nvertive energy, it sees its own essence, the powers which it
contains, the harmonic reasons from which it consists, and the many lives
of which it is the middle boundary, and thus finds itself to be a
rational world, the image of the prior natures, from which it proceeds,
but the paradigm of such as are posterior to itself. To this energy of
the soul, theoretic arithmetic and geometry greatly contribute, for these
remove it from the senses, purify the intellect from the irrational forms
of life with which it is surrounded, and lead it to the incorporeal
perception of ideas. For if these sciences receive the soul replete with
images, and knowing nothing subtile and unattended with material
garrulity; and if they elucidate reasons possessing an irrefragable
necessity of demonstration, and forms full of all certainty and
immateriality, and which by no means call to their aid the inaccuracy of
sensibles, do they not evidently purify our intellectual life from things
which fill us with a privation of intellect, and which impede our
perception of true being?

After both these operations of the rational soul, let us now survey her
highest intelligence, through which she sees her sister souls in the
universe, who are allotted a residence in the heavens, and in the whole
of a visible nature, according to the will of the fabricator of the
world. But above all souls, she sees intellectual essences and orders.
For a deiform intellect resides above every soul, and which also imparts
to the soul an intellectual habit. Prior to these, however, she sees
those divine monads, from which all intellectual multitudes receive their
unions. For above all things united, there must necessarily be unific
causes; above things vivified, vivifying causes; above intellectual
natures, those that impart intellect; and above all participants,
imparticipable natures. From all these elevating modes of intelligence,
it must be obvious to such as are not perfectly blind, how the soul,
leaving sense and body behind, surveys through the projecting energies of
intellect those beings that are entirely exempt from all connection with
a corporeal nature.

The rational and intellectual soul therefore, in whatever manner it may
be moved according to nature, is beyond body and sense. And hence it must
necessarily have an essence separate from both. But from this again, it
becomes manifest, that when it energizes according to its nature, it is
superior to Fate, an