10.But failure There? What can defensive horns serve to There? To sufficiency as living form, to completeness.That principle must be complete as living form, complete as Intellect, complete as life, so that if it is not to be one thing it may be another.Its characteristic difference is in this power of being now this, now that, so that, summing all, it may be the completest life-form, Intelligence complete, life in greatest fulness with each of the particulars complete in its degree while yet, over all that multiplicity, unity reigns.
If all were one identity, the total could not contain this variety of forms; there would be nothing but a self-sufficing unity.Like every compound it must consist of things progressively differing in form and safeguarded in that form.This is in the very nature of shape and Reason-Principle; a shape, that of man let us suppose, must include a certain number of differences of part but all dominated by a unity; there will be the noble and the inferior, eye and finger, but all within a unity; the part will be inferior in comparison with the total but best in its place.The Reason-Principle, too, is at once the living form and something else, something distinct from the being of that form.It is so with virtue also; it contains at once the universal and the particular; and the total is good because the universal is not differentiated.
11.The very heavens, patently multiple, cannot be thought to disdain any form of life since this universe holds everything.Now how do these things come to be here? Does the higher realm contain all of the lower?
All that has been shaped by Reason-Principle and conforms to Idea.
But, having fire [warmth] and water, it will certainly have vegetation; how does vegetation exist There? Earth, too? either these are alive or they are There as dead things and then not everything There has life.How in sum can the things of this realm be also There?
Vegetal life we can well admit, for the plant is a Reason-Principle established in life.If in the plant the Reason-Principle, entering Matter and constituting the plant, is a certain form of life, a definite soul, then, since every Reason-Principle is a unity, then either this of plant-life is the primal or before it there is a primal plant, source of its being: that first plant would be a unity; those here, being multiple, must derive from a unity.This being so, that primal must have much the truer life and be the veritable plant, the plants here deriving from it in the secondary and tertiary degree and living by a vestige of its life.
But earth; how is there earth There: what is the being of earth and how are we to represent to ourselves the living earth of that realm?
First, what is it, what the mode of its being?
Earth, here and There alike, must possess shape and a Reason-Principle.Now in the case of the vegetal, the Reason-Principle of the plant here was found to be living in that higher realm: is there such a Reason-Principle in our earth?
Take the most earthy of things found shaped in earth and they exhibit, even they, the indwelling earth-principle.The growing and shaping of stones, the internal moulding of mountains as they rise, reveal the working of an ensouled Reason-Principle fashioning them from within and bringing them to that shape: this, we must take it, is the creative earth-principle corresponding to what we call the specific principle of a tree; what we know as earth is like the wood of the tree; to cut out a stone is like lopping a twig from a tree, except of course that there is no hurt done, the stone remaining a member of the earth as the twig, uncut, of the tree.
Realizing thus that the creative force inherent in our earth is life within a Reason-Principle, we are easily convinced that the earth There is much more primally alive, that it is a reasoned Earth-Livingness, the earth of Real-Being, earth primally, the source of ours.
Fire, similarly, with other such things, must be a Reason-Principle established in Matter: fire certainly does not originate in the friction to which it may be traced; the friction merely brings out a fire already existent in the scheme and contained in the materials rubbed together.Matter does not in its own character possess this fire-power: the true cause is something informing the Matter, that is to say, a Reason-Principle, obviously therefore a soul having the power of bringing fire into being; that is, a life and a Reason-Principle in one.
It is with this in mind that Plato says there is soul in everything of this sphere.That soul is the cause of the fire of the sense-world; the cause of fire here is a certain Life of fiery character, the more authentic fire.That transcendent fire being more truly fire will be more veritably alive; the fire absolute possesses life.And the same principles apply to the other elements, water and air.
Why, then, are water and air not ensouled as earth is?