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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 29
In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not: body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to erect some one mode of body into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul body would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist: the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to bring Matter to shape.
Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of “soul,” remains air, fleeting breath [the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, “spirit” in the lower sense], whose very unity is not drawn from itself.
All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the kosmos be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless haphazard drift? This pneuma — orderless except under soul — how can it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts.
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-4b.asp?pg=29
