(1) We may, however, beginning from another hypothesis, demonstrate the same thing. We must admit that the corporeal parts of the universe are neither sluggish nor destitute of power, but as much as they excel our concerns in perfection, beauty, and magnitude, by so much also is the power which is present with them greater. Each, likewise, by itself is capable of effecting different things, and produces certain different energies. They are also capable of effecting things much more numerous on each other. And besides this, a certain multiform production extends to parts from wholes; partly from sympathy, through similitude of powers, and partly from the aptitude of the agent to the patient. If, therefore, certain evils and destructions happen to parts, they are salutary and good as with reference to wholes and the harmony of the universe, but to parts they introduce a necessary corruption, either from not being able to bear the energies of wholes, or from a certain other commixture and temperament of their own imbecility, or, in the third place, from the privation of symmetry in the parts to each other.

(4) Hence, through these things such a corporeal-formed division as you introduce, is demonstrated to be false. It is, indeed, especially necessary not to propose any thing of this kind; but if this should appear to you to be requisite, yet you must not think, that what is false deserves to be discussed. For such a discussion does not exhibit a copiousness of arguments; but he wearies himself in vain, who, proposing things that are false, endeavours afterwards to subvert them, as things that are not true. For how is it possible that an essence, which is of itself incorporeal, and which has nothing in common with the bodies that participate of it, should be distinguished from other things by corporeal qualities? How can that which is not locally present with bodies, be separated by corporeal places? And how can that which is not inclosed by the partible circumscriptions of subjects, be partibly detained by the parts of the world? What, also, is that which can prevent the Gods from being every where? And what can restrain their power from extending as far as to the celestial arch? For to effect this, must be the work of a more powerful cause, which is able to inclose and circumscribe them in certain parts.

(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 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.

(5) But the gifts of the unfailing Power pass on, both to men and living creatures, and plants, and the entire nature of the universe; and It empowers things united for their mutual friendship and communion, and things divided for their being each within their own sphere and limit, without confusion, and without mingling; and preserves the order and good relations of the whole, for their own proper good, and guards the undying lives of the individual angels inviolate; and the heavenly and the life-giving and astral bodies and orders without change: and makes the period of time possible to be; and disperses the revolutions of time by their progressions, and collects them together by their returns; and makes the powers of fire unquenchable, and the rills of water unfailing; and sets bounds to the aerial current, and establishes the earth upon nothing; and guards its life-giving throes from perishing; and preserves the mutual harmony and mingling of the elements without confusion, and without division; and holds together the bond of soul and body; and arouses the nourishing and growing powers of plants; and sustains the essential powers of the whole; and secures the continuance of the universe without dissolution, and bequeaths the deification Itself, by furnishing a power for this to those who are being deified. And in a word, there is absolutely no single thing which is deprived of the overruling surety and embrace of the Divine Power. For that which absolutely has no power, neither is, nor is anything, nor is there any sort of position of it whatever.

(12) To return: How is that Power present to the universe?

As a One Life.

Consider the life in any living thing; it does not reach only to some fixed point, unable to permeate the entire being; it is omnipresent. If on this again we are asked How, we appeal to the character of this power, not subject to quantity but such that though you divide it mentally for ever you still have the same power, infinite to the core; in it there is no Matter to make it grow less and less according to the measured mass.

Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it. The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give; you will always be able to move with it- better, to be in its entirety- and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before you.

But supposing you do thus "seek no further," how do you experience it?

In that you have entered into the All, no longer content with the part; you cease to think of yourself as under limit but, laying all such determination aside, you become an All. No doubt you were always that, but there has been an addition and by that addition you are diminished; for the addition was not from the realm of Being- you can add nothing to Being- but from non-Being. It is not by some admixture of non-Being that one becomes an entire, but by putting non-Being away. By the lessening of the alien in you, you increase. Cast it aside and there is the All within you; engaged in the alien, you will not find the All. Not that it has to come and so be present to you; it is you that have turned from it. And turn though you may, you have not severed yourself; it is there; you are not in some far region: still there before it, you have faced to its contrary.

It is so with the lesser gods; of many standing in their presence it is often one alone that sees them; that one alone was alone in the power to see. These are the gods who "in many guises seek our cities"; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and heaven, everywhere with God and in Him, possessing through Him their Being and the Real Beings about them, down to soul and life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which by its very lack of extension is infinite.

(2) We say, then, that Almighty God is Power, as pre-having, and super-having, every power in Himself, and as Author of every power, and producing everything as beseems a Power inflexible and unencompassed, and as being Author of the very existence of power, either the universal or particular, and as boundless in power, not only by the production of all power, but by being above all, even the self. existent Power, and by His superior power, and by His bringing into existence, ad infinitum, endless powers other than the existing powers; and by the fact that the endless powers, even when brought into existence without end, are not able to blunt the super-endless production of His power-making power; and by the unutterable and unknown, and inconceivable nature of His all-surpassing power, which, through abundance of the powerful, gives power even to weakness, and holds together and preserves the remotest of its echoes; as also we may see even with regard to the powerful insensible perception, that the super-brilliant lights reach even to obscure visions, and they say, that the loud sounds enter even into ears which are not very well adapted to the reception of sounds. For that which does not hear at all is not hearing; and that which does not see at all is not sight.

(18) The whole establishment of matter is divided into three. The strong powers which the spiritual Logos brought forth from fantasy and arrogance, he established in the first spiritual rank. Then those (powers) which these produced by their lust for power, he set in the middle area, since they are powers of ambition, so that they might exercise dominion and give commands with compulsion and force to the establishment which is beneath them. Those which came into being through envy and jealousy, and all the other offspring from dispositions of this sort, he set in a servile order controlling the extremities, commanding all those which exist and all (the realm of) generation, from whom come rapidly destroying illnesses, who eagerly desire begetting, who are something in the place where they are from and to which they will return. And therefore, he appointed over them authoritative powers, acting continuously on matter, in order that the offspring of those which exist might also exist continuously. For this is their glory.

(5) Herein lies its greatness, not in mass; mass is limited and may be whittled down to nothingness; in that order no such paring off is possible- nor, if it were, could there be any falling short. Where limitation is unthinkable, what fear can there be of absence at any point? Nowhere can that principle fail which is the unfailing, the everlasting, the undwindling; suppose it in flux and it must at some time flow to its end; since it is not in flux- and, besides , it has nowhere to flow to- it lies spread over the universe; in fact it is the universe, too great to be held by body, giving, therefore, to the material universe but little of itself, the little which that participant can take.

We may not make this principle the lesser, or if in the sense of mass we do, we must not begin to mistrust the power of that less to stretch to the greater. Of course, we have in fact no right to affirm it less or to measure the thing of magnitude against that which has none; as well talk of a doctor's skill being smaller than his body. This greatness is not to be thought of in terms of quantity; the greater and less of body have nothing to do with soul.

The nature of the greatness of soul is indicated by the fact that as the body grows, the larger mass is held by the same soul that sufficed to the smaller; it would be in many ways absurd to suppose a corresponding enlargement in the soul.

(7) That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul.

But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city.

We must recognize how different is the governance exercised by the All-Soul; the relation is not the same: it is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We lies under fetter; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps.

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset , necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle , and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.

The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life: there, the established rule commanding to permanence is sovereign; here things are like deserters kept to their own place and duty by a double bond; there is no outlet from the All, and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to bounds: all remains where from the beginning the Soul's nature appointed.

The natural movement within the plan will be injurious to anything whose natural tendency it opposes: one group will sweep bravely onward with the great total to which it is adapted; the others, not able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving to its concerted plan; midway in the march, a tortoise is intercepted; unable to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot; but if it could only range itself within the greater movement it too would suffer nothing.

(3) Such, therefore, as the truth is, such also it is requisite to unfold it to others. It must be said, then, that the maker of images neither uses the celestial circulations, nor the powers which are inherent in them, nor those powers which are naturally established about them; nor, in short, is it possible to come into contact with them. But he artificially, and not theurgically, applies himself to the last effluxions which openly proceed from the nature of them, about the last part of the universe. For these effluxions, I think, being mingled with a partial matter, are capable of being changed and transformed differently at different times. They likewise receive the transposition, from some things to others, of the powers which are in partial natures. The variety, however, of such like energies, and the composition of a multitude of material powers, are not only entirely separated from divine fabrication, but also from natural production. For nature produces her proper works collectively, and at once, and accomplishes all things by simple and incomposite energies. Hence it remains that a commixture of this kind, about the last and manifest celestial effluxion, and about the things which are moved by a celestial nature, is artificial.

(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.

(1) Now on the subject of a “Void,” —which seems to almost all a thing of vast importance,—I hold the following view. Naught is, naught could have been, naught ever will be void. For all the members of the Cosmos are completely full; so that Cosmos itself is full and [quite] complete with bodies, diverse in quality and form, possessing each its proper kind and size. And of these bodies—one’s greater than another, or another’s less than is another, by difference of strength and size. Of course, the stronger of them are more easily perceived, just as the larger [are]. The lesser ones, however, or the more minute, can scarcely be perceived, or not at all—those which we know are things [at all] by sense of touch alone. Whence many come to think they are not bodies, and that there are void spaces,—which is impossible.

(17) Therefore the eternal Word, or Heart of God, wrought thus in the dark and spiritual Matrix, which in itself, in the Originality without the Light, would be [as it were] dumb [or senseless,] and has generated a corporeal and palpable, [or comprehensible] Similitude of its Essence, in which all the Forms were brought forth out of the eternal Formation, and brought into Essence. For out of the spiritual Form, the corporeal [Form] is generated, and the eternal Word has created it by the Fiat, to stand thus. Or unknown.

(6) Thus do these organs of the world proceed, As thou perceivest now, from grade to grade; Since from above they take, and act beneath. Observe me well, how through this place I come Unto the truth thou wishest, that hereafter Thou mayst alone know how to keep the ford The power and motion of the holy spheres, As from the artisan the hammer's craft, Forth from the blessed motors must proceed. The heaven, which lights so manifold make fair, From the Intelligence profound, which turns it, The image takes, and makes of it a seal. And even as the soul within your dust Through members different and accommodated To faculties diverse expands itself,

(2) And immediately nature was divided into four parts. They became clouds that varied in their appearance. They were called hymen, afterbirth, power, and water. And the hymen and the afterbirth and the power were chaotic fires. And the mind was drawn from the midst of the darkness and the water—since the mind was in the midst of nature and the dark power—in order that the harmful waters might not cling to it. Because of this, nature was divided, according to my will, in order that the mind may return to its power, which the dark root, mixed with the mind, had taken from it. And the dark root appeared in the womb. At the division of nature the dark root separated from the dark power, which it possessed from the mind. The mind went into the midst of the power—this was the middle region of nature.

(3) And of the matter stored beneath it , the Father made of it a universal body, and packing it together made it spherical - wrapping it round the life - [a sphere] which is immortal in itself, and that doth make materiality eternal. But He, the Father, full-filled with His ideas, did sow the lives as in a cave, willing to order forth the life with every kind of living. So He with deathlessness enclosed the universal body, that matter might not wish to separate itself from body's composition, and so dissolve into its own [original] unorder. For matter, son, when it was yet incorporate , was in unorder. And it doth still retain down here this [nature of unorder] enveloping the rest of the small lives - that increase-and-decrease which men call death.

(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 .

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.

(15) But how did this intruder find entrance?

It had a certain aptitude and it grasped at that to which it was apt. In its nature it was capable of soul: but what is unfitted to receive soul entire- present entire but not for it- takes what share it may; such are the members of the animal and vegetal order. Similarly, of a significant sound, some forms of being take sound and significance together, others only the sound, the blank impact.

A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound with Reality entire; it possesses also a body; but this body is not a husk having no part in soul, not a thing that earlier lay away in the soulless; the body had its aptitude and by this draws near: now it is not body merely, but living body. By this neighboring it is enhanced with some impress of soul- not in the sense of a portion of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul entire: at once there is the ground of desire, pleasure, pain; the body of the living form that has come to be was certainly no unrelated thing.

The soul, sprung from the divine, lay self-enclosed at peace, true to its own quality; but its neighbour, in uproar through weakness, instable of its own nature and beaten upon from without, cries, at first to itself and afterwards upon the living total, spreading the disorder at large. Thus, at an assembly the Elders may sit in tranquil meditation, but an unruly populace, crying for food and casting up a host of grievances, will bring the whole gathering into ugly turmoil; when this sort of people hold their peace so that a word from a man of sense may reach them, some passable order is restored and the baser part ceases to prevail; otherwise the silence of the better allows the rabble to rule, the distracted assembly unable to take the word from above.

This is the evil of state and of council: and this is the evil of man; man includes an inner rabble- pleasures, desires, fears- and these become masters when the man, the manifold, gives them play.

But one that has reduced his rabble and gone back to the Man he was, lives to that and is that Man again, so that what he allows to the body is allowed as to something separate.

There is the man, too, that lives partly in the one allegiance and partly in the other; he is a blend of the good that is himself with the evil that is alien.

(1) We shall collect, therefore, what happens from these conclusions. For if certain invocators employ the physical or corporeal powers of the universe, an involuntary gift of energy [from these powers], and which is without vice, takes place. He, likewise, who uses this gift [sometimes] perverts it to things of a contrary nature, and to base purposes. And the gift, indeed, is moved contrarily together with the passions, and sympathetically through similitude; but he who uses the thing which is imparted, deliberately draws it, contrary to justice, to what is evil and base. And the gift, indeed, causes things which are most remote to cooperate through the one harmony of the world. But if some one understanding this to be the case should iniquitously endeavour to draw certain portions of the universe to other parts, these parts are not the cause of the evil that ensues; but the audacity of men, and the transgression of the order in the world, pervert things that are beautiful and legal. Hence neither do the Gods effect what appears to be base, but this is accomplished by the natures and bodies that proceed from them; nor do these very natures and bodies impart improbity from themselves, as it is thought they do; but they send their proper effluxions to places about the earth, for the salvation of wholes, and those who receive them transmute them by their commixture and perversion, and transfer what is given to a purpose different from that for which it was imparted. From all these particulars, therefore, it is demonstrated that a divine nature is not the cause of evils and unjust deeds.

(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 : 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 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 , 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.

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 gives the two horses 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.