The World Soul

In Plato's Timaeus the Demiurge fashions a Soul for the whole world, blending the indivisible and the divisible, sameness and difference, and dividing the mixture according to harmonic ratios before setting the cosmos turning as a single living being endowed with intelligence. The visible universe is thus not dead matter but one great animal, ensouled, rational, and beautiful.

For Plotinus the World Soul is the third hypostasis, proceeding from Intellect. It faces in two directions at once: upward, contemplating the Forms in Intellect, and downward, giving life, order, and motion to the material world through the formative principles (logoi) it carries. Individual souls are, in a sense, expressions or members of this one Soul, sharing its double life.

Soul is thus the great mediator of the cosmos, at home in both worlds and binding them together — the eternal patterns above to the realm of time and change below. The doctrine gave the tradition a living, intelligible universe, and through the Timaeus it shaped cosmology, and even theology, for many centuries.