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VI. 2. 5]
ON THE KINDS OF BEING
45

But we must begin by subtracting what is peculiar to body, its coming-to-be, its sensible nature, its magnitude—that is to say, the characteristics which produce isolation and mutual separation. It is an Intellectual Being we have to consider, an Authentic Existent, possessed of a unity surpassing that of any sensible thing.

Now the wonder comes how a unity of this type can be many as well as one. In the case of body it was easy to concede unity-with-plurality; the one body is divisible to infinity; its colour is a different thing from its shape, since in fact they are separated. But if we take Soul, single, continuous, without extension, of the highest simplicity—as the first effort of the mind makes manifest,—how can we expect to find multiplicity here too? We believed that the division of the living being into body and soul was final: body indeed was manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt, supposing that we had come to the limit of our course.

Let us examine this soul, presented to us from the Intellectual realm as body from the Sensible. How is its unity a plurality? How is its plurality a unity? Clearly its unity is not that of a composite formed from diverse elements, but that of a single nature comprising a plurality.

This problem attacked and solved, the truth about the genera comprised in Being will thereby, as we asserted, be elucidated also.

5.

A first point demanding consideration:—

Bodies—those, for example, of animals and plants—are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from

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