39. "It[341] would be wrong to suppose that the manifoldness of souls
was derived from the manifoldness of bodies. The individual souls,
as well as the universal Soul, subsist independently of the bodies,
without the unity of the universal Soul absorbing the manifoldness of
individual souls, and without the manifoldness of the latter splitting
up the unity of the universal Soul." Individual souls are distinct
without being separated from each other, and without dividing the
universal Soul into a number of parts; they are united to each other
without becoming confused, and without making the universal Soul a
mere total; "for they are not separated by limits," and they are not
confused with each other; "they are as distinct from each other as
different sciences in a single soul." Further, individual souls are
not contained in the universal Soul as if they were bodies, that
is, like really different substances (?), for they are qualitative
actualizations of the soul. Indeed, "the power of the universal Soul
is infinite," and all that participates in her is soul; all the souls
form the universal Soul, and, nevertheless, the universal Soul exists
independently of all individual souls. Just as one does not arrive
at the incorporeal by infinite division of bodies, seeing that such
a division would modify them only in respect to magnitude, likewise,
on infinitely dividing the soul, which is a living form, we reach
nothing but species (not individuals); for the Soul contains specific
differences, and she exists entire with them as well as without
them. Indeed, though the Soul should be divided within herself, her
diversity does not destroy her identity. If the unity of bodies, in
which manifoldness prevails over identity, is not broken up by their
union with an incorporeal principle; if, on the contrary, all of them
possess the unity of "being" or substance, and are divided only by
qualities and other forms; what shall we say or think of the species
of incorporeal life, where identity prevails over manifoldness, and
where there is no substrate alien to form, and from which bodies might
derive their unity? The unity of the Soul could not be split up by
her union with a body, though the body often hinder her operations.
Being identical, the Soul discovers everything by herself, because her
actualizations are species, however far the division be carried. When
the Soul is separated from bodies, each of her parts possesses all
the powers possessed by the Soul herself, just as an individual seed
has the same properties as the universal Seed (seminal reason). As
an individual seed, being united to matter, preserves the properties
of the universal Seed (seminal reason), and as, on the other hand,
universal Seed possesses all the properties of the individual seeds
dispersed within matter, thus the parts which we conceive of in the
(universal) Soul that is separated from matter, possess all the powers
of the universal Soul.[342] The individual soul, which declines towards
matter, is bound to the matter by the form which her disposition has
made her choose; but she preserves the powers of the universal Soul,
and she unites with her when the (individual soul) turns away from the
body, to concentrate within herself.
Now as in the course of her declination towards matter, the soul is
stripped entirely bare by the total exhaustion of her own faculties;
and as, on the contrary, on rising towards intelligence, she recovers
the fulness of the powers of the universal Soul,[343] the ancient
philosophers were right, in their mystic phrasing, to describe these
two opposite conditions of the Soul by the names of Penia and Poros,
(Wealth and Poverty).[344]