THE HIGHER REGION REACHED ONLY BY THOSE WHO ARE BORN PHILOSOPHERS.
2. Which is this higher region? What must be done to reach it? One must be naturally disposed to love, and be really a born philosopher.[108] In the presence of beauty, the lover feels something similar to the pains of childbirth; but far from halting at bodily beauty, he rises to that aroused in the soul by virtue, duties, science and laws. Then he follows them up to the cause of their beauty, and in this ascending progress stops only when he has reached the Principle that occupies the first rank, that which is beautiful in itself.[109] Then only does he cease being driven by this torment that we compare to the pains of childbirth.
LOVE IS TRANSFORMED INTO PROGRESSIVELY HIGHER STAGES.
But how does he rise up thither? How does he have the power to do so? How does he learn to love? Here it is. The beauty seen in bodies is incidental; it consists in the shapes of which the bodies are the matter.[110] Consequently the substance changes, and it is seen changing from beauty to ugliness. The body has only a borrowed beauty. Who imparted that beauty to the body? On the one hand, the presence of beauty; on the other, the actualization of the soul which fashioned the body, and which gave it the shape it possesses. But is the soul, by herself, absolute beauty? No, since some souls are wise and beautiful, while some others are foolish and ugly. It is therefore only by wisdom that the soul is beautiful. But from what is her wisdom derived? Necessarily from intelligence; not from the intelligence that is intelligent at some time, though not at others, but from the genuine Intelligence, which is beautiful on that very account.[111] Shall we stop at Intelligence, as a first principle? Or shall we on the contrary still rise above it? Surely so, for Intelligence presents itself to us before the first Principle only because it is, so to speak, located in the antechamber of the Good.[112] It bears all things within itself, and manifests them, so that it displays the image of the Good in manifoldness, while the Good itself remains in an absolute simple unity.
PROOFS FOR THE EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE.
3. Let us now consider the Intelligence which reason tells us is absolute essence and genuine "being," and whose existence we have already established in a different manner. It would seem ridiculous to inquire whether Intelligence form part of the scale of beings; but there are men who doubt it, or who at least are disposed to ask for a demonstration that Intelligence possesses the nature we predicate of it, that it is separated (from matter), that it is identical with the essences, and that it contains the ideas. This is our task.
IN THE HUMAN WORLD EVERYTHING IS A COMPOSITE OF FORM AND MATTER.
All things that we consider to be essences are composites; nothing is simple or single, either in works of art, or in the products of nature.[113] Works of art, indeed, contain metal, wood, stone, and are derived from these substances only by the labor of the artist, who, by giving matter its form makes of it a statue, or bed, or house. Among the products of nature, those that are compounds or mixtures may be analyzed into the form impressed on the elements of the compound; so, for instance, we may in a man, distinguish a soul and body, and in the body four elements. Since the very matter of the elements, taken in itself, has no form, every object seems composed of matter and of some principle that supplies it with form.[114] So we are led to ask whence matter derives its form, and to seek whether the soul is simple, or whether it contains two parts, one of which plays the parts of matter, and the other of form,[115] so that the first part would be similar to the form received by the metal of a statue, and the latter to the principle which produces the form itself.
THE WORLD-SOUL ALSO IS A COMPOUND OF FORM AND MATTER.
Applying this conception to the universe, we rise to Intelligence, recognizing therein the demiurgic creator of the world. It was in receiving from it its shapes by the intermediation of another principle, the universal Soul, that the (material) substances became water, air, earth and fire. On the one hand, the Soul shapes the four elements of the world;[116] on the other, she receives from Intelligence the (seminal) reasons,[117] as the souls of the artists themselves receive from the arts the reasons which they work out.[118] In Intelligence, therefore, there is a part which is the form of the soul; it is intelligence considered, as shape. There is another which imparts shape, like the sculptor who gives the metal the shape of the statue, and which in itself possesses all it gives.[119] Now the (shapes) which the Intelligence imparts to the soul connect with the truth as closely as possible, while those which the soul imparts to the body are only images and appearances.[120]