Select Works of Plotinus

Section 1 asks where the affections—pleasure, distress, fear, courage, desire, aversion—are seated: in the Soul, the Soul using body, or a third entity; it names sense-perception as the starting point. Section 2 distinguishes Soul from Essential Soul, arguing that if they are one the Soul is an Ideal-Form, impassive, immortal, unreceptive of fear, courage, pain, or grief. Section 3 treats the Soul as using the body as an instrument and questions how affections pass from body to Soul, listing possible modes of combination. Section 4 examines coalescence and interweaving, comparing the Soul to light flooding a body and to axe-form on iron, and cites the reading that it is absurd to suppose the Soul weaves. Section 5 introduces the Animate and the Couplement of body and Soul, testing whether suffering, judgement, and desire are seated there. Section 6 considers powers held by a recipient and asks again where Sense-Perception is seated. Section 7 states the Couplement subsists by the Soul's presence, the Soul giving forth a light forming the Animate; it introduces the "We." Section 8 discusses relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divinity, the undivided Soul present to bodies like one face in many mirrors. Section 9 holds the Soul guiltless, evil belonging to the Couplement. Section 10 says the Couplement is part of the total We; virtues from wisdom belong to the Separate Soul, vices to the Couplement; Friendship belongs to either. Section 11 treats childhood, the mid-point, and animals possessing the Animate. Section 12 reconciles the sinless Soul with expiation, cites Glaukos and the twofold Hercules, whose shade is below and self among the gods. Section 13 asks whether We or the Soul reasons: We, by the Soul, and Intellection is twofold.

The text opens by stating that Evil haunts this world and the Soul seeks escape, which is attained through Likeness to God, explained as becoming just and holy and living by wisdom. It asks to which Divine Being Likeness is directed, considering the Soul of the Kosmos and its ruling Principle, and questions whether that Being possesses virtues such as Sophrosyne and Fortitude. It distinguishes Civic Virtues from higher virtues, arguing Likeness need not imply virtue in the Supreme, using illustrations of warmth, fire, and the material house versus the conceived house. Two modes of Likeness are distinguished. The Civic Virtues set measure to desires and produce Likeness by nearness. Plato is cited as recognizing two orders of virtue and calling all virtues purifications; purification frees the Soul from the body, yielding Wisdom, Sophrosyne, Fortitude, and Righteousness. It asks whether purification is the whole of virtue or its forerunner, and describes the Soul's alignment toward the Intellectual-Principle. The scope of purification is examined regarding passions, pleasures, pain, fear, and desire. Beyond sinlessness, the aim is to be God; when the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled. Virtue in the lofty man appears as Wisdom; the Supreme holds these as exemplars. The virtues correspond to their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle, and Likeness looks to the Gods, not to good men. The next treatise asks what discipline brings one to the Good. It names three types—metaphysician, musician, born lover—and describes converting each: the musician led from tones to Absolute Beauty, the lover from embodied form to the One Principle, the metaphysician through Mathematics and Dialectic. Dialectic is defined as the Method pronouncing on the nature and relation of things, settling in the Intellectual Kosmos, and being the precious part of Philosophy.

Section 6 states that Philosophy has several provinces but Dialectic is its precious part, drawn on as other studies use Arithmetic, and used also in Morals toward contemplation. Wisdom, the virtue induced by Dialectic, is a super-reasoning presenting all things as Universals stripped of matter. The lower virtues can exist without Dialectic only imperfectly; natural virtues precede or accompany Wisdom, and both orders ripen together. Section 1 asks whether Happiness equals Welfare and so extends to other living beings; it is granted to animals that flourish after their kind, though plants, lacking feeling, are treated separately. Section 2 argues that denying happiness to plants for lacking sensation denies it to all living things; well-being lies in the state itself, not the perception, and those requiring Reason seek a loftier well-being. Section 3 bases happiness on Life, distinguishing degrees of life; fullest life holds the Supreme Good, essential not imported, located in the Intellectual Nature. Section 4 holds that the perfect life is within human reach; the man who has realized it possesses happiness, is this perfection, seeks nothing else, and remains undisturbed when death takes his household, grief touching only the lower man. Section 5 raises objections concerning sorrows, illness, suspended consciousness, and the "Miseries of Priam," arguing the bodily part must share happiness. Section 6 replies that happiness lies in fruition of the Authentic Good, not in necessaries. Section 7 says pleasant conditions add nothing to the Sage's felicity; disasters, even loss of children or fatherland, do not lessen it. Section 8 states the Sage carries personal sufferings without pity, keeping an inner radiance like a lantern's light. Section 9 argues the Sage unconscious through sickness or magic remains happy, wisdom being Authentic-Existence, a sleepless activity. Section 10 explains this activity goes unperceived, likening the reflecting soul to a mirror.

Section 11 replies to those who say the Sage in such a state is not alive, insisting the Sage's will is set always inward, not toward external goods. Section 12 states the Sage's pleasure is not bodily or emotional but the fixed contentment where Good is present; he is ever cheerful. Section 13 holds the Sage's activities adapt to events; even in the Bull of Phalaris the Self-Gathered keeps the vision of the All-Good while the body feels torture. Section 14 argues man, especially the Sage, is not the couplement of soul and body; happiness is an Act of the Soul, and the Sage lessens the body's claims. Section 15 asserts two equally wise men have equal happiness regardless of external fortune; the Sage is fearless and drives out involuntary fear. Section 16 says true happiness is unmixed, and cites Plato that the wise man draws good from the Supreme, tending the body as a musician tends a lyre. A new treatise then asks whether Happiness increases with Time. Sections 1–10 argue Happiness is a present state, not increased by duration; memory of past pleasures adds nothing; the Gods would not be happier over time; misery's increase comes from worsening condition, not time; time is a mimic of eternity, and Authentic-Existence is measured by eternity, not time; happiness lies in the inner disposition and contemplative wisdom, not in actions, since a wicked man too may save a country. A further treatise on Beauty opens. Section 1 notes beauty in sight, sound, conduct, and virtue, and rejects the common view that beauty is symmetry. Section 2 identifies the Principle bestowing beauty as communion in Ideal-Form, matter's yielding to Reason. Section 3 describes the soul's faculty for Beauty, the architect recognizing his inner idea, and the splendour of Fire and colour.

Section 4 states that beauties loftier than sensory ones exist, seen by the soul alone; the blind cannot speak of visible grace, nor can those who never cared for noble conduct speak of virtue's beauty. Such vision brings wonderment, trouble, longing, and love; those most keenly stung are called Lovers. Section 5 calls upon these Lovers of beauty beyond sense to declare what they feel before virtuous souls. The passion is awakened by no shape or colour but by moral wisdom and the virtues. An ugly Soul—dissolute, lustful, cowardly—is described as soiled by alien matter; like gold cleared of earthy particles, the Soul cleansed of bodily desires regains beauty. Section 6 identifies virtue with purification: Sophrosyne, Courage, Magnanimity, and Wisdom. The cleansed Soul becomes like God, source of Beauty; Beauty is identified with Authentic-Existents and the Good, posed as The First. Section 7 urges ascent toward the Good, comparing the upward path to the Mysteries' purifications and entry in nakedness to behold the solitary Existence. Section 8 asks how to reach this Beauty, counseling withdrawal into oneself; it invokes the myth of one drawn into water and Odysseus fleeing Circe and Calypso; the flight is not by feet but by inner vision. Section 9 describes training this inner vision, likening the Soul to a sculptor chiselling a statue; only a beautiful, sunlike eye sees the First Beauty; the Soul ascends to the Intellectual-Principle and the Good beyond. The next Section 1 defines the Good as the Soul's natural Act, unmoved wellspring of all. Section 2 aligns the Universe toward the Good through Soul and Intellectual-Principle. Section 3 asks whether death is evil, concluding bodily life is itself evil and the Soul enters its Good through Virtue. A further Section 1 asks what Evil is and by what faculty it is known. Section 2 defines the Good and the Intellectual-Principle, stating Evil has no place among divine beings.

Section 3 argues that since Beings and the Beyond-Being are good, Evil, if it exists, must be situated in the realm of Non-Being, understood not as sheer nonexistence but as an image of Being or something more remote. Evil is characterized as measurelessness, the unbounded, the unshaped, the ever-needy. The text posits an Absolute Evil, prior to derived evil, a Kind below all form and measure, the Authentic Essence of Evil, identified as Primal Evil. Section 4 states that the bodily Kind, partaking of Matter, is evil, and asks what the evil Soul is: the Soul that serves the unreasoning phase and merges into a Matter-made body, losing measure. The perfected Soul, turned toward the Intellectual-Principle, stays pure; the fallen Soul becomes indeterminate and "sees darkness," taking Matter into itself. Section 5 argues Evil is not any lack but absolute lack, which belongs to Matter, which has Non-Being. Evil is a principle distinct from particular bad things; sickness, ugliness, and poverty are traced to Matter. Men are not the source of Evil; some overcome vice. Section 6 examines the teaching that evils exist of necessity as a contrary to good. The "flight hence" means fleeing vice, living with justice and philosophy. It discusses whether contraries entail one another and the contrariety between the divine order and the evil principle. Section 7 asks why Good's existence entails Evil's: the All is a blend of Intellectual-Principle and Necessity; Matter is the Last, having no good. Section 8 answers objectors who blame Form rather than Matter, arguing Matter masters and corrupts the Forms entering it. Section 9 discusses knowing Evil by abstraction and the eye withdrawing to see darkness. Section 10 argues Matter is evil by lacking Quality, discusses whether Evil is Privation, and describes the twofold death of Soul, "going down to Hades."

The text considers the suggestion that Vice is feebleness in the Soul, describing the vicious Soul as unstable and weak, and asks the source of this weakness. It locates the weakness not in disengaged Souls but in fallen Souls, attributing it to the presence of Matter. Matter and Soul occupy one place; Matter importunes and dulls the Soul's illumination, drawing it into generation. Thus Matter is named the cause of the Soul's weakness and evil, and is called Primal Evil. Section 12 argues that denying Evil abolishes the Good; there must be The Good, the Mingled, and the Utterly Bad. It examines what allows Evil in the Soul, naming fear, pain, and desire as accompaniments of the compounded being, and describes Evil as bound in bonds of Beauty. The Ninth Tractate, "The Reasoned Dismissal," treats the injunction not to dismiss the Soul. It states the Soul departs when the body's harmony breaks; one who contrives the body's dissolution uses violence with passion. Drugs and anticipating fate are discouraged, except under stern necessity, since standing in the other world depends on one's state at departure. The following sections address the universe's permanence. It asks why celestial bodies should have individual persistence rather than mere persistence of form, and whether their permanence rests on soul, body, or both. It answers that celestial flux is not outgoing, so the Kosmos never ages, citing fire's upward tendency and the Soul's sustaining power. Following Plato, it holds the celestial order springs directly from God, earthly life from an image flowing downward. It discusses the elements composing the stars—chiefly fire with earth for solidity—and, following Timaeus, distinguishes celestial fire, light, and earthly flame.

The text asks what mode of outflow can be conceived from a pure light remaining in the upper sphere, arguing that such a Kind does not flow downward and that no outside body—air or fire—is necessary to the heavens' permanence or circular movement; changes in earthly bodies represent a slipping-away governed by a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions. It then asks whence circular movement comes, answering: in imitation of the Intellectual-Principle, and considers whether this belongs to body or Soul, concluding the Soul moves toward itself. Fire's forthright motion, driven back at the universe's limit, takes the circular course under providence. The centre is a point of rest; the Soul exists in revolution around God to whom it clings in love. Plato is cited as attributing spheric movement to the stars. The text distinguishes lowest, sensitive, and reasoning phases of Soul. A new treatise argues that the circuit of stars indicates events to come but is not the direct cause of all that happens. It examines whether planets are ensouled or soulless, rejecting notions that stars act from malice, position, or mutual aspect, and that they cause virtue, vice, poverty, wealth, or adulteries. It discusses cold and warm emanations, naming Jupiter, the Morning-star, the Fiery Star (Mars), Saturn, Mercury, Aphrodite, and the moon's phases. It denies stars grieve or rejoice, holding them continuously serene. It affirms all things are enchained in sympathy within the All, so stars serve as signs. Soul, possessing the Thought of the First Principle, is cause of all; virtue comes from the ancient staple of the Soul, vice from the Soul's commerce with the outer world.

The text turns to the Spindle-destiny, spun by the Fates under Necessity, their Mother; per the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the Soul's essential while the stars infuse affections of pleasure, pain, and desire. It defines the "We" as a Being able to govern its sensibilities, notes God grants virtue, and describes the twofold character of each human and of the Kosmos; the remoter Soul receives no baseness from sun and stars. All follows the Highest; the All is a blend, and "the rest" is a mighty spirit. Section 10 admits signification while limiting stellar efficacy, holding the Soul brings something of its own before birth. Section 11 states what comes from the supernals degenerates. Section 12 holds horse comes by horse, man by man, the sun only contributing. Section 13 distinguishes phenomena from the Kosmic Circuit, describes Soul governing the All, soulless parts as instruments, and two classes of ensouled things, all "following upon Zeus." Section 14 treats poverty, riches, fame, power, marriages, and births, assigning each its cause. Section 15 cites Plato on lots and choice, naming Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and contrasts men who are fragments with those mastering externals. Section 16 raises which phase of Soul embodies, compares Soul to a farmer, and discusses contraries and Matter overruled toward Unity. Section 17 treats the Reason-Principles acting on Matter like force on water, the Intellectual-Principle giving to the Soul of the All, yielding imperfect creation. Section 18 holds evil makes the All complete, vice having uses, the Soul overflowing into creative puissance, the Kosmos an image continuously imaged. A new treatise then defines Matter as a base recipient of Form-Ideas, reports schools holding only bodies real or Matter incorporeal, argues no Matter exists in the Highest, and contrasts changing Matter here with the immutable Matter of the Intellectual order.

Section 4 states that the existence of the Ideal-Forms has been demonstrated elsewhere, and argues that if there are multiple forming Ideas they share a common character and hold distinguishing differences, requiring a Matter that accepts shape; since this world images an Intelligible Realm, Matter must exist there too, as a shapeless substratum underlying variety. Section 5 answers the objection that the Intellectual-Principle admits no Matter, distinguishing Divine Matter, which has intellectual life, from the Matter of the sense-sphere, a dead thing decorated; it addresses whether the Intelligible Base has eternal existence, concluding both Base and Ideas are engendered outside Time, and that differentiation, the first movement away from The First, produces Matter needing The First for determination through Return. Section 6 argues bodies require a substratum, shown by elements changing into one another and by decay and reduction (a vessel to gold to liquid), concluding basic constituents consist of Matter and Form-Idea. Section 7 refutes Empedokles, Anaxagoras, the notion "all is in all," those making the base "the infinite," and the atomists. Section 8 describes Matter as one continuous stuff without quality, incorporeal, a simplex underlying all sense-entities, receiving magnitude and shape as alien gifts. Section 9 argues existence can be conceived without magnitude, since Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle. Section 10 explains Matter is apprehended through indetermination by spurious reasoning, citing Plato, comparing the Mind before Matter to the eye before darkness. Section 11 argues extension is not required for reception, describing Matter as "the great-and-small," a phantasm identified with The Void. Section 12 states the corporeal demands magnitude, Ideas enter subjects brought to magnitude, and Matter is necessary, grasped only by a spurious mental process. Section 13 rejects making an attribute or privation the substratum, concluding Matter's distinctive character is Alienism, being merely alien.

The text raises whether boundlessness and Privation lodge in a separate substratum. Number and Reason-Principle stand outside boundlessness and bestow order; what must be brought under order, namely Matter, is itself undelimited. Matter is essentially Indefiniteness, not a recipient of it as an attribute. The Matter of the Intellectual Realm is also the Indefinite, generated by The One. Indefiniteness has two phases—archetype and image—and Matter here is more indefinite. Matter is Indeterminateness by its opposition to Reason. Section 16 states Matter is that part of Alienism opposing the Authentic Existents; it is identical with Privation. Determination entering Matter confirms rather than annuls it, as sowing brings out land's quality. Matter's evil lies in its utter destitution; it is ugliness and unredeemed evil. Intellectual Matter is Existent; lower Matter is non-existent. The next treatise distinguishes actual and potential existence. Potentiality requires a prior character with reach toward another; bronze is potentially a statue. Matter's potentiality is examined. Actualization is considered in the Intellectual Realm, where all is Act and no potentiality exists; even Matter there is Idea. Matter, potentiality of all things, is Non-Being, a phantasm, the Actualization of Non-Being, and must be defined as Potentiality only. The final treatise distinguishes Being from Reality, Reality being Being with Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference. Movement is a Reality. In the Supreme all things are one; here separation produces grades. Whiteness is constitutive in ceruse, accidental in a man. Quality is distinguished from constituents of Reality. Fire is a Reality, not qualities. Quality is a condition superadded to Reality, moveable or fixed.

The text opens with a discussion of Whiteness in a human being, classing it as an activity rather than a quality, and distinguishing Quality in the Intellectual Realm—where such characteristics remain Activities—from quality here below. It states that reason appropriates a portion of Reality to form Quality, uses the example of warmth in fire, and concludes that anything never Form but always accidental is Quality unmixed. Next, an enquiry is made into the complete transfusion of material substances: whether fluids can wholly penetrate one another. The text reports those admitting only contact, those confining coalescence to qualities, and those accepting complete transfusion, presenting arguments on volume change, air expulsion, and disintegration. The question of water becoming air is raised, then set aside. The true explanation of mixing is pursued through examples of water in wool and papyrus-pulp, concluding that the bodilessness of qualities and of Matter permits penetration without disintegration. Corporeity is then considered—whether it is a conjunction of qualities or a Reason-Principle. The text turns to vision: why distant objects appear reduced and close together, offering explanations by light concentration, form stripped of magnitude, and colour. Sound's magnitude is said to be known incidentally. The explanation by lesser angle of vision is challenged using a mountain and the sky. Finally, the text affirms The Good and The One as one identical Nature, followed by the Intellectual-Principle and Soul—three Primals only. It argues against further distinctions, states the Divine Mind thinks itself. The Soul stands in graded powers. The All-Soul imparts light unfailingly. Against those saying creation follows the Soul's fall, it answers that creation proves steadfastness, and praises this universe as a beautiful reflection.

The text argues against those who, bound to bodies and passions, claim their own soul contacts the Intelligible World yet deny the sun, heavens, and stars any communion with the Immortal Principle; it questions their element-soul pieced from the elements and their claim of another earth, identified as the Logos, and asks the origin of that pattern world (Section 5). It states their "Exiles," "Impressions," and "Repentings" are jargon, that part of their doctrine comes from Plato—punishments, underworld rivers, transmigration, and the Intellectual plurality drawn from the Timaeus, which they misunderstand into three minds; they should reduce number and honor the ancient teachers rather than insult the Greeks (Section 6). It distinguishes the All-Soul's governance from the fettered human Soul, using graft-and-stock, fire, and the tortoise trampled in a choral procession (Section 7). It affirms the Universe as a beautiful copy of the Intellectual Divinities through a double Act, and calls the stars gods, morally good (Section 8). It addresses complaints of wealth and poverty, murder, and slavery to passion, calling life a training ground, and criticizes the teaching that one is "child of God" nobler than heavens, using the thousand-cubits analogy, affirming God's care extends to the whole Universe (Section 9). It withholds fuller refutation out of regard for friends, then recounts their tenet that Soul and Sophia declined, Sophia illuminating darkness so an image formed, producing the Demiurge severed from his Mother (Section 10). It challenges how a Soul that only illuminated can be said to decline, and asks whether the image is reality or Intellection (Section 11). It questions how the image acts by memory, why fire is made first, invokes the uterine-germ analogy, attributes the Heavens to the All-Soul, and concludes the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings (Section 12).

Section 13 states that those who censure the constitution of the Kosmos fail to understand the successive order of Primals, Secondaries, and so on down to the Ultimates, and that nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First. The heavenly Spheres, though of fire, serve toward beauty and order; their action foretells coming events, and variety arises from destinies, birth moments, place, and states of Souls. Men have no right to demand that all be good. Section 14 charges that this school inscribes sacred formulas addressing the Supernal Beings, uttering spells and evocations, and claims to expel diseases—held to be Spirit-Beings—by formula. Plotinus argues disease arises from overstrain, excess, deficiency, or decay, shown by its cures, and invites the hearers to read the books and compare that school with his own philosophy of simplicity and reverence. Section 15 addresses despising the world. Two theories name the End of life: pleasure, and good and virtue. Epicurus denies Providence; the doctrine under discussion carps at Providence, scorns law, and neglects virtue entirely, saying only "Look to God" without instruction. Section 16 states that despising this Sphere and its Gods is not the way to goodness; every evil-doer began by despising the Gods. It questions whether their Providence extends here, and praises the harmony of the world. Section 17 attributes their hatred of the corporeal to a reading of Plato, and urges study of the Intellectual Sphere and All-Soul, affirming the world's beauty descends from the Firsts. Section 18 compares two dwellers in one house—one grumbling, one waiting cheerfully—and calls the Soul "Sister." A new treatise (Sections 1–3) distinguishes Authentic Being from Process regarding Cause, rejects Causelessness, reviews schools positing atoms, a first-principle, the Circuit, and interconnected causes, and argues atoms cannot explain soul or mind.

Another theory holds that one Soul permeates the Universe as cause of all things, making every phenomenon part of one determined whole; the text argues that such total determination destroys destiny itself, denies that acts and thoughts are our own, and warns that vileness must not be charged to the All. Section 5 considers the theory that events are determined by the spheric movement and heavenly bodies, cited by augury and by place-influence on plants, animals, and humans. It answers that this immolates all that is ours to the stars; the mind derives from another Principle; astrologers wrongly treat stars as causes of conditions already present in parents, and predict fortunes of parents from children's births. Section 6 states each birth follows its own Kind; stars act materially but do not bestow character or wickedness; their circuit protects the whole while serving as letters the augur reads. Section 7 rejects the one Causing-Principle acting through seminal Reason-Forms as too rigid a Necessity leaving no personal action. Section 8 places Soul, including the individual Soul, as a first-hand bodiless Cause entering an environment of secondary causes, producing compromise; nobler Souls hold against surroundings. Section 9 admits Necessity where the Soul is modified by outer forces; voluntary act occurs only when the Soul holds to its Reason-Principle. Section 10 concludes causation is of two Kinds: from the Soul and from environment; Fate is compulsion contrary to wisdom; the best is our own doing. A new discussion begins (Section 1): the Universe's structure cannot depend on chance; providence is examined. The authentic Kosmos is the Intellectual Principle's Being. Section 2 describes the lower kosmos as multiple and divided, arising by necessity, governed by Soul between Matter and Reason. Section 3 defends the Kosmos as beautiful, product of Necessity, complete; it declares itself made by a God. Section 4 explains fire, water, destruction, transmigration of Souls, wrongdoing derived from foiled effort toward the Good, and punishment following.

Section 5 states that if some Souls fail of Happiness in this Universe, the blame falls on their feebleness, not the place; poverty and sickness harm only the evil, and even vice serves the general order as a lesson and by contrast displaying the right. Evil is a falling short in good and is ineradicable. Section 6 raises the disregard of desert—the good afflicted, the wicked thriving, ruling states and abusing prisoners—and holds Providence must reach every detail. Section 7 argues one cannot demand of a mixed Kosmos the excellence of the unmingled; evil acts depend on the Souls choosing them, and the universe is one living organism. Section 8 places humanity midway between gods and beasts; the untrained who suffer at the hands of physically stronger but morally neglected men deserve their fate, as fighters not those who pray win battles. Section 9 states Providence does not reduce men to nothing but presides, rewarding the good; the perverse never strive toward good. Section 10 holds wrongdoers are agents of their own sin; Necessity is not an outer force, and men are Principles. Section 11 says the Reason-Principle wills things as they are, making graded orders like an artist varying colours or a drama including low characters. Section 12 states Souls are members of the Reason-Principle, set where their quality entitles them, not perverted. Section 13 introduces Adrasteia, retribution across past and future lives: the murderer becomes murdered, one who wrongs a woman becomes a woman wronged. Section 14 declares the Kosmos accords with the Intellectual Principle, each form sufficient. Section 15 addresses mutual destruction—animals and men devouring each other—comparing death to an actor changing costume; the Shadow, not the Soul, grieves, and all human doings are play. Socrates trifles only in the outer Socrates.

Section 16 raises questions about the place of evil, wrongdoing, sin, and misery in a world organized in good, and about blasphemy against the divine, comparing the blasphemer to an actor given an insulting part by a dramatist. It restates the Logos or Reason-Principle as neither pure Intellectual Principle nor pure Soul but a radiation from both, a Life holding measured Reason. Life is described as formative activity aiming at pattern, like a pantomimic dancer. Because the Logos communicates imperfectly, it sets part against part and produces contraries, illustrated by musical tones and by universal opposites unified in one living body; a Reason-Principle must be multiple and produce contrarieties. Section 17 develops the drama and dancer images: the wicked remain wicked, but their role is not self-planned; excuse lies with the Reason-Principle, which does not excuse them. Souls, like actors receiving masks and costumes, bring their own quality to assigned fortunes and receive punishment and reward. The Syrinx and lyre illustrate how unequal tones and Souls form one harmony; what is evil in a single Soul serves the universal system, as the executioner serves the state. Section 18 considers actors adding to the poet's words, Souls' initial inequality, and whether the Reason-Principle itself includes evil action. The following sections answer: all events good and evil are encompassed, not engendered, by the Universal Reason-Principle; unity fissures into contraries yet forms one organism. Providence is compared to a general ordering operations. Responsibility for the individual's character is examined; inequality is inevitable. Man possesses a distinctive free Principle within Providence. Major and Minor Providence weave the universal fabric. Transmigration and prior lives explain degradation. Providence permeates the Kosmos unequally; Fate governs lower grades. Evil originates in ourselves by necessity; examples include Helen's beauty affecting Paris and Idomeneus differently, and a patient following treatment.

Section 6 addresses how evil falls within seership: predictions rest on observation of the Universal Circuit, and contraries coalesce, as Shape and Matter combine in the compound living being. The Universe is such a compound; Providence reaches all that comes into being, mingled with Necessity. The Seer cannot perfectly discriminate Providence from what the substrate contributes—a prerogative of a god. The Seer reads the scriptures of Nature through correspondences; the text states that Correspondences maintain the Universe, relating inferior with inferior, superior with superior. Section 7 states that since the higher exists, the lower must also; driving evil from the All would drive out Providence. Particular things push forth from a single unmoved root, branching into multiplicity, likened to bough, foliage, and fruit; all interaction resembles that of brothers from the same parents. The next treatise's Section 1 describes the Soul generating by motion, producing sensitive faculty, Nature, and life down to the vegetable order; beyond this point production becomes lifeless, an utter Indetermination becoming body. Section 2 cites the reading "All Soul has care for the Soulless" and that Soul passes through the heavens in varying forms. In humanity graded phases collaborate; the text urges breaking away toward the Intellective and God. Those living to sense become animals of corresponding species; song-lovers become vocal animals, unreasonable kings eagles, and civic-virtuous men return as men or bees. Section 3 identifies the guiding Spirit as the Prior of the operative principle, citing "You shall yourselves choose." Section 4 discusses whether the intellective phase stays fettered to body, and whether the All's Soul withdraws; the Universe has no Sight. Section 5 treats choice and independent action, citing the Timaeus. Section 6 defines the achieved Sage, discusses the Phaedo, Souls in brute bodies, emancipated Souls, the "spindle of Necessity," and the skiff of the universe. The Love treatise's Section 1 asks what Love is, reviewing Plato, Eros's birth, two forms of aspiration, procreation in beauty, and turns toward Love the God.

The text examines the existence of Eros, supported by Theologians and Plato, and cites the Symposium account making Eros the offspring of Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Possession) at Aphrodite's birth feast. It distinguishes two Aphrodites: the heavenly, unmothered daughter of Ouranos, identified with Soul at its divinest; and the daughter of Zeus and Dione, presiding over earthly unions. The Soul, gazing toward Divine Mind, brings forth Eros as a Hypostasis and medium of vision (section 2–3). Each individual Soul, like the All-Soul, contains its own Love; there are many Aphrodites and many Loves in the All (section 4). It argues against taking Eros to mean the Universe, noting contradictions (section 5). It distinguishes Gods (immune to passion) from Celestials (subject to emotion), and states a Celestial is generated by each Soul entering the Kosmos, while pure Soul generates a God (section 6). It interprets the myth: Poros's drunkenness by Nectar, Penia's participation in the Intellectual, and Love born as a mixture of Reason and indeterminate striving, never satisfied (section 7). It identifies Zeus as the Intellectual Principle, Aphrodite as his Soul, citing the Phaedrus and Philebus, and notes Priests equate Aphrodite and Hera (section 8). Poros is the Reason-Principle entering the garden of Zeus, the Ideas streaming from Divine Mind (section 9). It explains that myths import time-distinctions; Love, born at the banquet of the gods, exists eternally, its mother Poverty being Matter (section 10). A new discussion opens on feelings: they are actions accompanied by judgement, the judgement residing in the Soul; it questions how the Soul remains immune while vice and emotions dwell in it (section 1).

The text opens by examining virtue and vice in the Soul, treating virtue as harmony and vice as a breach of harmony among the Soul's faculties, illustrated by performers in a choral dance where each sings his own part. It considers whether false judgements introduce something positive into the reasoning faculty, and compares the Soul's looking toward reason to the act of sight, which takes in no impression like a seal on wax. Memory is likewise not stored impressions; immaterial entities act without change. Timidity and daring in the initiative faculty, and loose living in the desiring faculty, are explained without any change entering the Soul. Section 3 addresses likings, aversions, sorrow, anger, pleasure, desire, and fear, locating these effects in the animated body rather than the Soul: shame is in the Soul but the body is affected in the blood; fear begins in the mind, the pallor being blood's withdrawal. It concludes the Soul remains unchanged in substance, and virtue and vice are not imported. Section 4 examines the affective phase, where affections are grouped and pleasure and pain follow; some are pivoted on judgements, such as fearing impending death. The Ideal-form is impassive; Matter is the field of desire. The vegetal principle gives growth without growing, likened to Melody plucking strings, with the musician moving the strings while the Melodic Principle stays unmoved. Section 5 explains why Philosophy is called in: representations attack the affective phase; purification is the Soul remaining alone, separation its refusal to descend. Section 6 establishes the Intellectual Essence and Authentic Existent as impassive Intellect, discusses corporeal being, and calls the Soul in body asleep. Sections 7–9 argue Matter is bodiless non-being, a phantasm like a mirror-image, never dissolved, and immune to modification, since modification comes only by contrary acting on contrary.

Section 10 argues that if Matter were susceptible of modification it would acquire something from each incoming state, and successive qualities would render the substratum something other than Matter, closing it against further incomers and making Matter destructible. The text states Matter must remain identical throughout; a thing that changes must remain within its constitutive Idea, changing only in accidents. It concludes Matter, like the Ideal Principles, is immutable because its essence is to be Matter. Section 11 cites Plato's description of Images of Real Existents "entering and passing out," addressing the mode of the Ideas' presence in Matter. It states Matter takes no increase or decrease from what enters or withdraws, and that its participation in Idea is a bare seeming, not modification; thus Matter, though essentially evil, participates without abandoning its nature. Section 12 presents Plato's conception that participation produces no compound of merged elements. It examines expressions like Matter "becoming wet, inflamed," noting the following words "taking the shape of air and of water," and distinguishes becoming fire from becoming inflamed. It rejects Matter's divisibility and destructibility, denying Matter is magnitude or body. Section 13 questions the claim that Matter slips from form, citing Plato's "receptacle and nurse of all generation," "ground," "place, base." It compares entrant Ideas to faces in a mirror and light in air, unseen. Section 14 uses the mirror analogy and the myth of Poverty and Poros to show Matter's destitution of Good; impinging Reality is flung back like an Echo, illustrated by water-vessels producing fire. Section 15 explains Matter's immutability through the analogy of a representation present in the Mind without admixture. Sections 16 and 17 discuss how an Ideal-Principle invests Matter with magnitude that never incorporates, spurious Magnitude arising from straining toward Absolute Magnitude, Matter mirroring it as Mass.

The text explains that the Ideal Principle possessing the Intellection of Magnitude urges itself outward into Matter, which lacks the Idea of Magnitude. It cannot produce horse or cow but confers a reflected semblance of Magnitude upon Matter, which wears Magnitude as a dress without changing its Kind. The Universal Soul contains the Ideal Principles in concentration, seeing them stripped of Mass, while Matter, being a shadow without Act, accepts all sent to it and serves as the Place of all things. Section 19 states that the Ideal Principles entering Matter as into a Mother affect it neither for better nor worse; their action is upon each other—Heat annuls Cold, Blackness annuls Whiteness. Matter remains unaffected; it is "Recipient and Nurse" rather than Mother, sterile and non-generative. The text cites the doctors of old showing Hermes with the generative organ active and eunuchs surrounding the All-Mother to indicate Matter's sterility. A new treatise begins on Eternity and Time, described as two separate things. The author asks what Eternity means, cautioning against identifying it with Intellectual Substance or with Repose. Eternity is defined as the Life instantaneously entire, complete, unbroken, belonging to the Authentic Existent, holding all content in an actual present Now, without past or future. It is native to that Nature, a First-Eternity with The Good. Eternity is identified with God made manifest, a life limitless. Plato's words "Eternity stable in Unity" are cited, and the phrase "He was good" of the Demiurge is discussed as indicating absence of relation to Time. Finally the author turns downward to investigate Time, noting existing explanations identify Time with Movement, a moved object, or a phenomenon of Movement.

The text argues that Movement cannot be Time, since movement takes place in Time and can rest or be intermittent while Time is continuous. It answers the objection that the Movement of the All is continuous, noting the Circuit's return path takes twice as long, and that the outermost sphere being swiftest confirms Time is not this movement; still less is Time the Kosmic Sphere itself. It then examines and rejects Time as extent or duration of Movement, as space, continuity, number, or quantity, finding these define Time circularly as "the extension of Movement in Time," and raising the problem of the extension of Rest. Section 9 examines Time as a Number or Measure belonging to Movement, testing abstract number, continuous measure, and measured movement, concluding Time is other than number measuring Movement, and that Time existed before number and before the Soul that estimates it. Section 10 rejects Time as a sequence upon Movement and states the aim is to show what Time is. Section 11 returns to Eternity as unwavering Life, and lets Time tell its own origin: it lay at rest within the Authentic Existent until the active principle, the All-Soul, stirred toward more than its present, and Time stirred with it. The Soul, likened to an uncoiling Seed, laid aside eternity, clothed itself with Time, and produced the Kosmos. Time is defined as the Life of the Soul in movement passing from stage to stage, an image of Eternity, not outside Soul. Section 12 states that if the Soul withdrew, Time would disappear; Time came into being with the All. Section 13 holds Time is primary and measured by Movement, not its measure. Plato is cited: Time is coeval with the Heavens, an image of Eternity. A walking man illustrates movement in the Soul referred to the unextended. Time is in every Soul, and all Souls are one Soul.

The text opens by proposing, as play, that all things strive after Contemplation and Vision as their end—not only reasoning beings but unreasoning animals, the Principle in growing things, and the Earth—each attaining Vision in its own degree. The speaker states that even this play is an act of Contemplation, and defers the case of Man to treat first earth and vegetation. Section 2 argues that Nature produces without hands or implements, needing only Matter to bring under Form, working through an indwelling efficacy; Nature is identified with the Reason-Principle, an Ideal-Form producing a second Reason-Principle. Section 3 holds that Nature, stationary and self-indwelling, is itself a Contemplative act; it creates because it possesses its Essence, being at once contemplation and object of contemplation. Section 4 imagines Nature answering that it prefers silence, that its products are its vision, drawn from gazing, born of its Mother the All-Soul; its Vision is silent and blurred, so its products are weak, and human beings weak in contemplation turn to action. Section 5 raises the discussion to the higher Soul, which from its fullness produces another Vision, the Kosmos; the Soul remains contemplation throughout its phases. The Charioteer of the Phaedrus gives the two horses what he has seen. Section 6 argues action is set toward contemplation; the Sage is a man made over into a Reason-Principle, inward-bent. Section 7 establishes that all Authentic Existence springs from vision and is a vision, all acts aiming at knowing; Love too is vision pursuing Ideal-Form. Section 8 concludes that in the Intellectual-Principle Knower and Known are identical by Essence; the Highest began as unity but became manifold, and this Being is limitless.

The text argues that a Being of this nature is not primal; something transcends it. Plurality is later than Unity, and the Intellectual-Principle, a number and a duality of Intellect and its object, requires a prior source of both. That source is neither Intellective nor without Intellection in the ordinary sense but is The Good, the wholly simplex, known only by what in the self resembles it, illustrated by a voice sounding over a waste. The Intellectual-Principle must mount toward its origin; the engendering Principle is more simplex than what it begets, and arguments against the One-and-All show it must be prior to all things. Section 10 names this Principle the potentiality of the Universe, using the images of a spring and a tree-life. All is traced back to The One, of which nothing can be affirmed. The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing that needs The Good; once "The Good" is uttered, no addition should be made. The Intellectual-Principle is called beautiful, and its Maker must be sought. Citing the Timaeus, the text asks whether the Ideas precede the Intellectual-Principle, concluding the Intellectual-Principle and its Object form one substance, with division belonging to the third Principle, the Soul. Further passages state the All-Soul never came into being, that Plato places body in Soul, and that the partial Soul is illuminated by moving upward while movement downward produces an image, blank darkness. Lettered notes treat Unity giving Multiplicity by omnipresence, Soul as Matter to the Intellectual-Principle, self-intellection, the Primal beyond Movement and Repose, potentiality and actuality, and The Good needing no consciousness or life. A final section describes the Intellectual Kosmos, where souls are undivided yet become partible through secession into body.

The text argues that the soul's Essence is neither material fabric, harmony, nor entelechy, but belongs to the Intellectual and divine order. It distinguishes primarily partible sense-magnitudes from impartible Real-Being, likened to a circle's centre with attached radii, and identifies a third, intermediate Kind: ideal-forms entering bodies. Soul is this intermediate Essence, both divisible and indivisible, present entire in whole and in each part, its partition occurring in body, not in itself. It then demonstrates soul must be both partible and impartible, rejecting the "leading-principle" and "impressions by stages" theories through arguments about perception, and cites the Timaeus passage on blending impartible essence with divided essence to yield a third form. It ranks: Soul one and many; Ideal-Form many and one; bodies many; the Supreme one. A further enquiry states the study illuminates what sphere the soul governs and whence it springs, obeying the God's command to know oneself. It argues against those who make human souls mere segments of the All-Soul, who cite Plato that our soul is a portion of the All's soul and note we are borne by the Circuit of the All. The reply clarifies "part," using whiteness, numbers, and wine analogies, denying soul is quantitative. Considering soul-in-finger, it affirms one identical soul multi-present, requiring a common judging place. Addressing soul embodied versus disembodied, it offers light shining in many houses, and gardener/insect and healthy/sick man comparisons. Regarding particular souls and Socrates, nothing of Real Being is annulled; souls are the Logos of Intellectual-Principles. Finally it explains why the All-Soul produced a kosmos while particular souls administer parts, some becoming Uniate, others striving, a third rank less apt.

Section 7 addresses the Philebus passage taken to imply other souls are parts of the All-Soul, holding it means only that the heavens are ensouled; the Timaeus shows other souls compounded from the same mixing bowl, secondary and tertiary yet identical in ideal-nature. The Phaedrus saying that "all that is soul cares for all that is soulless" is read as meaning body is controlled only by Soul. Being entrained in the kosmic circuit does not make souls parts; another soul (the Intellectual) opposes such influence. Section 8 states sympathy does not counter this, since all souls spring from the same soul. Differences among souls arise from bodies and from prior lives; the life-choice corresponds to former lives. Number must enter the scheme; Real-Beings are not made from Matter. The soul's infinity is one of power, not divisibility; it is present whole in every part. When an animal rots and others spring from it, this does not increase the number of souls; all remain one. Section 9 examines how soul enters body, distinguishing metensomatosis from the first entry of the bodiless into body, beginning with the Soul of the All; soul generates a place, and body exists. The Architect-mansion and net-in-water images illustrate soul's presence. Section 10 works back from items to unit, describing soul's sovereignty over matter and its double efficacy. Section 11 states ancient sages secured divine presence through shrines and statues, catching soul's image as in a mirror. Section 12 describes men's souls seeing images in the mirror of Dionysus, descending while their higher part stays above; Zeus takes pity and makes their bonds soluble by death. Section 13 describes the Kosmic Law by which each soul descends at its own hour. Section 14 recounts the myth of Prometheus, Pandora, and Hephaistos. Section 15 describes souls descending through the heavens into bodies. Section 16 addresses punishment of the wicked and misfortunes befalling the good.

The text explains why souls proceeding from the Intellectual reach the heavens first, the heavens being nearest the Intellectual and earth remotest. All souls shine down upon the heavens, their lower phases illuminating lower realms. A figure of centre, circles of light, and an outer light-borrowing sphere illustrates emanation. Souls drawn downward become absorbed in caring for their charges, likened to a storm-tossed ship's steersman, and are fettered by concern for Nature. Section 18 asks whether the soul reasons before descent and after leaving the body; discursive reasoning belongs to this sphere, while souls in the Supreme exercise an uninterrupted reasoning without speech, knowing by present consciousness. Celestials and souls in the air may use speech. Section 19 distinguishes the indivisible and divisible phases of soul, citing Plato's phrase about soul "becoming divisible in bodies," and treats sensation, vegetative function, desire at the liver, emotion at the heart. The indivisible and divisible do not form a unity. Section 20 argues the soul is not in the body as in space, vessel, substratum, part, or Form, explaining why people nonetheless speak of soul as being in body. Section 21 tests analogies—steersman, science through instruments—finding none adequate. Section 22 compares soul's presence to light in air, citing Plato placing body in soul, not soul in body. Section 23 describes soul illuminating bodily organs—sight through eyes, hearing through ears, touch through nerves from the brain—and locations of desire at the liver, passion at the heart. Section 24 asks where the soul goes when leaving the body, invoking ineluctable divine law and justice. Sections 25–26 examine whether departed souls retain memory, denying memory to divine beings, and locating memory in the soul rather than the Couplement.

The text examines in which soul memory resides—the more divine soul or that springing from the All—affirming memory in both, personal and shared, uniting when the souls are together and forgetting each other's affairs when apart. Plotinus cites the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions remembering his deeds, while what the Hercules standing outside spoke of is not told. The freed soul, growing away from the body, revives forgotten things and passing through bodies recounts former lives, eventually forgetting accretions. He asks whether memory belongs to the perceptive or desiring faculty, arguing sight sees while desire merely responds; the desiring faculty keeps a condition, not a memory. He considers assigning memory to perception, distinguishes perception from remembrance, and locates memory in the imaging faculty, which holds the image after the impression passes. Memory of mental acts also involves the image-taking faculty receiving the Reason-Principle. With two souls, two imaging faculties exist, dominated by the more powerful when united. Concerning memory of friends, children, wife, and country: the lower man retains these with emotion, the authentic man passively. The loftier soul desires forgetfulness of what reaches it through the lower; the good soul is forgetful, fleeing multiplicity. The heavenly Hercules recounts his feats, but another man, translated to the Intellectual Realm, is more than Hercules. The following tractate asks what the soul remembers in the Intellectual Realm: nothing of earth, no memory, since all is timeless presence. There is no memory of personality—no thought that the contemplator is Socrates. The soul, on the border, may change, uniting with the Intellectual-Principle yet remaining two. Leaving that unity, it acquires self-memory. It has vision of The Good through the Intellectual-Principle. Memory commences after descent, first in the celestial period. Souls that remain unchanged—stars, sun, moon, the All, Zeus—do not remember but see God always. Their movement is one eternal day, without yesterday.

Section 8 states not everything seen need be retained in memory; incidental concomitants need not occupy the imagination, and the soul rejects differences that serve no need, especially when its act is directed toward another order. It applies this to local movement, journeys, time, and repeated processes, then to the stars: they move on their own affairs, not to traverse space, their passing being accident not essence, so they need no memory of places or times; their life is one in the All-Soul. It offers the comparison of a choral dance, eternally perfect, and of lyre strings sounding a melody. Section 9 asks whether Zeus, ordering and governing all, must remember the kosmic periods; the answer is that he knows all as one thing in one eternal life, by indwelling knowledge, in unity not in process. Section 10 distinguishes the Demiurge and the Soul of the All, both called Zeus; the leading principle operates without calculation, being an unremitting soul mirroring unchanging wisdom, a sovereign unity without perplexity. Section 11 compares kosmic administration to a living unit and Nature's action versus a doctor's, denying place for reasoning or memory. Section 12 argues reasoning is a struggle toward wisdom, while the wise hold wisdom in repose; the leading principle knows the future as a knower, not a learner, and creates from a stable inner model. Section 13 distinguishes this Wisdom (a first) from Nature (a last), using the waxen-seal image; Nature merely produces without perception. Section 14 examines the corporeal produced by Nature. Section 15 treats time as arising from the soul's activity, the All-Soul being timeless. Section 16 denies past exists in the soul itself; it presents the centre-circle illustration of The Good, Intellectual-Principle, and Soul. Section 17 explains why intuitions become temporal in humans, using a public-meeting image. Section 18 discusses whether the body has force, defining "we, the true human being" as the higher soul, and attributes pain and pleasure to the modified body, a troubled unity.

Section 19 identifies pleasure and pain: pain is perception of a body deprived of the soul's image, pleasure perception of the living frame restored to harmony. Using amputation as illustration, the text states the soul, itself unaffected, feels corporeal conditions and locates the pain; were it affected it could not localize or report it. The finger-pain and blue-eyes analogies follow; perception is knowledge, not distress, likened to a messenger who, if overwhelmed, would report falsely. Section 20 attributes bodily desires to the midway corporeal Nature; neither undetermined body nor pure soul desires. Two phases of desire are distinguished, Nature likened to a mother reading a suffering child's wishes; the living body desires, Nature desires for it, the higher soul grants or withholds. Section 21 cites the stages of life—childhood, youth, maturity—and sickness as evidence that desire originates in the corporeal, with Nature as arbiter approving or refusing. Section 22 asks about vegetal forms and the earth's soul, cites Plato's differing statements, and argues the earth, producing vegetation and animals, may possess an Intellectual-Principle and be a god; it examines whether earth perceives without organs. Section 23 holds that knowing sensibles is an act of soul requiring an intermediate and bodily organs, using the ruler and craftsman's tools as analogy. Section 24 asks whether perception concerns need, extends the question to the whole kosmos, and reasons the All, lacking an organ distinct from object, has self-awareness but not sense-perception; the "eyes were not necessary" passage is discussed. Section 25 requires a soul-state inclined to sense; the soul dwells in the Intellectual sphere; heavenly bodies seeing and hearing must have memory. Section 26 explains knowledge of prayers through enlinking and sympathy, magic, and grants earth contact-perception, calling it a god. Section 27 states the earth transmits generative soul, notes stones growing while embedded, and names the hierarchy Hestia and Demeter.

Section 28 returns to the seat of the passionate element. Pleasures, pains, and nascent desire were assigned to the body; it asks whether passion likewise resides in body, heart, or bile. Anger arises over one's own suffering and over others' conduct, implying sensation and judgment, so the vegetal nature is not its source; yet anger follows bodily states of blood and bile. Two phases of anger are distinguished, and its seat is placed near the heart, the centre of the blood concerned with passion. Section 29 uses the illustration of body warmed by soul: when the higher soul withdraws, the vital principle fades briefly, as hair and nails grow on the dead and severed animals wriggle. By analogy with the sun's light, it asks whether departing light sinks back or ceases, comparing colour, sweetness, and fragrance passing into other substances. Section 30 grants the stars perception but not memory, noting prayers are heard and the belief that they answer, even as accomplices in evil; it sets out questions about memory in heavenly bodies and vindicating the gods. Section 31 states the problem embraces all act and experience in the kosmos, by nature or art, listing house-building, medicine, farming, rhetoric, and music. It affirms the Circuit as cause but rejects heat, cold, and the stars' deliberate will as making men thieves. Section 32 identifies the cause: the All is one living being with one soul, a sympathetic total where the far is near, members harming and feeding on one another for the whole's life. Section 33 places the Circuit under the Reason-Principle, using the dance-play analogy where limbs submit to the pattern; the coordinating All is cause. Section 34 urges yielding the body within limits, and attributes powers to both configurations and beings, as in mime dancers.

The text opens by stating that the powers under discussion require explanation, asking how one triangular configuration differs in power from another and how power passes from man to man. It notes the difficulty of attributing causation to the bodies or wills of heavenly beings. It affirms the All is a self-sympathetic living unity under a law of reason, its groupings following Number and Reason-Principles. The several powers and wills within the All look to the one will of the whole, which contemplates The Good. Right will seeks The Good; the sun warms terrestrial things through its soul without volition, and configurations themselves have efficacy, as seen when certain groupments terrify. Section 36 states the Universe is varied, ensouled throughout, containing grades of life. Section 37 warns against robbing the universe of any factor, noting each item possesses power without necessarily reason or intention. Section 38 refers production to the nature of the thing produced and the transmission from major to minor. Section 39 traces the universe back to primal forces beyond Spermatic Reasons, comparing the Reason-Principle to a lawgiver, and lists causes dispelling doubt about evil from the gods. Section 40 explains magic by reigning sympathy; Nature is the primal mage; the magician operates from within the All. Section 41 uses the plucked-string analogy for answered prayer. Section 42 states stars need no memory and remain impassive. Section 43 holds the Sage immune in soul but affectable in his unreasoning element; only the self-intent go free of magic. Section 44 states Contemplation alone stands untouched. Section 45 concludes that each member contributes to the All according to its kind; the good man and base man go to fitting regions; souls change rank; punishments bring health to the All.

The text opens by taking up the question whether sight requires an intervening medium such as air. It explains that sense-perception operates through bodily organs bringing the soul into contact with sensible objects. For touch, contact suffices; for sight, it argues the intervenient is a hindrance rather than a help, citing that dense bodies block sight and invoking the example of the torpedo fish felt through the fisher's rod. It returns to sympathy as the basis of perception. Section 2 reviews theories of vision—light-linking, forth-going act, resistance, image through void, and sympathy—arguing an intervenient blunts sympathy. It discusses air yielding to falling stones and rising fire, and calls air a dark substance requiring illumination. Section 3 offers proof that vision does not depend on air being impressed: fire and stars are seen at night, and beacon-lights across darkness. It grounds perception in the universe as a self-sympathetic whole, raising the question of another kosmos, and rejects sealing-wax-like impression on air. Section 4 examines the linked light, arguing light is unmodified, citing heat felt from fire and light seen at dawn before reaching the eye, and difficulties with seeing stars at night. Section 5 considers hearing: air modified layer by layer, yet differing sounds (bronze on bronze) and sounds made without air (grinding teeth, cracking bones) show co-sensitiveness in a living whole. Section 6 asks whether light exists without air, concluding light belongs to fiery and shining bodies, is a self-existent activity, not a modification of dark air. Section 7 asks whether light perishes or returns to its source, distinguishing inner and outer activity, citing gleaming animal eyes and creatures with inner fire, comparing light to a mirror image and the soul as activity of a prior soul; the life-principle, an image, does not perish but is no longer where it was.

Section 8 poses a hypothesis: a solid mass beyond the heavens observed by unimpeded vision, questioning whether it could be perceived without sympathetic relation, which is said to arise within one living being. It considers perception by likeness rather than by self-sensitiveness of a living unity, and concludes the hypothesis contains contradictions—positing mind and no mind, kin and no kin, soul and no soul—and must be dismissed. Section 1 (on memory) rejects the theory that perceptions are seal-impressions and that memory is the lingering of such an impression. It argues from sight that the mind looks outward, includes distance and magnitude, and that vision requires a duality of seen and seeing. Section 2 asks how perception proceeds if not by impression: the mind acts within its sphere; air takes the impression of sound while soul reads it; Intellectual objects come from within as acts. Section 3 opens the discussion of Memory: the Soul, poised midway between the Intellectual and sense orders, knows the Intellectual by natural identity and gives radiance to sense-objects. Children's long memory, training, repetition, and the dulling of memory in the old show memory is a power, not passivity, and the soul is without magnitude. The final treatise's Section 1 asks whether the true man endures forever, distinguishing soul from the composite, dissolving body. Section 2 argues life is inherent to soul, and the four elements are soulless. Section 3 refutes atoms producing soul, arguing soul is a transcendent directing principle. Section 4 criticizes the Stoic "pneuma" and "certain state." Section 5 argues from diverse movement, growth, twin births, and the part being identical with the whole that Soul and Reason-Principles are without quantity.

Section 6 argues that if the Soul were corporeal there could be no sense-perception, mental act, knowledge, or moral excellence. Perception requires a unitary percipient to which all sense-impressions converge, like lines to a circle's centre; a divisible, material sentient would yield infinite fragmented perceptions. If the sentient were material, sensation would be like seal-impressions on wax, precluding memory; therefore soul cannot be material. Section 7 examines pain: pain is in the finger, but the sensation is at the centre of consciousness. The transmission theory via psychic pneuma is rejected, since serial sensations would not convey the finger's actual condition; the sentient must be identical to itself throughout, unlike body. Section 8 argues intellection would be impossible if soul were body, since magnitude cannot know the partless; abstraction of circle, triangle, and grasping of beauty and justice require a non-material principle. Virtues could not belong to rarefied pneuma. Subsection A answers those attributing bodily activities to soul: quality differs from quantity and body; efficacy belongs to non-magnitude. B argues soul permeates the whole body in a way impossible for body, so it is incorporeal. C rejects the theory that pneuma develops into soul through cooling, insisting the higher is earlier and actual. D refutes the Pythagorean view that soul is a harmony or accord of the lyre. E examines the Entelechy doctrine, showing sleep, reason's resistance to desire, and metasomatosis contradict it; soul is Veritable Essence. Section 9 describes the self-caused principle, source of motion and life, indestructible and immortal. Section 10 shows the purified soul, freed from bodily emotion, is divine and eternal, becoming an Intellectual Kosmos illuminated by The Good. Section 11 affirms the soul's self-springing life is immortal, an independent living principle.

Section 12 argues that if every soul were dissoluble the universe would have perished; it maintains soul is one, simplex, not a mass or quantity, and therefore indestructible, since destructive change annuls form but requires an underlying compound substance. Section 13 asks how soul enters body: the Intellectual-Principle remains stationary, while a following soul, acquiring appetite, strains toward the sense-realm, remaining partly embodied and partly outside. Section 14 states that souls of animals and of the vegetal order are likewise immortal, all springing from one source; tripartite souls shed their increment upon emancipation. Section 15 cites oracles of the Gods and souls that continue serving men after death as evidence. The next treatise opens with a first-person account of being lifted out of the body into a marvellous beauty, then descending, and questioning how soul entered body. Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Plato are cited on the soul's descent; Plato is examined across the Phaedrus and Timaeus. Section 2 examines soul's nature and the World-Soul's effortless governance. Section 3 treats the human Soul in bodily durance and distinguishes many souls and one. Section 4 describes individual souls descending from the universal to become partial, the casting of the wings. Section 5 reconciles voluntary and necessary descent and describes penalties administered by chastising daimons. Section 6 explains the outgoing process producing plurality and Matter's participation in Good. Section 7 treats soul's mid-rank between Intellectual and sensible. Section 8 asserts human soul has not sunk entire. The final treatise's Section 1 argues each soul is present entire at every point of the body and asks whether all souls are one.

Section 2 argues that the unity of one soul in different bodies does not make soul and body identical; an identical thing has different experiences in different recipients, as Man moves in one and rests in another; pain in a hand is felt in the centralizing unity, not transferred elsewhere; large bodies may not register slight membral events; soul is one and many, participant in division yet belonging to an undivided Order. Section 3 observes sympathetic relations, spells, and magic acting at a distance as proof of one soul, and distinguishes the reasoning, sense-perceiving, and forming powers as compatible with unity, likening this to seed. Section 4 enquires into the mode of unity, supposing a first soul and reasoning that ideal-form, not volume, makes souls one, comparing many seals bearing one ring's impression; soul is held bodiless. Section 5 explains how many essential beings are one through a source that gives itself without self-abandonment, illustrated by a science whose parts each potentially contain the whole and by the geometrician's single proposition. A new treatise begins. Section 1 asks what made souls forget the father, God; the cause is self-will and desire for self-ownership; a double discipline recalls the soul's worth. Section 2 declares soul the author of all living things, maker of the sun, and describes the great soul entering the heavens like sunlight gilding a cloud. Section 3 places above soul the Intellectual-Principle, of which soul is an image and utterance. Section 4 ascends to the archetypal world, the Golden Age of Kronos, listing the Primals: Intellectual-Principle, Existence, Difference, Identity, Motion, Rest. Section 5 treats Number, the Dyad, and The One. Section 6 asks how the Intellectual-Principle springs from The One, describing circumradiation from the unmoving Supreme.

The Intellectual-Principle stands as image of The One, arising because the first must have offspring carrying its quality, as rays tell of the sun. The One, not itself an Intellectual-Principle, engenders one through self-quest vision. Sensation is symbolized by a line, intellection by a circle; a corrupt passage follows. The Intellectual-Principle is a unity holding the potentiality of all existence, conscious it derives its being from the First. The First is source but not a thing among things. The text describes the offspring held within lest it fall toward Matter, "brought up in the House of Rhea," and reads Kronos, wisest, absorbing his offspring before engendering Zeus, whose offspring is Soul. Section 8 explains Plato's Triplicity—the King of All, Secondaries, Tertiaries—naming the Good above the Intellectual-Principle, and citing Parmenides and the Platonic Parmenides's three Ones. Section 9 reviews Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles's Strife and Friendship, and Aristotle, criticizing his multiplicity of intellective movers; the Pythagoreans and Pherekudes are noted. Section 10 states the three—The One, Being/Intellectual-Principle, Soul—exist for man, the Interior Man. Section 11 argues a permanent Right and God underlie reasoning; the centre-and-radii image. Section 12 explains why high activities go idle: perception requires turning the faculty inward. A new treatise: The One is all things and none; overflow produces the Intellectual-Principle, whose outflow is Soul, whose image is Sense and Nature. Section 2 traces soul's descent through vegetal, animal, human forms without spatial separation. Another treatise examines self-knowledge: whether a simplex being can know itself. Section 2 considers the soul's sense- and reasoning-principles. Section 3: sense transmits a man's image; understanding says "Socrates"; the We is soul's mid-point—the sensitive principle the scout, the Intellectual-Principle the King.

Section 4 states that a person becomes king when moulded to the Intellectual-Principle, achieved either by the radii from that centre being traced upon one or by being filled with the Divine Mind. The self-knower is described as a double person: one taking cognisance of the principle by which understanding occurs, and a higher one knowing himself by becoming identical with the Intellectual-Principle. A man becomes Intellectual-Principle when he sees through that alone. Section 5 asks whether self-knowing reduces to one phase knowing another, and rejects this as knower distinguished from known. It argues that seeing subject and seen objects must be present as one; the object known must be identical with the knowing act. Thus the Intellectual-Principle, the Intellectual Realm, and Real Being are one, the Primal Being. It concludes the Intellectual-Principle, its intellection, and its object are identical, so it possesses self-knowing. Section 6 states this self-knowing is perfect in the Intellectual-Principle but modified in the Soul. It notes the Intellectual-Principle brings compulsion, the soul persuasion; the soul must set its highest image alongside the Intellectual-Principle. Section 7 answers that contemplating God compels self-knowing, since the Principle is itself among God's given things. Repose is described as an Act. Section 8 asks what the Intellectual-Principle sees; vision and envisioned are a unity, like light seeing light. The soul is led up to the Divine as an image. Section 9 gives a method: separate the man from body, set aside the moulding soul and sense-system, leaving the God-like phase. Section 10 states the Intellectual-Principle must have self-vision through multiplicity and diversity. Section 11 states the Intellectual-Principle knowing the Transcendent is a manifold, and posits a Being above the Intellectual-Principle, above the All, not to be called Intellect.

Section 12 asks why the first principle should not be a manifold, and answers that before the manifold there must be The One from which the manifold arises, as the unit precedes numerical series. It argues the Activities proceeding from the Intellectual-Principle imply a simplex prior to them, and that The One, never incomplete, provides nothing and remains in self-gathered repose while later entities arise. Act flowing from it is explained by the analogy of light from a sun; The One transcends knowing and definition. Section 13 states The One is beyond all statement and name; allowing intellection in it would make it manifold and indigent. Self-intellection implies a manifold, so the Transcendent neither knows itself nor is known. Section 14 asks how it is spoken of: it is dealt with but not stated; what it is not can be said. The divinely inspired hold within them something greater they cannot name; likewise the Supreme is known as a nobler principle than Being. Section 15 asks how The One confers what the many possess; the emanation must be less self-sufficing, a Not-One, a multiplicity striving toward unity. The Transcendent is unity's self, the source from which all take unity. Section 16 states a secondary must follow the First, which must be less manifold than any product; the manifold does not rise from the manifold. The Intellectual-Principle has life directed toward the Transcendent. Section 17 asks what is loftier; it directs the Soul, still in pain, toward a contact purely intellective and a vision by the Supreme's own light, ending "Cut away everything." Section 1 states everything after The First arises from it; a Simplex, transcending Being, must exist and produce, as all things imitate their source. Section 2 explains the Intellectual-Principle is not the generating source because it is not simplex; it emanates from the intellectual object through the Act of the Essence and the Act going out from it.

The text opens by asking whether the Intellectual-Principle can ever fail to think reality, answering that it cannot, since it must know unceasingly and not by guesswork, demonstration, or alien report. It examines sense-knowledge, noting that the senses grasp only an image, never the thing itself. It argues that if the Intellectual-Principle knows its objects as external, it holds only images and possesses falsity, and concludes there would then be no truth in it and no Intellectual-Principle at all. Section 2 states that the Intellectual objects must not be placed outside the Intellectual-Principle; truth is self-accordance, not accordance with an external. Section 3 identifies this Principle as the Truth and as the Godhead entire, a secondary god heralding the Supreme; it describes a royal progress toward the Supreme Monarch, and includes an interpolation naming Zeus, Kronos, and Ouranos. Section 4 turns to The One, reached only by a leap, refusing number, being measure not measured, and discusses monad, dyad, and participation. Section 5 states The First remains intact as other entities spring from it, connecting existence with unity through etymology of "on" and "hen." Section 6 argues the produced reality is Ideal form, so The First is without form and transcends Being; it can be called only "the indefinable," named The One, likened to the Pythagorean "Apollo." Section 7 compares vision, light, and medium, describing the Intellectual-Principle's inner light seen suddenly. Section 8 describes the vision's coming without approach, above the contemplating Intellect. Section 9 explains The First is uncontained, omnipresent, both present and not present, containing all. Section 10 urges seeking The Good directly, calling it the source whose infinitude resides in its power.

Section 11 states that the One is infinite by being pure unity, outside measure and number, without parts, shape, or pattern; it cannot be seen with mortal eyes. Those who make sense the test of reality are compared to festival gluttons who miss the shrine's sanctities and to a man who trusts a lifelong dream and refuses waking sight. Section 12 holds that knowing requires an organ fitted to its object, and that intellection differs from sense. All things desire the Supreme. It distinguishes the love of Beauty, which brings pain, from the love of Good, present even to the sleeping. The Good is prior; Beauty is secondary and needs the Good, while the Good needs not Beauty. God needs none of His derivatives and remains what He was; He is not the All. Section 13 argues the Absolute Good contains nothing, being void of all but itself. Only denial, not assertion, describes it; ascribing existence, intellect, or goodness robs it of its being. The next treatise (Sections 1–6) distinguishes a principle with intellection of the external, one with self-intellection, and argues the primally intellective requires unity in duality, illustrated by the Soul as double light. The First transcends intellection, having no need of it. It posits three principles: one without intellection, one primarily intellective, one secondarily. A figure of light, sun, and moon relates Soul, Intellectual-Principle, and the highest. The Good is without Act and above intellection; knowing itself is unnecessary. The final treatise (Sections 1–3) examines whether individuals have ideal archetypes. It argues each soul contains all Reason-Principles, that distinct individuals require distinct Reason-Principles, addresses parentage, twins, litters, quantity, and affirms infinitude of generative powers in Soul and Divine Mind.

The text opens with the principle that one who has attained the vision of Intellectual Beauty can come to understand the Father beyond that Divine Being. Section 1 offers the example of two stone blocks, one unworked and one shaped by a craftsman into a statue, arguing the beauty comes from the form the artist holds through his art, not from the stone; it states the beauty in the art is higher, and cites Pheidias, who wrought Zeus by apprehending what form Zeus would take. Section 2 turns to natural beauty, asking whence shone the beauty of Helen, of Aphrodite, and of gods, and locating it in the Idea communicated from producer to product; it notes beauty in study, conduct, and soul. Section 3 describes an ascending series of archetypes—in Nature, in Soul, and the Intellectual-Principle—and uses the image of gold to represent it, naming the Gods as beautiful through Intellect. Section 4 describes the realm "There," where all is transparent, each contains all, and life is wisdom; it mentions the myth of Lynceus and the saying that Justice is assessor to Zeus, and cites Plato on knowledge not "a stranger in something strange." Section 5 identifies true Wisdom with the Intellectual-Principle and Real Being. Section 6 describes the wise of Egypt using picture-images in temple-inscriptions rather than writing-forms. Section 7 considers the universe, arguing its maker did not design it discursively but that all springs from the divine world, quoting that man "soars aloft and administers the Kosmos entire." Section 8 names Beauty as primal and entire, citing Plato's Creator who admired his work and determined to bring it closer to the Exemplar. Section 9 instructs forming a mental picture of the universe as a sphere, then calling on God to enter, describing the one God who is all the gods, and the identity of Being and Beauty.

Zeus, oldest and sovereign of the gods, advances first toward the vision, followed by gods, demigods, and capable souls; that Being rises and pours light, upholding some who see while dazzling the lower. Gazers take differing visions—one sees Justice, another Moral Wisdom. Zeus takes this vision, shared by those who love as he does. The text describes bringing the vision within rather than seeing it as external, as one possessed by Apollo or a Muse. Section 11 describes one possessed by the God seeing an image of himself, then sinking into self-identity and unity with the God; identification amounts to self-knowing. It notes that ugliness and sickness impress more violently than health. Section 12 reports what the vision gives: God engendering a universe within himself, of which one offspring (Zeus) becomes manifest without, producing a second Kosmos copying the archetype, sharing divine perpetuity; the Supreme has existed and will exist forever. Section 13 treats Kronos (Intellectual-Principle) fettered to unchanging identity, leaving ordering to his son Zeus (All-Soul), claiming his father Ouranos (the One); Kronos holds a mid position; Soul, called Aphrodite, is less beautiful than Intellect. A new treatise begins. Section 1 distinguishes three orders of people: those bound to sense, those lifting slightly, and godlike men with clear vision. Section 2 describes ascent through beauty toward the First. Section 3 argues the Intellectual-Principle necessarily exists, analyzing compounds of Matter and Idea, with Soul imparting Kosmos-patterns received from Intellect. Section 4 argues something prior to Soul. Section 5 identifies Intellectual-Principle with the Authentic Beings, intellection inseparable from object. Section 6 states it contains all beings as one, illustrated by powers in seed. Section 7 distinguishes opinion from authentic knowledge. Section 8 states Being and Intellectual-Principle are one Nature. Section 9 identifies the intellectual Kosmos, Plato's "living existent."

Section 10 states that all present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the Supreme, while what is not present as Idea does not; things conflicting with nature, the inartistic, lameness, and evil have no archetype There. Section 11 treats arts and crafts: imitative arts are earth-based, while skills observing symmetry, music, crafts, agriculture, medicine, oratory, generalship, geometry, and philosophy derive from or hold place in the Intellectual Kosmos. Section 12 argues the Idea of man entails the Idea of reasoning man and of the arts; Ideas are of universals, not Socrates but Man, with Matter affecting features like aquilinity and complexion. Section 13 considers whether an Absolute-Soul and Absolute-Intellect exist, affirming souls contain true originals, not copies. Section 14 asserts a Nature comprehending all exists, notes repulsive and putrid things trace to Soul not the Intellectual-Principle, and posits the Absolute-Soul before the universal and particular Soul. Section 1 reviews early philosophy's theories on the number and character of Existents and the tenfold division of genera. Section 2 questions whether Substance is one genus across Intellectual and Sensible worlds. Section 3 considers a single category embracing Intellectual Substance, Matter, Form, and Composite. Section 4 examines Quantity, concluding only number is Quantity strictly, magnitudes secondarily. Section 5 treats speech, time, and motion as quantities, judging speech an action and time not Quantity. Section 6 examines Relation, questioning its actuality in cases like double and half, like and equal. Section 7 argues Relation possesses objective reality. Section 8 investigates dissimilarity among relations, distinguishing productive from non-productive relations.

Section 9 states that in cases such as agent and knowledge the relation must be taken as in actual operation, the Act and Reason-Principle being real, while other cases involve participation in an Ideal-Form. Doubleness is the cause of the double, and halfness derives from it. Correlatives may share the same Form or opposite Forms; likeness and unlikeness, identity and difference may coexist in one object. The text considers whether sharing a Form makes men depraved, and treats sensation, habit, and measurement as Reason-Principles, then questions whether Relation is a single genus, noting a thing and its negative cannot share one genus. Section 10 examines Quality as source of the "quale," asking its common ground in habit, disposition, figure. Boxing is not a power of man qua man, but reasoning is. Quality is defined as a power adding the property of being qualia; the text questions whether ugliness, disease, and incapacity are powers, and discusses the four Aristotelian senses, privations, and Form. Section 11 asks why Quality has more than one species, discussing habit versus disposition, permanence, physical powers, natural versus acquired ability, and rough, smooth, light, heavy. Section 12 proposes dividing qualities into those of body (by senses) and soul (appetite, emotion, reason), and considers benefit and injury, and whether Sensible and Intellectual qualities fall under one head, noting wisdom exists There. Section 13 treats Date, questioning whether yesterday and last year need a category separate from time, which belongs to Quantity. Section 14 treats Place, citing the Academy, Lyceum, Delphi as middle, and "here" versus "at Athens." Section 15 treats Action, concluding the category is one of Act, with Motion a distinct genus. Section 16 argues Motion is timeless like Act, using walking. Section 17 rejects reducing Act and Motion to Relation. Section 18 raises questions on Acts, motions, passivity, walking, and thinking.

The text asks whether certain Acts, such as living and life, are imperfect without a time-element and so classed with motions; life and happiness are treated as motions, Motion as a single genus. It distinguishes bodily from psychic and spontaneous from induced motions, examines cutting from the cutter versus in the object, and considers Action, Passion, pain, writing, walking, and hearing, concluding that feeling pain is a Passion not opposed to Action. Section 20 argues Passion differs from Action yet shares the genus if both are Motion, treating alteration as qualitative motion, and examines rubbing, the swan's whiteness, tin and copper, and the learner who is not simply passive since the Act becomes his own. Section 21 seeks Passivity where the patient remains without Act, distinguishes Action (from within, outward) from Passion (from without, fulfilled within), and divides aspirations following intellect (Actions) from impulsive ones (Passions), citing bronze and statue and two forms of passivity. Section 22 holds Action impassive, the same motion being Action for A and Passion for B, relating them to Relation, and discusses providence, self-gathered thought, and footprints. Section 23 questions whether Possession forms one category, citing weapons and shoes, and notes animate and inanimate possess differently. Section 24 treats Situation—reclining, sitting—as involving position and place. Section 25 examines the school positing four categories (Substrates, Qualities, States, Relative States) and a common Something, objecting that Matter is given priority yet made homogeneous with the subsequent. Section 26 argues placing potential Matter above actuality is perverse, and that God becomes secondary to Matter. Section 27 objects to making formless Matter the source of Being, using the mime analogy. Section 28 states the theory relies on sense-perception, assigns primacy to the Non-existent, and defers fuller treatment.

Section 29 addresses the school that treats Qualities as a category distinct from Substrates. The text argues that if Qualities form a distinct category they must be simplex, bodiless, and active, Matter being their passive substrate; it examines the alternatives that Qualities are composite, are qualifications of Matter, or are Matter in a certain state, and finds each reducible to Matter. It concludes that on this view Matter alone is Reality, then asks how this is known, since Intellect too would be a mere state of Matter; it observes that Matter does not speak, and that whoever says it does reveals the predominance of Matter in himself. Section 30 examines States, arguing they reduce to Matter, and questions how such diverse things—Quantity, Quality, Time, Place, Action, Passion, Situation, Possession, Relation—could form a single genus. It notes the absurdity of classing dependent entities with their priors. Section 1 turns to the author's own views and their agreement with Plato, affirming that Being is not a unity, and distinguishing Being from Becoming. Section 2 states Being is many as well as one, a plurality in unity, and considers whether genera are also first-principles. Section 3 asserts a plurality of Existents deriving from a unity that is external and transcendent—the One is beyond Existence. Section 4 proposes examining body (using stone) to find substrate, quantity, quality, then applying the method to Intellectual Substance and to Soul. Section 5 argues bodies arise from a pluralized unity, namely Soul, itself one Reason-Principle. Section 6 argues Soul's being is life, one and many through its motion and self-contemplation. Section 7 identifies Substance and life, introduces Intellect, then establishes Motion, Being, and Stability as genera, distinguishing yet uniting them.

Section 8 posits three principles—Being, Motion, Stability—since Intellect discerns them; things bound with Matter have no being in Intellect, but these three are free of Matter. The text describes fixing the undefiled Intellect, not with bodily eyes, as looking upon the hearth of Reality. The Act of Intellect involves energy and motion; its self-intellection is Substance and Being. Being thinks itself; Stability is the goal of intellection. All Existents are one, both Motion and Stability. By positing three unities, Being is found to contain Difference; restoring them to unity, Identity emerges. Thus Identity and Difference are added, giving five genera, held to be primary. Section 9 asks whether these five are the only primaries, considering unity, Quantity, Quality, Relation; unity is argued not to be a genus. Section 10 argues unity is ambiguous and not a genus. Section 11 examines how unity is contained in Being, states unity is not identical in all things, relates unity to perfection, and identifies unity with Goodness. Section 12 discusses perfection of numbers depending on unity, the point's perfection through the circle, and the genus existing as whole-in-many with independent existence. Section 13 excludes Quantity, since number and magnitude are posterior, holding the problem over. Section 14 excludes Quality as posterior to Substance. Section 15 explains how the four genera complete Substance without qualifying it, Motion being the Act of Substance. Section 16 excludes Relation, Place, Date, Action, Passivity, Possession, and Situation as involving duality. Sections 17 and 18 exclude goodness, beauty, knowledge, intelligence, justice, and self-control as posterior or species.

Section 19 asks whether each of the four primary genera alone produces species, concluding Being cannot be divided without drawing on the other three genera, and warns against sinking genera into their species or reducing a genus to a mere predicate; it identifies the amalgam of Existents with the particular intellect and infers that fully unfolded Intellect is subsequent. Section 20 distinguishes two phases of Intellect, comparing science whole and specific, and holds that universal Intellect is prior to and provides for particular intellects, each potentially the totality. Section 21 asks how universal Intellect produces particulars while remaining a unity, deriving Magnitude, Quality, Quantity, shape, Difference, Identity, equality and inequality within it, and states Being is served by the domination of Intellect and is unity-with-plurality; Intellect is a complete living being. Section 22 adduces Plato's words on Intellect perceiving the Forms in the Living Being, applies them to Soul, explains how Intellect's Act directed on itself yields particular intellects and outward yields Soul, and describes Soul's lower part as an image, like a reflection in a mirror. The second treatise's Section 1 turns to the principle of Becoming, proposing new genera for the Sensible realm and excluding Soul from the investigation. Section 2 examines what passes for Substance in bodies, considering Matter and Form and rejecting an analogy-based division. Section 3 distinguishes Matter, Form, the Mixture, and Attributes, arriving at five genera. Section 4 asks what identifies the first three entities with Substance, concluding Substance is not predicated of another. Section 5 treats these as facts about Sensible pseudo-substance, discussing "present in a subject" and predication.

The text argues that the essence of the Sensible cannot be seen; fire and water are Substance not through visibility, Matter, Form, or their Couplement, but by existing. It distinguishes existence "in the primary sense" from existence by participation, using the predication of "white" and "Being," and concludes the Being of the Sensible depends on the Authentic Being as white depends on Authentic Whiteness. Section 7 rejects Matter as the source of existence, holding Matter is not a Primary but posterior to the Intellectual beings; the higher gives existence to the lower, never the reverse, so Substance is not a genus embracing Matter, Form, and Couplement. Substance is compared to life, dim in one place, clearer in another. Section 8 abandons division into elements, seeking what is constant in stone, earth, water within a single genus; the amalgam is not True Substance but an imitation. Section 9 identifies the genus with body, divided into material bodies (fire, earth, water, air) and organic (plants, animals), and treats the distinction of First and Second Substance through grammar and through Man and Socrates, holding the universal prior. Section 10 offers division by coupled qualities (hot-dry, etc.) and calls the Sensible realm Becoming. Section 11 treats Quantity, admitting only number and magnitude as true quantities, assigning Time and Space to Relation, and discussing great, small, and beauty. Section 12 affirms contrariety in Quantity and progression from unit or point. Section 13 treats continuous and discrete, odd and even, and the dimensions of line, surface, solid. Section 14 examines the straight line, differentiae, figures, and geometry as the study of magnitudes. Section 15 discusses equality, inequality, similarity, and Quality forming Sensible Substance, using the Socrates-portrait analogy for quale versus Reason-Principle.

Section 16 defines Quality as the distinctive mark of a thing, apart from essence, quantity, or motion, and holds that Sensible and Intellectual beauty share only a name, making "Quality" equivocal across the two spheres. It examines whether virtues, arts as Reason-Principles, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy belong to the Sensible or Intellectual order, citing Plato, and assigns practical virtues to Sensible Quality while declining to place Soul among Sensible Substance. Section 17 proposes dividing sensible qualities by the senses and raises the difficulty of dividing Quality itself into species, since differences cannot be drawn from Quality itself. Section 18 argues against seeking differences of differences and considers whether all qualities are differentiae, noting that sweet and bitter are distinguished by Relation, and concludes Quality is not a differentia of Quality. Section 19 treats dependent qualia, classifying "not white," negations, and privations—"toothless" and "blind" as qualities, "naked" and "clothed" as states—and holds that states, not dispositions, constitute qualities. Section 20 asks whether every quality has a contrary, examining colours, intermediates, black and white, contrariety, and degree in Quality. Section 21 sets three conditions for Motion to be a genus, denies it belongs to Substance, Quality, Action, Passivity, or Relation, and weighs Change and becoming as candidates. Section 22 characterizes Motion as passage from potentiality to realization, giving the statue, walking, and dancing as examples, links Motion to perpetual Difference, and describes Time as the measure of Motion. Section 23 holds Motion enters Sensible objects from without, passing from agent to patient like a breath of wind, with examples of walking, heating, growth, decay, birth, health, and sickness. Section 24 treats locomotion, its tendency to seek an appointed place, and circular versus straight motion.

Section 25 examines integration and disintegration, asking whether they differ from other motions or reduce to them; it considers approach and retreat as local motions, fusion and blending producing unity, the relation to locomotion, growth, and alteration, the mixing of wine and water, condensation and rarefication, and whether integration and disintegration can explain blackness, whiteness, or learning. Section 26 subdivides types of Motion by direction, organic versus inorganic, walking, swimming, flight, natural versus unnatural, and classes motions as natural, artificial, and purposive. Section 27 treats what opposes Motion, distinguishing Stability, assigned to the Intellectual, from Rest in the lower sphere, treating Rest as negation of locomotion, and considering sickness, health, and convalescence. Section 28 recalls that Activity and Passivity are motions, discusses the relative and Relation between coexisting objects, and declares the investigation into kinds of Being complete. The next treatise opens (Section 1) asking how soul is omnipresent, whether this depends on material magnitude or belongs to soul apart from body, and how a partless, massless soul extends over a universe. Section 2 distinguishes the Authentic All, contained in nothing, from the visible universe, asserting Being present to all Being as self-presence. Section 3 asks whether Authentic Being is itself present or acts through powers described as rays, holding it present entire yet distinct. Section 4 addresses the multiplicity of intelligences and souls within omnipresent unity, holding souls many before body. Section 5 locates soul's greatness not in mass. Section 6 asks why one soul does not enter more bodies, and treats the single judging soul. Section 7 illustrates omnipresent identity through a controlling hand, a luminous center in a transparent sphere, and sunlight.

Section 8 states that worldly light can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass, but an immaterial entity, independent of body, cannot be allotted part here and part there; participation is of entirety with entirety, partibility going with body and impartibility with the bodiless; the unity remains self-concentrated. Section 9 examines the supposed partition of unity into participants, considers powers emanating from the First, and concludes the source must be omnipresent as an undivided whole. Section 10 answers objections drawn from image-and-archetype and from fire and warmth, distinguishing artist's pictures from images in water or mirrors, and affirms the souls and Intellectual-Principle are imperishable. Section 11 states presence is determined by the participant's fitness, ranking firsts, seconds, thirds by power. Section 12 uses the example of a spoken word carried through air and reaching every ear to illustrate soul's omnipresence; the participant comes to soul. Section 13 denies extension, arguing the extended participates in what is unextended, so one soul is present at every point. Section 14 asks about individual, good, and bad souls; it says the one soul contains all, and that before becoming Here "We" existed There as pure souls, upon whom another man intruded, making us dual. Section 15 explains the intruder entered through aptitude; body is warmed by soul, giving desire, pleasure, pain, likened to Elders disturbed by an unruly populace. Section 16 treats Descents, Returns, punishments, and banishment into animal forms inherited from ancient philosophers, holding the corporeal approaches soul; the soul's evil is association, its good release. Section 1 states the god in each is one, that all seek good by seeking unity, and that all beings are one. Section 2 states the reasoning faculty borrows corporeal principles; one must use Intellectual principles, distinguishing Becoming from eternal Being.

Section 3 states that the Authentic Existent holds unchanging identity, remains self-gathered, and is multipresent while self-enclosed; other things participate in it, and the One is numerically identical and undistributed. Section 4 holds that the god in man is omnipresent, that all-pervasion is inconsistent with partition, that the divine nature is infinite, and that Intellectual Beings are firsts, seconds, and thirds attached to one centre. Section 5 offers the illustration of lines radiating from one centre, with the centres coinciding in one central centre. Section 6 states the Intellectual Beings are multiple and one, and that Man in the Idea becomes many individual men, as soul is present in every part of the body. Section 7 describes the return to Real Being, knowledge without image, and being turned by Athene to see God, self, and the All. Section 8 treats Matter's participation in the Ideas, denying physical illumination, holding that the Ideal Fire remains apart while producing fire throughout. Section 9 presents the elements as one spheric figure from one partless cause, with all souls one, and soul spoken of as number. Section 10 speaks of the principle poised in wisdom, "Love Waiting at the Door," wisdom entire to all, participation in the One, meetings and Assemblies, and knowing the good by identification. Section 11 asks how the unextended reaches extension, calling the First Principle measureless, contrasting Time and Eternity, and the material and immaterial triangle. Section 12 describes the Power present as One Life, omnipresent, and entering the All by putting non-Being away, with gods who "in many guises seek our cities." A new tractate's Section 1 states multiplicity is a falling from Unity, that the universe has extension and beauty held by unity. Section 2 questions Number and infinity, holding Number in the Intellectual determined.

The text opens by asking how the infinite can exist yet remain unlimited, and whether multiplicity, being a unit-multiple of lessened unity, is evil in comparison with pure unity. It discusses the unlimited's relation to limit, place, and motion, concluding Matter is not solely in flux. Section 4 enquires whether Numbers in the Intellectual are Ideas or concomitants of Ideas, citing Plato both on men deriving Number from the changes of day and night and on veritable Number having Being. Section 5 asks the nature of Number, treating dyad and triad, the Pythagorean equation of Justice with a Tetrad, and argues unity is prior to man and to Being. Section 6 posits unity absolute and decad absolute, examines the origin of Ideas, and states Justice is not the thought of Justice but an activity of the Intellectual-Principle. Section 7 affirms all is contained within one nature, known through soul's longing and participation, positing a Collective Life. Section 8 orders Being, Intellectual-Principle, and Living-Form, holding Number independent of the Living-Form. Section 9 asks whether Being produced Number or Number the distinction, concludes Number pre-exists within Authentic Being, and distinguishes authentic Number from its monadic image, describing Forms as Henads and Numbers. Section 10 states Being becomes Number by awakening to manifoldness, using the example of gold and quantity, and compares Number to Good. Section 11 considers whether the decad is merely so many henads, arguing a bare unity must exist and that Nature produces the numbers by limiting its advance. Section 12 answers the objection that unity is only a mental attitude, presents an objector citing "Crowd," "Festival," "Army," "on the right," "Above," and "Below," and states each objection must be taken singly.

Section 13 argues that the notion of unity is not derived from physical objects, since presentations of man, animal, or stone differ from unity. The mind affirms unity from perceiving something real, as it affirms relation from observed position. Otherness and Difference come later than unity; that which asserts unity is itself a unity. A manifold presupposes a precedent unity. The text states that unity exists in degrees, referring back to a primal Unity, and that Unity precedes Reality and is its author. Unity is an existent Unity. The word "This" affirms an indicated existence. Section 14 answers the argument from relation: Unity does not lose its being merely because something else changes. Duality is produced both by association and by the splitting of a unity, showing number is not relation. Unity is due to the presence of Unity, duality to Duality, as things are white by Whiteness. Participation in the Decad differs in various orders; in the Intellectuals is Authentic Number. Section 15 states the Collective Being is Being, Intellectual-Principle, and Complete Living Form, and is Number-Entire. Number exists before every living thing. Being is the seat of Number and brings forth the Beings by Number. Section 16 poses questions about where the primal numbers belong. It distinguishes counted quantity from essential number inherent in things. Soul is Number since it is essence. Section 17 discusses Infinite Number and the infinite line among Intellectual Beings, and the primal configurations existing There. Section 18 states Number There is definite; infinity lies in human counting. All Real-Beings are Measure and beautiful. Parmenides is cited for identifying Being and Unity; Being produces eternally. Section 1 (new treatise) states that God, or a god, placed eyes and senses in living beings. It argues Providence was never the outcome of plan; there is no planning There, no later in the divine; the future is present, foreconceived.

Section 2 states that the Intellectual-Principle is known to exist though seen at less than its worth; here a man or eye is an image, whereas There man is at once an intellective thing and the cause of its being, the thing identical with its cause. The essence of a thing is its cause; the Idea, unfolded, reveals the cause inherent in it. The Intellectual-Principle contains every cause, each item rising complete with its cause. The universe links its items mutually as cause and caused. The Idea of Man contains Man entire and complete; the man born is the derivative. Section 3 denies planning There, since planning implies process and forgetfulness of a first state; to state cause is to state the thing complete. Sense-perception is involved in the Idea by eternal necessity, raising the difficulty of whether the Principle perceives sense-things. Section 4 examines Man here, asking whether man is a Reason-Principle distinct from soul, the soul itself, or soul using body. Section 5 concludes Man is a Reason-Principle other than soul; soul holds the pattern of Man; the higher Man rises from the more godlike soul, cited as Plato's definition "Man is Soul... using body." Section 6 explains how the higher soul has sense-perception through correspondence with the Intellectual; the diviner shines upon the secondary and tertiary Man. It discusses souls entering animal bodies and the Celestials (Daimons), per Plato. Section 7 addresses the soul producing animal nature; the All-Soul lays down a pattern. It reaffirms the Divine does not look toward process. Section 8 argues the universal horse existed There before production, not looking to this sphere, and explains the universe's multiplicity. Sections 9 and 10 explain how the divine contains unreasoning forms as Intellections in particular modes, the outgoing being by loss, with unity reigning over multiplicity.

Section 11 states that the heavens hold every form of life and asks how lower things exist There. It admits vegetal life, arguing each plant's Reason-Principle derives from a primal, truer plant There. It treats earth: stones and mountains reveal an ensouled earth-principle, so earth There is primally alive. Fire likewise is a Reason-Principle in Matter, not originating in friction; Plato is cited saying soul is in everything. Water and air are equally within the living total, though life appears less visibly; the blood analogy shows soul present yet unsensed. Section 12 restates the universe as copy of the original: sky, stars, earth, sea, waters, and air, with their living things, must exist There. All flows from one fount englobing all qualities—sweetness, fragrance, colours, sounds, rhythms. Section 13 holds that Intellectual-Principle is not simplex; its movement requires Identity and Difference, producing Collective Identity and Collective Difference, wandering within itself in the Meadow of Truth, a stationary wandering. Its ceasing to move would be its ceasing to be. Section 14 argues Intellectual-Principle demands diversity compatible with monad, using face, nose, and eyes as illustration, and names Universal Sympathy. Section 15 describes That Life as primal and one, calling other life darkness; evil belongs to the copy. It likens Intellectual-Principle to a living sphere of radiant faces, urging one to become Intellectual-Principle. Section 16 ascends higher, asking who produced that realm, comparing The Good to the sun, cause of Being and seeing. Section 17 explains how secondaries reside in the First; the Giver transcends the given; Life determined becomes Intellectual-Principle, base to the Formless Form. Sections 18 and 19 examine how the Ideas participate in good, whether good is choice, and conclude the search continues.

Since desire cannot test the good, Section 20 turns to judgement, opposing paired terms (order/disorder, health/illness, form/shapelessness) and assigning the first of each to the good; virtue, Intellectual-Principle, life, and soul belong to it, yet Intellectual-Principle is not the ultimate, for all things look to the good, which precedes reason. Section 21 states that Life is an Activity streaming from The Good and Intellectual-Principle an Activity defined therein; both are sought as congenial, needing a lordlier light. Section 22 says the soul, taking the outflow from the divine, is seized with Bacchic passion and becomes Love; it passes beyond Intellectual-Principle but not beyond The Good; beauty irradiates symmetry, the living being more beautiful than the dead. Section 23 identifies this self-sufficing source, contrary to evil (a Later), as The Good, producer and preserver of Intellectual-Principle, Life, and souls. Section 24 raises whether The Good is named because desired, and voices a critic's objection about scattered praises and deception. Section 25 notes that Plato, in the Philebus, makes pleasure an element in the Term; the solution lies in priority, each step's good being its immediate higher, halting at the First Good. Section 26 says striving shows something is good; pleasure is inadequate. Section 27 holds that Form supplies need because it is a portion of the Good. Section 28 asks whether Matter would desire Form; the Good advances by cleansing away Matter, holding aloft with the Formless. Section 29 states the First is immune to pleasure, which implies lack. Section 30 rejects blending Intellect with bodily pleasure, citing poets' metaphors ("Drunk with nectar"), and cites Truth introduced into the Mixture. Section 31 describes soul, stricken like lovers, loving the Supreme Good and urged Thither. Section 32 seeks the author of beauty: formless, limitless, without magnitude, a beauty above beauty.

Section 33 states that when naming beauty all visible shape must be dismissed; the formless Form is beautiful as Form, and the Intellectual-Principle is lessened by seeing things as distinct. The text holds that the primal existent, The First, must be without Form. It draws the example of love: love is born when the lover forms within his partless soul an immaterial image; shape is an impress from the unshaped, and Matter is furthest away. By steps through soul and Intellectual-Principle it concludes the First Principle is formless. Section 34 describes the soul laying aside all shape to receive the Alone; the presence reveals itself within her, distinction fades, and she gives herself no name and looks only on This, scorning office, power, wealth, beauty, and knowledge. Section 35 states the soul dismisses even Intellection; it compares entering a house and seeing the master. Intellectual-Principle has two powers, knowing and loving; drunk with nectar it becomes simplex. Section 36 says knowledge of The Good is the grand learning, reached by analogies and abstractions; the quester, swept by the wave of Intellect, sees a light that is itself the vision. Sections 37–41 argue the First has no Intellection: Intellection implies duality, and the Supreme is simplex, above Intellect, needing nothing. "He Is" and "He is good" do not truly apply; the Good does not know itself as Good but has immediate self-directed intuition; intellection belongs to Being, not the Good. Section 42 allocates powers to secondaries, citing "About the King of All, all has being." Section 1 opens a new inquiry on whether gods have voluntary action and defines free acts as those done by choice, under no compulsion, with knowledge, using the example of a man killing without recognizing his father.

Section 2 examines where the freedom of action ascribed to persons is to be placed, questioning whether it rests in impulse, appetite, rage, desire, or calculation, and noting that grounding freedom in these would extend it to animals, infants, and the deranged; it argues that emotion is preceded by reasoning yet a compelling imagination leaves no mastery, and that a thing rising from an extern has no efficiency of its own. Section 3 traces self-disposal to will, will to reasoning, and to right reasoning joined with knowledge, distinguishing fancy that arises from bodily conditions. It assigns self-disposal to those living above bodily states through the Intellectual-Principle, and states that the gods, living by Intellectual-Principle and conformed desire, possess freedom. Section 4 asks whether act rising from desire can be voluntary, considers whether Intellectual-Principle acting by its nature has freedom, and holds that movement toward a recognised good is not compulsion, that servitude lies in being debarred from one's good, and that Intellectual-Principle, being within the Good, possesses self-disposal. Section 5 asks whether freedom belongs also to soul acting under Intellectual guidance, using the example of virtue exercised through war, wrong, or poverty, and Hippocrates preferring no need of his skill, concluding freedom lies in Intellectual-Principle immune from act. Section 6 refers freedom to inner activity and virtue's vision rather than the deed, stating the unembodied is free. Section 7 states soul becomes free moving through Intellectual-Principle toward The Good, and denies The Good exists by chance. Sections 8 through 11 hold that freedom is not an attribute of the First, that nothing "happens" to it, that it is what it must be without a "Must," and that, being spaceless and beyond assertion, it is nearer truth to say "Thus He has happened not to be."

Section 12 asks whether God is master of being what He is. In humans the body is far from reality while soul confers some reality; this compound of Reality and Difference is not pure reality, so humans are not fully masters of their being. In That which is wholly what it is, being is a unit sovereign over itself, source of freedom to Being; since self-mastery implies a duality of Act and essence, pure unity cannot strictly be said to have self-mastery. Section 13 grants that Activities in the Supreme depend on will, making will and essence identical: as He willed to be, He is; the Supreme is its own Author, not what He happened to be but what He willed to be. Section 14 distinguishes things one with their essence from things distinct; as one approaches the simplex, accident recedes. Since things of determined condition carry the reason of their being, and the Supreme authors reason and causation, God is cause of Himself. Section 15 calls the Supreme self-love, lovely from Himself, self-producing, neither absorbing nor absorbed; ascending, one reaches it as reason's better, the Term of all. Section 16 states the Supreme is everywhere and nowhere; He acted Himself into being through self-looking, as He willed to be. Section 17 places Intellectual-Principle before all things, a concordance not of chance; God is self-related, self-tending. Section 18 instructs seeking nothing of Him outside; using the circle-and-centre image, it derives Intellectual-Principle from the Supreme. Plato is cited that the necessary is far from hazard. Section 19 urges striving to possess it directly; the ancients indicated the Beyond-Essence. Section 20 answers that God is maker, not made, His Activity being reality, self-making simultaneous with Himself. Section 21 holds His self-making definite and good; God and will are primally identical. It closes by directing that, in conceiving Him, one put all else aside.

Section 1 states that beings are beings in virtue of unity, illustrating with army, chorus, flock, house, ship, magnitudes, plant, animal, health, beauty, moral excellence, and soul; it argues soul bestows unity yet remains distinct from it, being a participant in unity and itself a manifold of powers—reasoning, desiring, perceiving. Section 2 examines whether Being and Unity are identical, arguing that Being, Intellectual-Principle, and the Ideal Forms are manifold and therefore distinct from and posterior to Unity, which is The First. Section 3 asks what The Unity is, describing the soul's difficulty grasping the formless, urging ascent from things of sense to the Principle within, and stating The Unity is higher than Intellectual-Principle, no being, without shape, generative of all yet none of all. Section 4 states awareness of this Principle comes by presence overpassing knowledge; knowing must be left aside; the Principle is "not to be told, not to be written," present to those fit to receive. Section 5 addresses those who accept soul, tracing soul from Intellectual-Principle and Intellect from The Unity, naming it the source of existence, cause and fount, not to be counted among its derivatives. Section 6 asks how Unity is asserted, distinguishing it from monad and point, calling it infinite in power, self-sufficing, above need, without will, Intellection, or Movement, being The Good above good. Section 7 urges withdrawal from the extern, turning inward; it cites Minos, known as the Familiar of Zeus, establishing laws from his vision. Section 8 likens the soul's movement to a circle turning on its own centre, describing the coincidence of centres in the Principle, and closes with the image of a choir singing about its conductor, attaining rest when facing aright.

In Section 9, the soul in its choiring looks upon the wellspring of Life, Intellect, Being, Good, and Soul. The text states these emanants are eternal, springing from an eternal principle that produces without fragmentation; so long as the sun shines, there is light. The soul is not cut away; it is fuller for turning Thither, while holding aloof is loneliness. Life in the Supreme brings forth gods, beauty, righteousness, and moral good. The soul's inborn love shows its good is There; the myth of Aphrodite and Eros is cited. The soul loves God as a daughter loves a father, but at human birth takes a mortal love and falls, later seeking the father again. Those who have seen know the soul takes another life approaching God. In Section 10, the soul does not keep that ground because it has not wholly escaped; vision differs from reasoning. In self-seeing, seer merges with seen; the man becomes one with the Supreme. In Section 11, the rule "Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate" is cited. The man becomes the Unity, passing beyond beauty and virtue, like one entering the inner sanctuary. The soul mounts to its very self, outgrows Being, and attains the Term—the passing of solitary to solitary.