WHICH OF OUR TWO SOULS IS THE GENUINE INDIVIDUALITY?
Our genuine selves are what is essentially "us"; we are the principle to which Nature has given the power to triumph over the passions. For, if we be surrounded by evils because of the body, nevertheless, the divinity has given us virtue, which "knows of no master"[223] (is not subject to any compulsion). Indeed we need virtue not so much when we are in a calm state, but when its absence exposes us to evils. We must, therefore, flee from here below;[230] we must divorce ourselves from the body added to us in generation, and apply ourselves to the effort to cease being this animal, this composite in which the predominant element is the nature of the body, a nature which is only a trace of the soul, and which causes animal life[231] to pertain chiefly to the body. Indeed, all that relates to this life is corporeal. The other soul (the reasonable soul, which is superior to the vegetative soul), is not in the body; she rises to the beautiful, to the divine, and to all the intelligible things, which depend on nothing else. She then seeks to identify herself with them, and lives conformably to the divinity when retired within herself (in contemplation). Whoever is deprived of this soul (that is, whoever does not exercise the faculties of the reasonable soul), lives in subjection to fatality.[222] Then the actions of such a being are not only indicated by the stars, but he himself becomes a part of the world, and he depends on the world of which he forms a part. Every man is double,[232] for every man contains both the composite (organism), and the real man (which constitutes the reasonable soul).