made vision a forth-going act [and not an in-coming 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 intervening
substance.
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 bridge.
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 that continuity is a condition of any perception of a remote
object?
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 any universal need of intervening substance.
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 from behind to fill the
void we make.
If the severance of the air by such bodies leaves it unaffected, why
must there be any severance before the images of sight can reach us?
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 impression, what has been impressed upon itself.
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, its own and that of the air.
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 and their very shapes.
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 beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers.
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 visible with
nothing intervening.
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 power.
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 from this to
that?
To return; there is a further consideration showing that sight is not
brought about by this alleged modification of the intervenient.
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 living
being one and self-sensitive.
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, serving simply as the field over which
the vision ranges.
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
accidental that it demands proximity.
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 but is not the source of our warmth.
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 the case of contact by the agency of
an intervenient.
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 through the agency of a medium.
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.
5. But some doubt arises when we consider the phenomena of hearing.
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 similarly affected.
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 upon our sense?
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 movement successively till it reaches the ears and the sense of
hearing.
But if the determinant is the air, and the impression is simply of
air-movements, 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 difference in sounds is much
more than a matter of greater or less intensity.
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 air does not intervene.
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 co-sensitiveness 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 modified did not exist neither could be
modification.
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 container?
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 would always have its
movement.
But movement, where?
Is space, pure and simple, all that is necessary?
With unchecked motion of the light outward, the material sun will be
losing its energy, for the light is its expression.
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,
though having some operation upon any base that may be present.
Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when
anything -- the human body, for instance -- comes in its path to be
affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it
to modify: surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of
whatever luminary source there be [i.e., light, affecting things, may
be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other].
Certainly light is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which
on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that
it is no longer the brilliant reality: as reasonable to talk of some
substance being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter.
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
non-darkness; 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
self-existent in whose path the air happens to be present.
On this point we need dwell no longer; but there remains still a
question.
7. Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring: Whether light
finally perishes or simply returns to its source.
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 far-going; 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.
But has the light gone inward?
No: it is simply no longer on the outside because the fire [of which it
is the activity] is no longer outward going but has withdrawn towards
the centre.
But surely the light has gone inward too?
No: only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only
of the non-luminous body; the fire can no longer act towards the outer.
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 [inner] activity.
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 what it held when the
conditions were favourable.
So it is with the soul considered as the activity of another and prior
soul: as long as that prior retains its place, its next, which is its
activity, abides.
But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an
activity -- as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body
to be -- is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held
in material things?
No; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of
the active element [the light being alloyed with Matter]; whereas the
life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul
closely present to it.
But when the body perishes -- by the fact that nothing without part in
soul can continue in being -- when the body is perishing, no longer
supported by that primal life-giving soul, or by the presence of any
secondary phase of it, it is clear that the life-principle can no
longer remain; but does this mean that the life perishes?
No; not even it; for it, too, is an image of that first out-shining; it
is merely no longer where it was.
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 about in virtue of
the nature inherent in some one living being.
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 remain
unresponsive.
[The following passage, to nearly the end, is offered tentatively as a
possible help to the interpretation of an obscure and corrupt place.]
[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 considerations to
support it.
That every living being is self-sensitive 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 self-sensitiveness of a living
unity)?
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 self-identical 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 awareness by means of organs akin to the object.
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 objects appear not as its content but as related to its
content.
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 own propositions.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
PERCEPTION AND MEMORY.
1. Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of
as seal-impressions on soul or mind: accepting this statement, there is
one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected.
Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue
of the lingering of an impression which in fact was never made; the two
things stand or fall together; either an impression is made upon the
mind and lingers when there is remembrance, or, denying the impression,
we cannot hold that memory is its lingering. Since we reject equally
the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another
explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that
the sensible object striking upon soul or mind makes a mark upon it,
and that the retention of this mark is memory.
If we study what occurs in the case of the most vivid form of
perception, we can transfer our results to the other cases, and so
solve our problem.
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 with it:
sight can deal only with an object not inset but outlying.
2. But if perception does not go by impression, what is the process?
The mind affirms something not contained within it: this is precisely
the characteristic of a power -- not to accept impression but, within
its allotted sphere, to act.
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 known.
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 reality
it is the master, not the victim.
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 soul-essence, to read the imprints thus
appearing before it, as they reach the point at which they become
matter of its knowledge.
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 sense-objects known as from
without: they have more emphatically the character of acts; they are
acts in the stricter sense, for their origin is in the soul, and every
concept of this Intellectual order is the soul about its Act.
Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views itself as
from the outside -- while seeing the Intellectual-Principal as a unity,
and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity -- this question
is investigated elsewhere.
3. With this prologue we come to our discussion of Memory.
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 Reason-Principle of the universe, ultimate among the
Intellectual Beings -- its own essential Nature is one of the Beings of
the Intellectual Realm -- but it is the primal Reason-Principle of the
entire realm of sense.
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 sense-order 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 multitude of
subjects pass quickly over all, lingering on none.
Now, if memory were a matter of seal-impressions 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 up in those members, but to which they may be fitted
by persevering effort.
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 back to us in a flash.
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 soul-power brought to full strength?
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 sense-perception; 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
significant, the senses are dulled and so is the memory.
Sensation and memory, then, are not passivity but power.
And, once it is admitted that sensations are not impressions, the
memory of a sensation cannot consist in the retention of an impression
that was never made.
Yes: but if it is an active power of the mind, a fitness towards its
particular purpose, why does it not come at once -- and not with delay
-- to the recollection of its unchanging objects?
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 self-concentration.
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 consideration that the soul is
without magnitude.
And -- one general reflection -- it is not extraordinary that
everything concerning soul should proceed in quite other ways than
appears to people who either have never enquired, or have hastily
adopted delusive analogies from the phenomena of sense, and persist in
thinking of perception and remembrance in terms of characters inscribed
on plates or tablets; the impossibilities that beset this theory escape
those that make the soul incorporeal equally with those to whom it is
corporeal.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
THE IMMORTALITY OF 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 question will be answered here for those willing to investigate
our nature.
We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and
he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body: this
is the first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and
essential being of these two constituents.
Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for
ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out,
the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its
constituents going its own way, one part working against another,
perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are
no longer presided over by the reconciling soul.
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 to destruction.
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 thing put at our service for
a certain time, it must be in its nature passing.
The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this
Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation
be, the soul is the man.
2. But of what nature is this sovereign principle?
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 or by some more suitable
method.
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; what is this body which of
its own nature possesses soul?
Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless -- whenever soul is
in any of them, that life is borrowed -- and there are no other forms
of body than these four: even the school that believes there are has
always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life.
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 Reason-Principle into Matter, and
only from soul can a Reason-Principle come.
3. Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some
entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the
very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the
very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature
repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or
self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again,
constituents void of part could never produce body or bulk.
Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity
[disregarding the question of any constituent elements]: they will tell
us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a
self-springing life -- since matter is without quality -- but that life
is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under
Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a
real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that
constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being
[by hypothesis] outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body
would simply force us to repeat our former analysis.
If on the contrary they do not mean by this Forming-Idea 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 soul-power did not:
body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in
a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to erect some one mode of
body into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul body
would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist:
the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to
bring Matter to shape.
Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this
sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a
body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of "soul," remains air,
fleeting breath [the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, "spirit" in the
lower sense], whose very unity is not drawn from itself.
All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the kosmos
be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless
haphazard drift? This pneuma -- orderless except under soul -- how can
it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given soul, all these
material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the
kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate
objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the
things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their
ordered parts.
4. Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the
necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or form of
soul; their "pneuma" [finer-body or spirit] is intelligent, and they
speak of an "intellectual fire"; this "fire" and "spirit" they imagine
to be necessary to the existence of the higher order which they
conceive as demanding some base, though the real difficulty, under
their theory, is to find a base for material things whose only possible
base is, precisely, the powers of soul.
Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this "pneuma," what is
the import of that repeated qualification of theirs "in a certain
state," their refuge when they are compelled to recognize some acting
principle apart from body? If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands
of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this "certain state" is soul,
what follows? Either this "certain state," this shaping or
configuration of things, is a real being or it is nothing.
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
Reason-Principle, incorporeal, a separate Nature.
There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any form
of body.
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
lightens; fire has not the property of chilling or a cold body that of
warming.
Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings,
and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the
solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy
and light. If it were material, its quality -- and the colour it must
have -- would produce one invariable effect and not the variety
actually observed.
5. Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an
incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? Predilections,
reasons, they will say; that is all very well, but these already
contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to body which is one
and simplex, and, besides, is not participant in reason -- that is, not
in the sense here meant, but only as it is influenced by some principle
which confers upon it the qualities of, for instance, being warm or
cold.
Then there is growth under a time-law, 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 growth.
Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then,
if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow;
that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the
added material must be either soul or soulless body: if soul, whence
and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined [to the soul
which by hypothesis is body]; if soulless, how does such an addition
become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing
with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial
soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge
laid up before?
Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and
gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of
our material mass?
And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of
familiar things when we have no stably identical soul?
Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body, characteristically
divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being;
soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to
be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so,
for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in
virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and
quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a
quality quite independent of quantity.
What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal? Is
every part of the soul, in any one body, soul entire, soul perfectly
true to its essential being? and may the same be said of every part of
the part? If so, the magnitude makes no contribution to the soul's
essential nature, as it must if soul [as corporeal] were a definite
magnitude: it is, as body cannot be, an "all-everywhere," a complete
identity present at each and every point, the part all that the whole
is.
To deny that every part is soul is to make soul a compound from
soulless elements. Further, if a definite magnitude, the double limit
of larger or smaller, is to be imposed upon each separate soul, then
anything outside those limits is no soul.
Now, a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a twin birth or in
the animal order to a litter; there is a splitting and diverging of the
seed, every diverging part being obviously a whole: surely no honest
mind can fail to gather that a thing in which part is identical with
whole has a nature which transcends quantity, and must of necessity be
without quantity: only so could it remain identical when quantity is
filched from it, only by being indifferent to amount or extension, by
being in essence something apart. Thus the Soul and the
Reason-Principles are without quantity.
6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there
could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral
excellence, nothing of all that is noble.
There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity
enables it to grasp an object as an entirety.
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 sense-impressions appeared before a
common identity able to take the sum of all?
This there must be, as there is a centre to a circle; the
sense-impressions 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 veritable unity.
If this centre were to break into separate points -- so that the
sense-impressions fell upon the two ends of a line -- then, either it
must reknit itself to unity and identity, perhaps at the mid-point 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
experiences.
Suppose the sense-object 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 compressed to the capacity of the pupils.
Much more must this be true in the case of thoughts, partless entities
as they are, impinging upon the centre of consciousness which [to
receive them] must itself be void of part.
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 co-expansion 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 whole.
This cannot be: the faculty entire must be a unity; no such dividing is
possible; this is no matter in which we can think of equal sections
coinciding; the centre of consciousness has no such relation of
equality with any sensible object. The only possible ratio of
divisibility would be that of the number of diverse elements in the
impinging sensation: are we then to suppose that each part of the soul,
and every part of each part, will have perception? Or will the part of
the parts have none? That is impossible: every part, then, has
perception; the [hypothetical] magnitude, of soul and each part of
soul, is infinitely divisible; there will therefore be in each part an
infinite number of perceptions of the object, and therefore an
infinitude of representations of it at our centre of consciousness.
If the sentient be a material entity sensation could only be of the
order of seal-impressions struck by a ring on wax, in this case by
sensible objects on the blood or on the intervenient air.
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 cannot be a material entity.
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 semi-material
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
consciousness.
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 have no notion that the finger is in pain.
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 body.
If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul's employment of the
body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be
identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart
from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and
the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense,
intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected,
it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of
intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing
magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing
that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of
what has parts? We will be told "By some partless part." But, at this,
the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole;
one point suffices. If then it be conceded -- and it cannot be denied
-- that the primal intellections deal with objects completely
incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue
of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all
intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always
takes place by abstraction from the bodies [in which these forms
appear] and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For
assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or
point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any
kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the
material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly
it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without
magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them.
When such non-magnitudes come before the soul, it receives them by
means of its partless phase and they will take position there in
partless wise.
Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues --
moral excellence [Sophrosyne], justice, courage and so forth? All these
could be only some kind of rarefied body [pneuma], or blood in some
form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that
pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie
wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness
as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their
bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough
with the idea of rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want
with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being
comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or
pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft
around it: what could it care about a just distribution?
Then consider the objects of the soul's contemplation, virtue and the
other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal
or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then
perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there,
again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul's
contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the
concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not
bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature:
it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is
a thing of flux.
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 reflections:
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 qualities are not body.
Further: if the powers in question were bodies, then necessarily the
stronger powers would be large masses and those less efficient small
masses: but if there are large masses with small while not a few of the
smaller masses manifest great powers, then the efficiency must be
vested in something other than magnitude; efficacy, thus, belongs to
non-magnitude. Again; Matter, they tell us, remains unchanged as long
as it is body, but produces variety upon accepting qualities; is not
this proof enough that the entrants [with whose arrival the changes
happen] are Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order?
They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer
present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are
many other things of which none could possibly be soul: and neither
pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being; but soul is.
8. B. (10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire body-mass,
still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord
with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing.
Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its
efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the bodies;
it could but be latent; it will have lost that by which it is soul,
just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears: we
have, thus, no soul.
Two bodies [i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human body] are
blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one
is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the
whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture:
the one body thus inblended can have left in the other nothing
undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable
portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the
incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point -- an
impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater;
still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout. Now if,
thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided
material anywhere, the division of the body concerned must have been a
division into (geometrical) points: an impossibility. The division is
an infinite series -- any material particle may be cut in two -- and
the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual.
Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole.
But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.
8. C. (11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form,
one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into
soul by growing finer under that new condition. This is absurd at the
start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has
been tempered by cold: still that is the theory -- the soul has an
earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external
accidents. Thus these teachers make the inferior precede the higher,
and before that inferior they put something still lower, their
"Habitude." It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and
has sprung from the soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of
the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and
always the later inferior, as the system actually stands.
If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle -- as later,
engendered and deriving intellection from without -- soul and intellect
and God may prove to have no existence: this would follow if a
potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual,
unless the corresponding actuality exists. And what could lead it
onward if there were no separate being in previous actuality? Even on
the absurd supposition that the potentially existent brings itself to
actuality, it must be looking to some Term, and that must be no
potentiality but actual.
No doubt the eternally self-identical may have potentiality and be
self-led to self-realization, but even in this case the being
considered as actualized is of higher order than the being considered
as merely capable of actualization and moving towards a desired Term.
Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body,
and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle and Soul
precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of
body.
These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have
been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a body.
8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it
something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to it, for
example a harmony or accord?
The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with
some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre.
When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the
strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our body is
formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend
produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing
upon the bodily total.
That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The
soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul
rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could
not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due
blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials which constitute our
frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering
as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its
own accord or note], so that there would be many souls to each person.
Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul
to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument,
there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his
own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical
strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune.
Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered becomes
orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul, soul
itself owes its substantial existence to order -- which is self-caused.
Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that of Wholes could this
be true. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or accord.
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 organic body having the potentiality of life.
Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the
body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will
follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with
it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go
with it. Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which
it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep
cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul
is an Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to
the desires; the total [of body and Entelechy-Soul] must have
one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal
contradiction. Sense-perception might occur; but intellection would be
impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to
introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe
immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy -- if the
word is to be used at all -- in some other mode.
Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of
absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for
otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images,
and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the
perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy
inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing
not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from body;
this also is no inseparable Entelechy.
There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the
possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable
Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every
growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place
at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the
vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at
that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an
inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant's development the
life-principle is situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes
from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why
should it not pass outside altogether?
An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present
partwise in the partible body?
An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another:
how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul
were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet that this transference
does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis.
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 capacity, by participating in what
authentically is.
9. (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is
self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes
away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things
never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining
principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its
maintenance and its ordered system to the soul.
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, being essentially innate, can never fail.
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 coming to be nor passing away.
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 self-gathered: 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 turning its tendency back to its own.
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 step and begin with working
out the nature of our own soul.
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 identical
substance.
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 immortality.
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 Intellectual-Principle
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 truth upon all that stands within that realm of
the divine.
Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word "Farewell: I am to you
an immortal God," for he has ascended to the Supreme, and is all one
strain to enter into likeness with it.
If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then,
too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic
knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself
that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of
its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp
of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal
state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to
purity.
Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all
that kept it in self-ignorance 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 self-springing and therefore not to
be destroyed?
This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in
the mode of the heat in fire -- for if heat is characteristic of the
fire proper, it certainly is adventitious to the Matter underlying the
fire; or fire, too, would be everlasting -- it is not in any such mode
that the soul has life: this is no case of a Matter underlying and a
life brought into that Matter and making it into soul [as heat comes
into matter and makes it fire].
Either life is Essential Reality, and therefore self-living -- 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 accepting death.
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 itself the opposite of the life which it conveys.
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 self-living, each touches the
same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of the
celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking to win to
what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the primal source.
Again: the soul's understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the
visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is
reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and
drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal.
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 fragmentary.
No: the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity.
May not it change and so come to destruction?
No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying
substance: and that could not happen to anything except a compound.
If it can be destroyed in no such ways, it is necessarily
indestructible.
13. (18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of
the Intellectual?
There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the
intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this,
knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm.
But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired
appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step
outward; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it
has seen in the Intellectual-Principle: pregnant by those Beings, and
in pain to the birth, it is eager to make, to create. In this new zest
it strains towards the realm of sense: thus, while this primal soul in
union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it
is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its
concern: yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself
to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is
not wholly and exclusively held by body: it is still in possession of
the unembodied; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. As
a whole it is partly in body, partly outside: it has plunged from among
the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been
an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself
remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the
universe with beauty and penetrant order -- immortal mind, eternal in
its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul.
14. (19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the
degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if
there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible
origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of
life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order.
All have sprung from one source, all have life as their own, all are
incorporeal, indivisible, all are real-beings.
If we are told that man's soul being tripartite must as a compound
entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their
emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at birth, all
that increment which the others will long retain.
But even that inferior phase thus laid aside will not be destroyed as
long as its source continues to exist, for nothing from the realm of
real being shall pass away.
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, make clear, as well,
that the other souls, too, have not ceased to be.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
THE SOUL'S DESCENT INTO BODY.
1. Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself;
becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a
marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the
loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the
divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised
above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet,
there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and
after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I
can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body,
the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown
itself to be.
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 sought for himself and found.
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 case, versification
has some part in the obscurity.
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.
What do we learn from this philosopher?
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 Realm.
In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry
to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul after it
has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities
driving other souls down to this order.
In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at
body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the
kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given
by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things
might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned
to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a reason,
then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God: in the
same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe
may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual
should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the
realm of sense.
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 control it.
No doubt the individual body -- though in all cases appropriately
placed within the universe -- is of itself in a state of dissolution,
always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome
forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always
gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but
the body inhabited by the World-Soul -- complete, competent,
self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature -- this needs
no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is
undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable
neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.
This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association
with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty
ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does
not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of
servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of
the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no
hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not
every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from
its own sure standing in the highest.
The soul's care for the universe takes two forms: there is the
supervising of the entire system, brought to order by deedless command
in a kindly presidence, and there is that over the individual, implying
direct action, the hand to the task, one might say, in immediate
contact: in the second kind of care the agent absorbs much of the
nature of its object.
Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul's
method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with
penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no longer be charged
with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been deprived of its natural
standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that
rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the
course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither
failing ever nor ever beginning.
Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as
the All to the material forms within it -- for these starry bodies are
declared to be members of the soul's circuit -- we are given to
understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of
transcendence and immunity that becomes them.
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 not calling upon act.
3. The Human Soul, next;
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 the human Soul has not been
due to the same causes [as that of the All-Soul.]
All that is Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle 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 Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made: there is the
Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living organism
contains potentially all the other forms; and there are the forms thus
potentially included now realized as individuals. We may think of it as
a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms
of life; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those
lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living quality:
or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the
great fire and the minor fires; yet all have the one common essence,
that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from
which the essence of the universal fire proceeds.
No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning
phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would
be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To its quality of
being intellective it adds the quality by which it attains its
particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an
Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as
everything must that exists among real beings.
It looks towards its higher and has intellection; towards itself and
conserves its peculiar being; towards its lower and orders,
administers, governs.
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 soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the
heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators
with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing
with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed
[as distinguished from the kosmos] are thus far in the one place with
their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the
universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of
standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own.
This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its
differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the
Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care,
intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one
form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring
for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things:
thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence,
it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends
to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths
it henceforth sinks far.
With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the
enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the
higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier
state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.
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, the lower dominant where
character or circumstances are less favourable.
All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he
distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as
"parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial,
they must of necessity experience birth.
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 and definite form are
eternal.
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 choice-embodiment 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 word a voluntary descent which is also voluntary.
All degeneration is no doubt involuntary, yet when it has been brought
about by an inherent tendency, that submission to the inferior may be
described as the penalty of an act.
On the other hand these experiences and actions are determined by an
external law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a being
which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve the needs of
another: hence there is no inconsistency or untruth in saying that the
soul is sent down by God; final results are always to be referred to
the starting point even across many intervening stages.
Still there is a twofold flaw: the first lies in the motive of the
Soul's descent [its audacity, its Tolma], and the second in the evil it
does when actually here: the first is punished by what the soul has
suffered by its descent: for the faults committed here, the lesser
penalty is to enter into body after body -- and soon to return -- by
judgement according to desert, the word judgement indicating a divine
ordinance; but any outrageous form of ill-doing incurs a
proportionately greater punishment administered under the surveillance
of chastising daimons.
Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier
realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of the divine:
but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to
its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if
it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by
acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is,
by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those
activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the
unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never
to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known
that suppressed and inhibited total.
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 the inner whose greatness is displayed in acts so splendid.
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 taking
the outward path; these are the beings holding the rank of souls.
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 principle
to whose grace it owes its existence.
In sum: The loveliness that is in the sense-realm 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 self-existent, the
other eternally taking its being by participation in that first, and to
the full of its power reproducing the Intellectual nature.
7. The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the
Intellectual against the sensible: better for the soul to dwell in the
Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to
participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not
being, through and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the
authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme
of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it
communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in
turn whenever -- instead of employing in its government only its
safeguarded phase -- it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst
of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with
whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by
turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered
here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the Supreme, and more
clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost
their direct antithesis. Where the faculty is incapable of knowing
without contact, the experience of evil brings the dearer perception of
Good.
The outgoing that takes place in the Intellectual-Principle is a
descent to its own downward ultimate: it cannot be a movement to the
transcendent; operating necessarily outwards from itself, wherein it
may not stay inclosed, the need and law of Nature bring it to its
extreme term, to soul -- to which it entrusts all the later stages of
being while itself turns back on its course.
The soul's operation is similar: its next lower act is this universe:
its immediate higher is the contemplation of the Authentic Existences.
To individual souls such divine operation takes place only at one of
their phases and by a temporal process when from the lower in which
they reside they turn towards the noblest; but that soul, which we know
as the All-Soul, has never entered the lower activity, but, immune from
evil, has the property of knowing its lower by inspection, while it
still cleaves continuously to the beings above itself; thus its double
task becomes possible; it takes thence and, since as soul it cannot
escape touching this sphere, it gives hither.
8. And -- if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of
a personal conviction clashing with the general view -- even our human
soul has not sunk entire; something of it is continuously in the
Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of
sense, hold the mastery, or rather be mastered here and troubled, it
keeps us blind to what the upper phase holds in contemplation.
The object of the Intellectual Act comes within our ken only when it
reaches downward to the level of sensation: for not all that occurs at
any part of the soul is immediately known to us; a thing must, for that
knowledge, be present to the total soul; thus desire locked up within
the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours
by the central faculty of perception, or by the individual choice or by
both at once. Once more, every soul has something of the lower on the
body side and something of the higher on the side of the
Intellectual-Principle.
The Soul of the All, as an entirety, governs the universe through that
part of it which leans to the body side, but since it does not exercise
a will based on calculation as we do -- but proceeds by purely
intellectual act as in the execution of an artistic conception -- its
ministrance is that of a labourless overpoising, only its lowest phase
being active upon the universe it embellishes.
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 pleasure which is its lure.
But there is always the other, that which finds no savour in passing
pleasure, but holds its own even way.
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
ARE ALL SOULS ONE?.
1. That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the
fact that it is present entire at every point of the body -- the sign
of veritable unity -- not some part of it here and another part there.
In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and
so in the forms of vegetal life the vegetal soul is entire at each
several point throughout the organism.
Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one,
and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the
several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate
items, but an omnipresent identity?
If the soul in me is a unity, why need that in the universe be
otherwise seeing that there is no longer any question of bulk or body?
And if that, too, is one soul and yours, and mine, belongs to it, then
yours and mine must also be one: and if, again, the soul of the
universe and mine depend from one soul, once more all must be one.
What then in itself is this one soul?
First we must assure ourselves of the possibility of all souls being
one as that of any given individual is.
It must, no doubt, seem strange that my soul and that of any and
everybody else should be one thing only: it might mean my feelings
being felt by someone else, my goodness another's too, my desire, his
desire, all our experience shared with each other and with the
(one-souled) universe, so that the very universe itself would feel
whatever I felt.
Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of
reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul and vegetal?
Yet if we reject that unity, the universe itself ceases to be one thing
and souls can no longer be included under any one principle.
2. Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not
enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical
thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the
identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is
stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in
any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the
transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a
hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand
as represented in the centralizing unity.
In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would
have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would
the souls feel as one.
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 sea-beasts, 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 that an identical thing may be
active here and inactive there.
We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete
negation of multiplicity -- only of the Supreme can that be affirmed --
we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in
the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of
belonging to that Order which suffers no division.
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 any operation from
ourselves upon the All there can be no certainty.
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 to some unity among us.
Again, if spells and other forms of magic are efficient even at a
distance to attract us into sympathetic relations, the agency can be no
other than the one soul.
A quiet word induces changes in a remote object, and makes itself heard
at vast distances -- proof of the oneness of all things within the one
soul.
But how reconcile this unity with the existence of a reasoning soul, an
unreasoning, even a vegetal soul?
[It is a question of powers]: the indivisible phase is classed as
reasoning because it is not in division among bodies, but there is the
later phase, divided among bodies, but still one thing and distinct
only so as to secure sense-perception throughout; this is to be classed
as yet another power; and there is the forming and making phase which
again is a power. But a variety of powers does not conflict with unity;
seed contains many powers and yet it is one thing, and from that unity
rises, again, a variety which is also a unity.
But why are not all the powers of this unity present everywhere?
The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described,
similarly, as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in
all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of
growth is at work where there is no sensation -- and yet all these
powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside.
The nourishing faculty as dependent from the All belongs also to the
All-Soul: why then does it not come equally from ours?
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 nature of the All.
4. These reflections should show that there is nothing strange in that
reduction of all souls to one. But it is still necessary to enquire
into the mode and conditions of the unity.
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 there is first one from
which the many rise.
Let us suppose, even, the first soul to be corporeal.
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 body-soul 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 ideal-form that
makes them souls, then all are, in virtue of this Idea, one.
But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed
among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not
thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be
thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity -- much as a
multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode
the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second
mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or
modification of body, we could not wonder that this quality -- this one
thing from one source -- should be present in many objects. The same
reasoning would apply if soul were an effect [or manifestation] of the
Conjoint.
We, of course, hold it to be bodiless, an essential existence.
5. How then can a multitude of essential beings be really one?
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 self-abandonment, to its
own multiplication.
It is competent thus to give and remain, because while it penetrates
all things it can never itself be sundered: this is an identity in
variety.
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 force of
sequence.
[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.
It is our feebleness that leads to doubt in these matters; the body
obscures the truth, but There all stands out clear and separate.
The Death of Marcus Aurelius
TEXT: Plotinus, The Enneads 3-4 (tr MacKenna/Page)
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