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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
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» Contents of this Ennead
126 pages - You are on Page 38
16. The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the Living-Being is.
On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter must be examined later on from quite other considerations than occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul.
One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in succession — man followed by horse and other animals domestic or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all — that it watches these creations acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures.
Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the entire enchainment.
No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed by the Soul] covers all the action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.
Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the Reason-Principles?
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/plotinus/enneads-2.asp?pg=38
