4. The dignity of Intelligence may be appreciated in still another way.
After having admired the magnitude and beauty of the sense-world, the
eternal regularity of its movement, the visible or hidden divinities,
the animals and plants it contains, we may (taking our direction from
all this), rise to this world's archetype, a more real World. There
we may contemplate all the intelligible entities which are as eternal
as the intelligible world, and which there subsist within perfect
knowledge and life. There preside pure intelligence and ineffable
wisdom; there is located the real Saturnian realm,[226] which is
nothing else than pure intelligence. This indeed embraces every
immortal essence, every intelligence, every divinity, every soul;
everything there is eternal and immutable. Since its condition is
blissful, why should Intelligence change? Since it contains everything,
why should it aspire to anything? Since it is sovereignly perfect,
what need of development would it have? Its perfection is so much
completer, since it contains nothing but perfect things, and since
it thinks them; it thinks them, not because it seeks to know them,
but because it possesses them.[227] Its felicity is not in any way
contingent on anything else; itself is true eternity, of which time
furnishes a moving image of the sphere of the soul. Indeed, the soul's
action is successive, and divided by the different objects that attract
its attention. Now it thinks Socrates, and then it thinks a horse;
never does it grasp but one part of reality, while intelligence always
embraces all things simultaneously. Intelligence, therefore, possesses
all things immovable in identity. It is; it never has anything but the
present;[228] it has no future, for it already is all it could ever
later become; it has no past, for no intelligible entity ever passes
away; all of them subsist in an eternal present, all remain identical,
satisfied with their present condition. Each one is both intelligence
and existence; all together, they are universal Intelligence, universal
Existence.