Page:Enneads (IA enneads05plot).pdf/123
plausible to suppose a partition of the All—the original remaining undiminished—or, in a more legitimate phrase, an engendering from the All.
Thus the Authentic would be left self-gathered, while what we think of as the parts—the separate souls—would come into being to produce the multiple total of the universe.
But if the Authentic Being is to be kept unattached in order to remove the difficulty of integral omnipresence, the same considerations must apply equally to the souls; we would have to admit that they cannot be integrally omnipresent in the bodies they are described as occupying either, soul must be distributed, part to body's part, or it is lodged entire at some one point in the body giving forth some of its powers to the other points; and these very powers, again, present the same difficulty.
A further objection is that some one spot in the body will hold the soul, the others no more than a power from it.
Still, how account for the many souls, many intelligences, the beings by the side of Being?
No doubt the beings proceed from the Priors in the mode only of numerical distinction and not as concrete masses, but the difficulty remains as to how they come to constitute the plenitude of the material universe.
This explanation by progression does not clear the problem.
We are agreed that diversity within the Authentic depends not upon spatial separation but sheerly upon differentiation; all Being, despite this plurality, is a unity still; "Being neighbours Being"; all holds together; and thus the Intellectual-Principle (which is Being and the Beings) remains an integral, multiple by differentiation, not by spatial distinction.
Soul too? Souls too. That principle distributed over material masses we hold to be in its own nature incapable of distribution; the magnitude belongs to the masses; when this soul-principle enters into them—or rather they into it—it is thought of as distributable only because, within the discrimination of the corporeal, the animating force