life, it will remember less and less; friends, children, wife, will be gradually forgotten; ultimately,
we shall know nothing of the things of this world, but only contemplate the intellectual realm.
There will be no memory of personality, which, in contemplative vision, is unaware of itself. The
soul will become one with nous, but not to its own destruction: nous and the individual soul will
be simultaneously two and one ( IV, 4, 2).
In the Fourth Ennead, which is on the Soul, one section, the Seventh Tractate, is devoted to the
discussion of immortality.
The body, being compound, is clearly not immortal; if, then, it is part of us, we are not wholly
immortal. But what is the relation of the soul to the body? Aristotle (who is not mentioned
explicitly) said the soul was the form of the body, but Plotinus rejects this view, on the ground
that the intellectual act would be impossible if the soul were any form of body. The Stoics think
that the soul is material, but the unity of the soul proves that this is impossible. Moreover, since
matter is passive, it cannot have created itself; matter could not exist if soul had not created it,
and, if soul did not exist, matter would disappear in a twinkling. The soul is neither matter nor the
form of a material body, but Essence, and Essence is eternal. This view is implicit in Plato's
argument that the soul is immortal because ideas are eternal; but it is only with Plotinus that it
becomes explicit.
How does the soul enter the body from the aloofness of the intellectual world? The answer is,
through appetite. But appetite, though sometimes ignoble, may be comparatively noble. At best,
the soul "has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-
Principle (nous)." That is to say, soul contemplates the inward realm of essence, and wishes to
produce something, as like it as possible, that can be seen by looking without instead of looking
within--like (we might say) a composer who first imagines his music, and then wishes to hear it
performed by an orchestra.
But this desire of the soul to create has unfortunate results. So long as the soul lives in the pure
world of essence, it is not separated from other souls living in the same world; but as soon as it
becomes joined to a body, it has the task of governing what is lower than itself, and by this task it
becomes separate from other souls, which have other bodies. Except in a few men at a few
moments, the soul becomes