Select Works, Section 100 (part 1)

Section 1 1. But whence that circular movement? In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle. And does this movement belong to the material part or to the Soul? Can we account for it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once for centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving; or that, being self-centred it is not of unlimited extension [and consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent], and that its revolution carries the material mass with it? If the Soul had been the moving power [by any such semi-physical action] it would be so no longer; it would have accomplished the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end of this endless revolution. In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least cannot have spatial movement; how then, having itself a movement of quite another order, could it communicate spatial movement? But perhaps the circular movement [of the Kosmos as soul and body] is not spatial or is spatial not primarily but only incidentally. What, by this explanation, would be the essential movement of the kosmic soul? A movement towards itself, the movement of self-awareness, of self-intellection, of the living of its life, the movement of its reaching to all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing anywhere but within its scope. The dominant in a living thing is what compasses it entirely and makes it a unity. If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its content alive, for the life of body is movement. Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it will be not that of Soul untrammelled but that of a material frame ensouled, an animated organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a thing at once carried forward and at rest. But supposing that the circular movement is to be attributed to the body, how is it to be explained, since all body, including fire [which constitutes the heavens] has straightforward motion? The answer is that forthright movement is maintained only pending arrival at the place for which the moving thing is destined: where a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to come for its rest; its motion is its tendence to its appointed place. Then, since the fire of the sidereal system has attained its goal, why does it not stay at rest? Evidently because the very nature of fire is to be mobile: if it did not take the curve, its straight line would finally fling it outside the universe: the circular course, then, is imperative. But this would imply an act of providence? Not quite: rather its own act under providence; attaining to that realm, it must still take the circular course by its indwelling nature; for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds no further space and is driven back so that it recoils on the only course left to it: there is nothing beyond; it has reached the ultimate; it runs its course in the regions it occupies, itself its own sphere, not destined to come to rest there, existing to move. Further, the centre of a circle [and therefore of the Kosmos] is distinctively a point of rest: if the circumference outside were not in motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case of a living thing whose nature binds it within a body.