Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor.

  • Plotinus
Date:
1817
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    603/700 (page 509)
    ever, one and the same relationship of souls and bodies. For it is not congruous to souls to be born on the earth from the same parents, but to flow from one fountain. But the nature of the world imparts two fountains ; the one indeed being luminous, but the other obscure and dark. And the one scatters its streams from the earth, as having its roots beneath, and leaps from terrene caverns, in order that it may offer violence to the divine law. But the other is suspended from the back of heaven.2 And it is sent from thence, in¬ deed, for the purpose of adorning the terrene allot¬ ment. In descending, however, it is ordered to be careful, lest in adorning and arranging that which is disorderly and unadorned, it should itself become, by approximating to it, filled with turpitude and deformity. But the law of Themis proclaims to souls, that whatever soul, in associating with the last of things, preserves its own nature free from contamination, shall again by the same way [in which it descended] be restored to the fountain I from which it was derived;4 just as the souls which after a certain manner are impelled from the 1 i. e. From an intelligible essence. % See my translation of the Phsedrus of Plato.