PLOTINUS, "THE ENNEADS"...EXCERPT

"8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation ? By this I mean, not the faculty in the soul which is one with the emanations from the Intellectual -Principle, but the Intellectual -Principle itself (Divine-Mind). "This also we possess as the summit of our being. An we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate possession : or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is, in common, since It is indivisible --one, everywhere and always Its entire self --and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul (i.e. In the intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul). "Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual -Principle , concentrated, one. "And how do we possess the divinity? In that the Divinity is poised upon the Intellectual -Principle and Authentic -Existence ; and we come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul--we read--and that Soul which is divided among living bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one and undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not merely by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught in many mirrors. "The first of these images is (the faculty of) Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth of all production of offspring --offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering Soul which (has no direct action within matter but ) produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions." P.9-10, "The Animate and The Man," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)