ALL SOULS ARE UNITED BY THEIR HIGHEST, WITH INTELLIGENCE SHINING DOWN
FROM THE PEAK THEY FORM.
15. Who then will be able to contemplate this multiple and universal
Life, primary and one, without being charmed therewith, and without
scorning every other kind of life? For our lives here below, that
are so weak, impotent, incomplete, whose impurity soils other lives,
can be considered as nothing but tenebrous. As soon as you consider
these lives, you no longer see the others, you no longer live with
these other lives in which everything is living; which are relieved
of all impurity, and of all contact with evil. Indeed, evil reigns
here below only[164]; here where we have but a trace of Intelligence
and of the intelligible life. On the contrary, in the intelligible
world exists "that archetype which is beneficent (which possesses the
form of Good"), as says Plato,[101] because it possesses good by the
forms (that is, by the ideas). Indeed, the absolute Good is something
different from the Intelligence which is good only because its life
is passed in contemplating the Good. The objects contemplated by
Intelligence are the essences which have the form of Good, and which
it possesses from the moment it contemplates the Good. Intelligence
receives the Good, not such as the Good is in itself, but such as
Intelligence is capable of receiving it. The Good is indeed the
supreme principle. From the Good therefore, Intelligence derives its
perfection; to the Good Intelligence owes its begetting of all the
intelligible entities; on the one hand, Intelligence could not consider
the Good without thinking it; on the other, it must not have seen in
the Good the intelligible entities, otherwise, Intelligence itself
could not have begotten them. Thus Intelligence has, from the Good,
received the power to beget, and to fill itself with that which it has
begotten.[102] The Good does not Himself possess the things which He
thus donates; for He is absolutely one, and that which has been given
to Intelligence is manifold. Incapable in its plenitude to embrace, and
in its unity to possess the power it was receiving, Intelligence split
it up, thus rendering it manifold, so as to possess it at least in
fragments. Thus everything begotten by Intelligence proceeds from the
power derived from the Good, and bears its form; as intelligence itself
is good, and as it is composed of things that bear the form of Good, it
is a varied good. The reader may be assisted in forming a conception of
it by imagining a variegated living sphere, or a composite of animated
and brilliant faces. Or again, imagine pure souls, pure and complete
(in their essence), all united by their highest (faculties), and then
universal Intelligence seated on this summit, and illuminating the
whole intelligible region. In this simile, the reader who imagines
it considers it as something outside of himself; but (to contemplate
Intelligence) one has to become Intelligence, and then give oneself a
panorama of oneself.