Passages similar to: The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians — The Sevenfold Soul of Man
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The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians
The Sevenfold Soul of Man (22)
V. The Human Soul The Human Soul is distinguished from the Animal Soul not only by its special aptitude for intellectual reasoning, and voluntary choice and action, but also by its consciousness of itself—of the "I am I." This distinction has been fully explained in previous chapters of this book, and need not be gone into in further detail at this place. The following paragraph, however, quoted from a writer, may prove of interest in the consideration of this phase of the general subject before us. The writer says: "Among the lower animals there is very little of what may be called Self Consciousness. In fact, the consciousness of the lowest forms of animal life is little more than mere sensation. Life in the early stages of animal life is almost automatic. The mentation there is almost entirely along subconscious lines, and the mental operations are only those which are concerned with the physical life of the animal—the satisfaction of its primitive wants. After a bit, this primitive consciousness developed into what psychologists call 'simple consciousness,' which is an awareness' of outside things, and an apprehension of them as things.' But there is no self-consciousness manifested at this point. The animal does not think of its hopes and fears, its aspirations, its plans, its thoughts, and then compare them with like thoughts of others of its kind. It cannot indulge in abstract thinking, or use symbols of thought. It simply takes things for granted and asks no questions. It does not seek to find answers to perplexing general questions, for it does not know that such questions exist. With the advent of Self-Consciousness, man begins to form a conception of the 'I'. He begins to compare himself with others, and to reason about the result thereof. He takes mental stock of himself, and draws conclusions from what he finds in his mind. He begins to think for himself, to analyze, to classify, to separate, to deduce, to form judgments. He begins to create for himself, and is no longer a mere mental automaton." Another writer has said concerning the evolution of the consciousness of man: "For some hundreds of years, upon the general plane of self-consciousness, an ascent, to the human eye gradually, but from the point of view of cosmic evolution rapid, has been made. In a race, large-brained, walking erect, gregarious, brutal, but king of all other brutes, man in appearance but not in fact, was from the highest simple consciousness born the basic human faculty, Self Consciousness, and its twin, Language. From these and what went with these, through suffering, toil, and war; through bestiality, savagery, barbarism; through slavery, greed, effort; through conquest infinite, through defeats overwhelming, through struggle unending; through ages of aimless semi-brutal existence; through subsistence on berries and roots; through the use of the casually found stone or stick; through life in deep forests, with nuts and seeds, and on the shores of waters, with mollusks, crustaceans, and fish for food; through that greatest, perhaps, of human victories, the domestication and subjugation of fire; through the invention and art of bow and arrow; through the taming of animals and the breaking of them to labor; through the long learning which led to the cultivation of the soil; through the abode brick and the building of houses therefrom; through the smelting of metals and the slow birth of the arts which rest upon these; through the slow making of alphabets and the evolution of the written word; in short, through thousands of centuries of human life, of human aspiration, of human growth, sprang the world of men and women as it stands before us and within us today with all its achievements and possessions." A writer on the subject of the evolution of the soul has well given the following words of warning: "The awakening of the intellect in man does not necessarily make him a better being. While it is true that the unfolding of a higher faculty gives an upward tendency to man, it is also true that some men are so closely wrapped in the folds of the animal sheath—so steeped in the material side of things—that the awakened intellect only tends to give them increased powers to gratify their low desires and inclinations. Man, if he chooses, may excel the beasts in bestiality—he may descend to depths of which the beast never would have thought. The beast is governed solely by instinct, and his actions, so prompted, are perfectly natural and proper, and the animal is not to be blamed for following the impulses of his nature. But man, in whom intellect has unfolded, knows that it is contrary to his highest nature to descend to the level of the beasts—yea, lower by far. He adds to the brute desires the cunning and intelligence which have come to him, and deliberately prostitutes his higher principle to the task of carrying out the magnified animal propensities. Very few animals abuse their desires—it is left for some men to do so. The higher the degree of intellect unfolded in a man, the greater the depths of low passions, appetites, and desires possible to him. He may actually create new brute desires, or rather, build edifices of his own upon the brute foundations. It is unnecessary for us to state that all occultists know that such a course will bring certain consequences in its train, which will result in the soul having to spend many weary years in retracing its steps over the backward road it has trodden. Its progress has been retarded, and it will be compelled to retravel the road to freedom, in common with the beastlike natures of undeveloped creatures whose proper state of the journey it is, having an additional burden in the shape of the horror of a consciousness of its surroundings, whereas its beast-companions have no such consciousness and suffer not therefrom. If you can imagine the feeling of a cultured, civilized man being compelled to dwell among the African Bushmen for many years, with a full recollection of his past living in civilization, you may form a faint idea of the fate in store for one who deliberately sinks his higher powers to the accomplishment of low ends and desires. But even for such a soul there is escape—in time." The Human Soul occupies a place of great trials and struggles between two conflicting forces. On the one hand is the force of the lower animal nature, striving to pull it downward into the plane of the Animal Soul and urging him to employ his newly awakened intellectual powers on the lower plane. On the other hand is the awakening forces of the higher spiritual nature, striving to draw him upward into a consciousness of his relationship to the All, and urging him to open his intellect to the inflow of the higher vibrations of spiritual consciousness and to turn his faculties to the carrying out of the dictates of the higher portion of himself.
The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence. This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives...
(7) The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's presence.
This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body.
No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate.
But the "We"? How have We Sense-Perception?
By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler elements go to make up the entire many-sided nature of Man.
The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.
And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We: before this there was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands the WE loftily presiding over the Animate.
There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being- mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul.
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...
(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 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 ; 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 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 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 .
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 o...
(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.
Chapter 4: Of the true Eternal Nature, that is, of the numberless and endless generating of the Birth of the eternal Essence, which is the Essence of all Essences; out of which were generated, born, and at length created, this World, with the Stars and Elements, and all whatsoever moves, stirs, or lives therein. The open Gate of the great Depth. (28)
Now look upon the human Life a little further, you neither see, find, nor apprehend any more by your Light than Flesh and Blood, wherein you are like...
(28) Now look upon the human Life a little further, you neither see, find, nor apprehend any more by your Light than Flesh and Blood, wherein you are like other Beasts; secondly, you find the Elements of Air and Fire which work in you, and that it is but an animal or bestial Life, for every Beast has the same in it, from whence proceeds the Lust to fill themselves, and to propagate themselves, as all Plants, Herbs, and Grass, and yet you find no true Understanding to be in all these living Creatures; for although the Stars or Constellations operate in Man, and afford him the Senses, yet they are only such Senses as belong to Nourishment and Propagation, like other Beasts.
On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (1) (14)
The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a unity and an infinity; ...
(14) But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a particular soul of the individual and how the good soul and the bad?
The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a unity and an infinity; it holds all its content as one yet with each item distinct, though not to the point of separation. Except by thus holding all its content as one-life entire, soul entire, all intelligence- it could not be infinite; since the individualities are not fenced off from each other, it remains still one thing. It was to hold life not single but infinite and yet one life, one in the sense not of an aggregate built up but of the retention of the unity in which all rose. Strictly, of course, it is a matter not of the rising of the individuals but of their being eternally what they are; in that order, as there is no beginning, so there is no apportioning except as an interpretation by the recipient. What is of that realm is the ancient and primal; the relation to it of the thing of process must be that of approach and apparent merging with always dependence.
But we ourselves, what are We?
Are we that higher or the participant newcomer, the thing of beginnings in time?
Before we had our becoming Here we existed There, men other than now, some of us gods: we were pure souls, Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, members of the Intellectual, not fenced off, not cut away, integral to that All. Even now, it is true, we are not put apart; but upon that primal Man there has intruded another, a man seeking to come into being and finding us there, for we were not outside of the universe. This other has wound himself about us, foisting himself upon the Man that each of us was at first. Then it was as if one voice sounded, one word was uttered, and from every side an ear attended and received and there was an effective hearing, possessed through and through of what was present and active upon it: now we have lost that first simplicity; we are become the dual thing, sometimes indeed no more than that later foisting, with the primal nature dormant and in a sense no longer present.
These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question, are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between soul and...
(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 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 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 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 : 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.
Chapter 14: Of the Birth and Propagation of Man. The very Secret Gate. (6)
For we have a certain Ground of this, in that our Mind can find and conceive all whatsoever is in the Spirit of this World, which no Beast can do: For...
(6) For we have a certain Ground of this, in that our Mind can find and conceive all whatsoever is in the Spirit of this World, which no Beast can do: For no Creature can conceive [further or] higher than [what is] in its own Principle, out of which its own Essences are proceeded in the Beginning: But we (that are Men) can certainly conceive [of that which is] in the Principle of God, and also [of that which is] in the anguishing Kingdom of Hell, where the Worm of our Soul in the Beginning in Adam originally is, and this no other Creature can do.
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...
(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 ; for the descent of the human Soul has not been due to the same causes
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.
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...
(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.
Some Existents remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to...
(1) Some Existents 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 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.
For man is the sole animal that is twofold. One part of him is simple: the [man] “essential,” as say the Greeks, but which we call the “form of the Di...
(2) But as to Sense and all things similar, I will set forth the whole discourse when [I explain] concerning Spirit. For man is the sole animal that is twofold. One part of him is simple: the [man] “essential,” as say the Greeks, but which we call the “form of the Divine Similitude.” He also is fourfold: that which the Greeks call “hylic,” [but] which we call “cosmic”; of which is made the corporal part, in which is vestured what we just have said is the divine in man, —in which the godhead of the Mind alone, together with its kin, that is the Pure Mind’s senses, findeth home and rest, its self with its own self, as though shut in the body’s walls.
Chapter 16: Of the noble Mind of the Understanding, Senses and Thoughts. Of the threefold Spirit and Will, and of the Tincture of the Inclination, and what is inbred in a Child in the Mother's Body [or Womb.] Of the Image of God, and of the bestial Image, and of the Image of the Abyss of Hell, and Similitude of the Devil, to be searched for, and found out in a [any] one Man. The noble Gate of the noble Virgin. And also the Gate of the Woman of this World, highly to be considered. (29)
Every Beast has a Mind, having a Will, and the five Senses therein, so that it can distinguish therein what is good or ill for it. But where remain...
(29) Every Beast has a Mind, having a Will, and the five Senses therein, so that it can distinguish therein what is good or ill for it. But where remain the Senses in the Will [that come] out of the Gates of the Deep, where the Will discovers itself [or glimmers] in the first Principle in infinitum, [infinitely,] Animal or living Creature. mOf. out of which the Understanding proceeds, so that Man can see into all Things into their Essences, how high they are graduated, whereupon follows the Distinction [or different Articulation] of the Tongue? For if a Beast had them, then it could also speak, and distinguish Voices, and speak of the Things that are in Substance [or Being,] and search into the Originality. But because it is not out of the Eternal, therefore it has no Understanding in the Light of Nature, be it never so nimble and crafty; neither does its Strength and Force avail to the lifting it up into Understanding; no, it is all in vain.
Against Those That Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to Be Evil (2)
We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, ...
(2) Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.
And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.
The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty- the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part- thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.
For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.
Since, however, of the parts of the soul, one is the leader, but the other follows, and the virtues and the vices subsist about these, and in these;...
(2) Since, however, of the parts of the soul, one is the leader, but the other follows, and the virtues and the vices subsist about these, and in these; it is evident that with respect to the virtues also, some are leaders, others are followers, and others, are composed from these. And the leaders, indeed, are such as prudence; but the followers are such as fortitude and temperance; and the composites from these, are such as justice. The passions, however, are the matter of virtue; for the virtues subsist about, and in these. But of the passions, one is voluntary, but another is involuntary. And the voluntary, indeed, is pleasure; but the involuntary is pain. Men also, who have the political virtues, give intension and remission to these, co-harmonizing the other parts of the soul, to that part which possesses reason.
But the boundary of this co-adaptation, is for intellect not to be prevented from accomplishing its proper work, either by indigence, or excess. For that which is less excellent, is co-arranged for the sake of that which is more excellent. Thus in the world, every part that is always passive, subsists for the sake of that which is always moved. And in the conjunction of animals, the female subsists for the sake of the male. For the latter sows, generating a soul; but the former alone imparts matter to that which is generated. In the soul however, the irrational subsists for the sake of the rational part. For anger and desire are co-arranged in subserviency to the first part of the soul; the former as a certain satellite, and guardian of the body; but the latter as a dispensator and provident curator of necessary wants.
But intellect being established in the highest summit of the body, and having a prospect in that which is on all sides splendid and transparent, investigates the wisdom of [real] beings. And this is the work of it according to nature, viz. having investigated, and obtained the possession [of truth] to follow those beings who are more excellent and more honorable than itself. For the knowledge of things divine and most honorable, is the principle, cause, and rule of human blessedness .
We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating. The...
(2) We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating.
The sense-principle in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance only of the external; even in any awareness of events within the body it occupies, this is still the perception of something external to a principle dealing with those bodily conditions not as within but as beneath itself.
The reasoning-principle in the Soul acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the impressions, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming impressions and adapts them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before- the act which may be described as the soul's Reminiscence.
So far as this, the efficacy of the Intellectual-Principle in the Soul certainly reaches; but is there also introversion and self-cognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the Divine Mind?
If we accord self-knowing to this phase of the soul we make it an Intellectual-Principle and will have to show what distinguishes it from its prior; if we refuse it self-knowing, all our thought brings us step by step to some principle which has this power, and we must discover what such self-knowing consists in. If, again, we do allow self-knowledge in the lower we must examine the question of degree; for if there is no difference of degree, then the reasoning principle in soul is the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed.
We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior and inferior, which it receives.
The first stage is to discover what this comprehension is.
The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of...
(3) The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between.
But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward neighbour of the soul, its prior and source.
Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself.
Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task.
In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded.
What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior.
The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is separable and...
(16) The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the Living-Being is.
On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter must be examined later on from quite other considerations than occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul.
One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in succession- man followed by horse and other animals domestic or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all- that it watches these creations acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures.
Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the entire enchainment.
No doubt the Reason-Principle covers all the action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.
Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the Reason-Principles?
To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action; they exist and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains the engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought to pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total.
All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for instance, are not as they were of old; by dint of interval and of the inevitable law, the Reason-Principles have ceded something to the characteristics of the Matter.
But:
The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence- like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc.
If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable, we are obliged to think that the Reason-Principles themselves foreknew or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.
But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the Reason-Principles, though the arts and their guiding principle do not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the work of art.
And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.
Still, by the side of the better there exists also what is less good.
Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may co-operate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe: all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good.
Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the better; so that out of the total of things- modified by Soul on the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the Reason-Principles- there is, in the end, a Unity.
By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself . T...
(8) And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself .
This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate possession: or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible- one, everywhere and always Its entire self- and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul .
Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one.
And how do we possess the Divinity?
In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul- we read- and that Soul which is divided among bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.
The first of these images is Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring- offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions.
FROM METOPUS, IN HIS TREATISE CONCERNING VIRTUE. (2)
The species however, and the parts of it, may be surveyed as follows: Since there are two parts of the soul, the rational and the irrational; the...
(2) The species however, and the parts of it, may be surveyed as follows: Since there are two parts of the soul, the rational and the irrational; the latter is divided into the irascible and appetitive. And the rational part, indeed, is that by which we judge and contemplate; but the irrational part is that by which we are impelled and desire. And of this, that which is as it were adapted to defend us, and revenge incidental molestations, is denominated the irascible part; but that which is as it were orectic of, and desires to preserve the proper constitution of the body, is the appetitive part. It is evident therefore, that the multitude of the virtues, their differences, and their peculiarities, follow conformably to these parts of the soul.
How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-forms Came Into Being: and Upon the Good (6)
It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul's perception of the sense...
(6) But how can that higher soul have sense-perception?
It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul's perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the sense-realm to the lowest extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the Reason-Principles in copy; and Man in the Intellectual-Principle contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all- not in the sense of actually living by them all but as standing in under-parallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the body, then if the second also departs- of course not losing hold on the Above- the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that.
Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher. It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials , who are of one Form with the soul that makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. For that Being into which man develops is not to be called a god; there remains the difference which distinguishes souls, all of the same race though they be. This is taking "Celestial" in the sense of Plato.
When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is giving forth the Reason-Principle- necessarily in it- of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the activity has been to the lower.