Bodies- those, for example, of animals and plants- are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity.Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from Reality.Since, thus, bodies take their rise from unity, but not "unity" in the sense of the complete unity or Unity-Absolute- for this could never yield discrete plurality- it remains that they be derived from a unity Pluralized.But the creative principle [in bodies] is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity.
We then ask whether the plurality here consists of the Reason-Principles of the things of process.Or is this unity not something different from the mere sum of these Principles? Certainly Soul itself is one Reason-Principle, the chief of the Reason-Principles, and these are its Act as it functions in accordance with its essential being; this essential being, on the other hand, is the potentiality of the Reason-Principles.This is the mode in which this unity is a plurality, its plurality being revealed by the effect it has upon the external.
But, to leave the region of its effect, suppose we take it at the higher non-effecting part of Soul; is not plurality of powers to be found in this part also? The existence of this higher part will, we may presume, be at once conceded.
But is this existence to be taken as identical with that of the stone? Surely not.Being in the case of the stone is not Being pure and simple, but stone-being: so here; Soul's being denotes not merely Being but Soul-being.
Is then that "being" distinct from what else goes to complete the essence [or substance] of Soul? Is it to be identified with Bring [the Absolute], while to some differentia of Being is ascribed the production of Soul? No doubt Soul is in a sense Being, and this is not as a man "is" white, but from the fact of its being purely an essence: in other words, the being it possesses it holds from no source external to its own essence.
6.But must it not draw on some source external to its essence, if it is to be conditioned, not only by Being, but by being an entity of a particular character? But if it is conditioned by a particular character, and this character is external to its essence, its essence does not comprise all that makes it Soul; its individuality will determine it; a part of Soul will be essence, but not Soul entire.
Furthermore, what being will it have when we separate it from its other components? The being of a stone? No: the being must be a form of Being appropriate to a source, so to speak, and a first-principle, or rather must take the forms appropriate to all that is comprised in Soul's being: the being here must, that is, be life, and the life and the being must be one.
One, in the sense of being one Reason-Principle? No; it is the substrate of Soul that is one, though one in such a way as to be also two or more- as many as are the Primaries which constitute Soul.Either, then, it is life as well as Substance, or else it possesses life.
But if life is a thing possessed, the essence of the possessor is not inextricably bound up with life.If, on the contrary, this is not possession, the two, life and Substance, must be a unity.
Soul, then, is one and many- as many as are manifested in that oneness- one in its nature, many in those other things.A single Existent, it makes itself many by what we may call its motion: it is one entire, but by its striving, so to speak, to contemplate itself, it is a plurality; for we may imagine that it cannot bear to be a single Existent, when it has the power to be all that it in fact is.
The cause of its appearing as many is this contemplation, and its purpose is the Act of the Intellect; if it were manifested as a bare unity, it could have no intellection, since in that simplicity it would already be identical with the object of its thought.
7.What, then, are the several entities observable in this plurality?
We have found Substance [Essence] and life simultaneously present in Soul.Now, this Substance is a common property of Soul, but life, common to all souls, differs in that it is a property of Intellect also.
Having thus introduced Intellect and its life we make a single genus of what is common to all life, namely, Motion.Substance and the Motion, which constitutes the highest life, we must consider as two genera; for even though they form a unity, they are separable to thought which finds their unity not a unity; otherwise, it could not distinguish them.
Observe also how in other things Motion or life is clearly separated from Being- a separation impossible, doubtless, in True Being, but possible in its shadow and namesake.In the portrait of a man much is left out, and above all the essential thing, life: the "Being" of sensible things just such a shadow of True Being, an abstraction from that Being complete which was life in the Archetype; it is because of this incompleteness that we are able in the Sensible world to separate Being from life and life from Being.
Being, then, containing many species, has but one genus.Motion, however, is to be classed as neither a subordinate nor a supplement of Being but as its concomitant; for we have not found Being serving as substrate to Motion.Motion is being Act; neither is separated from the other except in thought; the two natures are one; for Being is inevitably actual, not potential.
No doubt we observe Motion and Being separately, Motion as contained in Being and Being as involved in Motion, and in the individual they may be mutually exclusive; but the dualism is an affirmation of our thought only, and that thought sees either form as a duality within a unity.