Still, admitting the diversity of the Reason-principles, why need there by as many as there are men born in each Period, once it is granted that different beings may take external manifestation under the presence of the same principles?
Under the presence of all; agreed: but with the dominance of the very same? That is still open to question.
May we not take it that there may be identical reproduction from one Period to another but not in the same Period?
3.In the case of twin birth among human beings how can we make out the Reason-Principles to be different; and still more when we turn to the animals and especially those with litters?
Where the young are precisely alike, there is one Reason-Principle.
But this would mean that after all there are not as many Reason Principles as separate beings?
As many as there are of differing beings, differing by something more than a mere failure in complete reproduction of their Idea.
And why may not this [sharing of archetype] occur also in beings untouched by differentiation, if indeed there be any such?
A craftsman even in constructing an object identical with a model must envisage that identity in a mental differentiation enabling him to make a second thing by bringing in some difference side by side with the identity: similarly in nature, where the thing comes about not by reasoning but in sole virtue of Reason-Principles, that differentiation must be included in the archetypal idea, though it is not in our power to perceive the difference.
The consideration of Quantity brings the same result:
If production is undetermined in regard to Quantity, each thing has its distinct Reason-Principle: if there is a measured system the Quantity has been determined by the unrolling and unfolding of the Reason-Principles of all the existences.
Thus when the universe has reached its term, there will be a fresh beginning, since the entire Quantity which the Kosmos is to exhibit, every item that is to emerge in its course, all is laid up from the first in the Being that contains the Reason-Principles.
Are we, then, looking to the brute realm, to hold that there are as many Reason-Principles as distinct creatures born in a litter?
Why not? There is nothing alarming about such limitlessness in generative forces and in Reason-Principles, when Soul is there to sustain all.
As in Soul [principle of Life] so in Divine Mind [principle of Idea] there is this infinitude of recurring generative powers; the Beings there are unfailing.
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
ON THE INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.
1.It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being.It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation.
Let us go to the realm of magnitudes: Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman's hands into some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor's art has concentrated all loveliness.
Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist's hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone- for so the crude block would be as pleasant- but in virtue of the form or idea introduced by the art.This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art.The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the material.
Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external.In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.
Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effect can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives from an art yet higher.
Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognise that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking.Thus Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.