Page:Enneads (IA enneads05plot).pdf/183
skilful craftsman competent to create all kinds of works of art but reduced to making what is ordered and what the aptitude of his material indicates.
The power of the All-Soul, as Reason-Principle of the universe, may be considered as laying down a pattern before the effective separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something like a tentative illumining of Matter; the elaborating soul would give minute articulation to these representations of itself; every separate effective soul would become that towards which it tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer adapts himself to the action set down for him.
But this is to anticipate: our enquiry was How there can be sense-perception in man without the implication that the Divine addresses itself to the realm of process. We maintained, and proved, that the Divine does not look to this realm but that things here are dependent upon those and represent them and that man here holding his powers from Thence is directed Thither, so that, while sense makes the environment of what is of sense in him, the Intellectual in him is linked to the Intellectual.
What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into cognisance in a way of their own, since they are not material, while the sensible sense here—so distinguished as dealing with corporeal objects—is fainter than the perception belonging to that higher world; the man of this sphere has sense-perception because existing in a less true degree and taking only enfeebled images of things There—perceptions here are Intellections of the dimmer order, and the Intellections There are vivid perceptions.
8.
So much for the thing of sense; but it would appear that the prototype There of the living form, the universal horse, must look deliberately towards this sphere; and, that being so, the idea of horse must have been worked out in order there be a horse here?
Yet what was that there to present the idea of the horse it was desired to produce? Obviously the idea of horse must exist before there was any planning to make a horse; it could not be thought of in order