/lit/ - Literature

>If she does not mix with bodies then how does she give life?
She remains individuals and gives out images of herself. These images form the faculties of the individual soul: sensation in the common part; and the forms which derive successively from each other down to the faculties of generation.
>The World Soul in creation of the individual souls is foreign to the cause of the evils man suffers.
So is the highest part of the soul, even though ratiocination belongs to it, as the latter can be the cause of great evils when mastered by the lower parts of our nature.
>Often we yield to appetite and anger, and to even lower sensation. These are the result of the soul being duped by imperfect images.
Our imagination/fantasy does not await the judgement of discursive reason. In such a case the intellect did not grasp the object itself.
>The real Man differs from the body.
"We" is taken in a double sense: either the soul with the animal body; or simply the upper part, while the body is a beast.
>the virtues consist not in wisdom but in ethical habits and austerity. They belong to the common part.
Friendships however are some referred to the common part and some to the pure Soul or inner Man.
>The superior principle, which at first seems inactive in relation to us, only begins to be active towards us when it advances as far as the middle part of our being.
To utilise the superior principle, we must direct this middle part of our being towards either the upper or lowerd worlds. This is actualisation of Aristotelian "potentiality" or Stoic "habit."
>Animal bodies can be defined according to this animating principle as human souls that have sinned.
Those animals into whose bodies no human soul have entered are produced by illumination of the World Soul.
>The common doctrine that the soul sins and undergoes punishment in Hades is not necessarily incompatible with this doctrine.
Philosophy's separation of the soul refers not only to body, but to passible accretions. The combination of the pure soul with that which experiences passions and sins is what undergoes punishment.
>The animal nature is generated when the soul descends.
As she inclines towards the body the soul sheds light onto what is below her and thereby produces an image of herself. But when she is entirely occupied in contemplating the intelligible world, this image vanishes.
>It is we, by means of the soul which makes this research. The soul considers itself.
As for the Intelligence (Nous) it is only ours insofar as the soul is intelligent; for us the higher life consists in a better thinking, when the intellect is both a part of ourselves, and a part of something superior towards which we ascend.