THE SOUL, AS COMPRISING MANY SOULS, IS INFINITE.
Let us first explain how there can be a plurality of intelligences, souls, and essences. If we consider the things that proceed from the first principles, as they are numbers and not magnitudes, we shall also have to ask ourselves how they fill the universe. This plurality which thus arises from the first principles does not in any way help us to solve our question, since we have granted that essence is multiple because of the difference (of the beings that proceed from it), and not by place; for though it be multiple, it is simultaneously entire; "essence everywhere touches essence,"[2] and it is everywhere entirely present. Intelligence likewise is manifold by the difference (of the intelligences that proceed therefrom), and not by space; it is entire everywhere. It is so also with souls; even their part which is divisible in the bodies is indivisible by its nature. But the bodies possess extension because the soul is present with them; or rather, it is because there are bodies in the sense-world; it is because the power of the Soul (that is universal) which is in them manifests itself in all their parts, that the Soul herself seems to have parts. What proves that she is not divided as they are, and with them, that she is entirely present everywhere, is that by nature she is essentially one and indivisible. Thus, the unity of the Soul does not exclude the plurality of souls, any more than the unity of essence excludes the plurality of (beings), or that the plurality of intelligibles does not disagree with the existence of the One. It is not necessary to admit that the Soul imparts life to the bodies by the plurality of souls, nor that that plurality derives from the extension of the body (of the world). Before there ever were any bodies, there was already one (universal) Soul and several (individual) souls. The individual souls existed already in the universal Soul, not potentially, but each in actuality. The unity of the universal Soul does not hinder the multitude of the individual souls contained within her; the multitude of the individual souls does not hinder the unity of the universal Soul. They are distinct without being separated by any interval; they are present to each other instead of being foreign to each other; for they are not separated from each other by any limits, any more than different sciences are within a single soul. The Soul is such that in her unity she contains all the souls. Such a nature is, therefore, infinite.