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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
Plotinus Resources OnLine and in Print
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» Contents of this Ennead
II: 69 pages - You are on Page 48
12. (17) A further consideration is that if every soul is to be held dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be: if it is pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is mortal, and another, that of the All, let us suppose, is immortal, we demand to know the reason of the difference alleged.
Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches the same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of the celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking to win to what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the primal source.
Again: the soul’s understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal.
Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment, must in the nature of things be broken apart by that very mode which brought it together: but the soul is one and simplex, living not in the sense of potential reception of life but by its own energy; and this can be no cause of dissolution.
But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been divided (in the body) and so becoming fragmentary.
No: the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity.
May not it change and so come to destruction?
No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying substance: and that could not happen to anything except a compound.
If it can be destroyed in no such ways, it is necessarily indestructible.
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/plotinus/enneads-4b.asp?pg=48
