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Today, we are pleased to present excerpts from “The Second Ennead: Second Tractate – The Heavenly Circuit” from the book “The Six Enneads by Plotinus,” translated by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page. Section 1 “But from where is that circular movement? In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle. And does this movement belong to the material part or the Soul? Can we account for it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once for center and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving, or that, being self-centered, it is not of unlimited extension [and consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent], and that its revolution carries the material mass with it? If the Soul had been the moving power [by any such semi-physical action], it would be so no longer; it would have accomplished the act of moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end to this endless revolution. […]If the soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the Cosmos nor would the Cosmos, a thing of body, keep its content alive, for the life of body is movement. Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it will be not that of Soul untrammeled, but that of a material frame ensouled an animated organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a thing at once carried forward and at rest. […]Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates that quality of universal presence to the Heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it. If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Cosmos, too, brought so far, would halt: but the Soul encompasses all, and so the Cosmos moves, seeking everything. […]If the soul were stationary, that is if [instead of presiding over a Cosmos] it dwelt wholly and solely in the realm in which every member is at rest, motion would be unknown; but, since the Soul is not fixed in some one station There, the Cosmos must travel to every point in quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle, therefore.”
