THE PROCESSION OF INTELLIGENCE IS AN EXCURSION DOWNWARDS AND UPWARDS.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Plotinus and Guthrie, Kenneth Sylvan
The procession of intelligence consists in descending to things that occupy the lowest rank, and which have an inferior nature,183 for Intelligence could not rise to the superior Nature. Obliged to act outside of itself, and not being able to remain self-enclosed, by a necessity and by a law of its nature, intelligence must advance unto the soul where it stops; then, after having communicated of itself to that which immediately follows it, intelligence must return to the intelligible world. Likewise, the soul has a double action in her double relation with what is below and above her. By her first action, the soul manages the body to which she is united; by the second, she contemplates the intelligible entities. These alternatives work out, for individual souls, with the course of time; and finally there occurs a conversion which brings them back from the lower to the higher natures.