No; the seeing may imply merely that the reality comes into being by the fact of that seeing; the Intellectual-Principle is not external to the Life-Form; all is one; the Act of the Intellectual-Principle possesses itself of bare sphere, while the Life-Form holds the sphere as sphere of a living total.
18.It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the "More than is present"; the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire; no number has been or could be omitted to make addition possible.It might be described as infinite in the sense that it has not been measured- who is there to measure it?-but it is solely its own, a concentrated unit, entire, not ringed round by any boundary; its manner of being is settled for it by itself alone.None of the Real-Beings is under limit; what is limited, measured, is what needs measure to prevent it running away into the unbounded.There every being is Measure; and therefore it is that all is beautiful.Because that is a living thing it is beautiful, holding the highest life, the complete, a life not tainted towards death, nothing mortal there, nothing dying.Nor is the life of that Absolute Living-Form some feeble flickering; it is primal, the brightest, holding all that life has of radiance; it is that first light which the souls There draw upon for their life and bring with them when they come here.It knows for what purpose it lives, towards What it lives, from Whence it lives; for the Whence of its life is the Whither...and close above it stands the wisdom of all, the collective Intellectual-Principle, knit into it, one with it, colouring it to a higher goodness, by kneading wisdom into it, ****** its beauty still more august.Even here the august and veritably beautiful life is the life in wisdom, here dimly seen, There purely.For There wisdom gives sight to the seer and power for the fuller living and in that tenser life both to see and to become what is seen.
Here attention is set for the most part upon the unliving and, in the living, upon what is lifeless in them; the inner life is taken only with alloy: There, all are Living Beings, living wholly, unalloyed; however you may choose to study one of them apart from its life, in a moment that life is flashed out upon you: once you have known the Essence that pervades them, conferring that unchangeable life upon them, once you perceive the judgement and wisdom and knowledge that are theirs, you can but smile at all the lower nature with its pretention to Reality.
In virtue of this Essence it is that life endures, that the Intellectual-Principle endures, that the Beings stand in their eternity; nothing alters it, turns it, moves it; nothing, indeed, is in being besides it to touch it; anything that is must be its product;anything opposed to it could not affect it.Being itself could not make such an opposite into Being; that would require a prior to both and that prior would then be Being; so that Parmenides was right when he taught the identity of Being and Unity.Being is thus beyond contact not because it stands alone but because it is Being.For Being alone has Being in its own right.
How then can we deny to it either Being or anything at all that may exist effectively, anything that may derive from it?
As long as it exists it produces: but it exists for ever; so, therefore, do its products.And so great is it in power and beauty that it remains the allurer, all things of the universe depending from it and rejoicing to hold their trace of it and through that to seek their good.To us, existence is before the good; all this world desires life and wisdom in order to Being; every soul and every intellect seeks to be its Being, but Being is sufficient to itself.
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
HOW THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE IDEAL-FORMS CAME INTO BEING:
AND UPON THE GOOD.
1.God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the light and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch.
But what led to this provision?
It cannot be that other forms of being were produced first and that, these perishing in the absence of the senses, the maker at last supplied the means by which men and other living beings might avert disaster.
We may be told that it lay within the divine knowledge that animal life would be exposed to heat and cold and other such experiences incident to body and that in this knowledge he provided the senses and the organs apt to their activity in order that the living total might not fall an easy prey.
Now, either he gave these organs to souls already possessing the sensitive powers or he gave senses and organs alike.
But if the souls were given the powers as well as the organs, then, souls though they were, they had no sensation before that giving.If they possessed these powers from the moment of being souls and became souls in order to their entry into process, then it is of their very nature to belong to process, unnatural to them to be outside of process and within the Intellectual: they were made in the intent that they should belong to the alien and have their being amid evil; the divine provision would consist in holding them to their disaster; this is God's reasoned purpose, this the plan entire.
Now what is the foundation of reasoned plan?
Precedent planning, it may be; but still we are forced back to some thing or things determining it.What would these be here?
Either sense-perception or intellect.But sense-perception it cannot in this case be: intellect is left; yet, starting from intellect, the conclusion will be knowledge, not therefore the handling of the sensible; what begins with the intellectual and proceeds to the intellectual can certainly not end in dealings with the sensible.Providence, then, whether over living beings or over any part of the universe was never the outcome of plan.
