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The Second Ennead, First Tractate On the Cosmos or on the Heavenly System Section 1“The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of idea.”Section 2 “Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and body or by soul only or by body only. […]When one holds that body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence: this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of the union envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary [in the Heavens] even Matter must conduce to the scheme of the standing result.”Section 3 “We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physical mass of the universe, could serve towards the immortality of the Cosmos. And our answer is ‘Because the flux is not outgoing:’ where there is motion within but not outwards and the total remains unchanged, there is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Cosmos never ages.We have a parallel in our Earth, constant from eternity to pattern and to mass; the air, too, never fails; and there is always water: all the changes of these elements leave unchanged the Principle of the total living thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a ceaseless shifting of particles – and that with outgoing loss – and yet the individual persists for a long time: where there is no question of an outside region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as against the identity and endless duration of the living thing.”
