History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [171]
Matter is created by Soul, and has no independent reality. Every Soul has its hour; when that strikes, it descends, and enters the body suitable to it. The motive is not reason, but something more analogous to sexual desire. When the soul leaves the body, it must enter another body if it has been sinful, for justice requires that it should be punished. If, in this life, you have murdered your mother, you will, in the next life, be a woman, and be murdered by your son (III, 2, 13). Sin must be punished; but the punishment happens naturally, through the restless driving of the sinner's errors.
Do we remember this life after we are dead? The answer is perfectly logical, but not what most modern theologians would say. Memory is concerned with our life in time, whereas our best and truest life is in eternity. Therefore, as the soul grows towards eternal life, it will remember less and less; friends, children, wife, will be gradually forgotten; ultimately, we shall know nothing of the things of this world, but only contemplate the intellectual realm. There will be no memory of personality, which, in contemplative vision, is unaware of itself. The soul will become one with nous, but not to its own destruction: nous and the individual soul will be simultaneously two and one (IV, 4, 2).
In the Fourth Ennead, which is on the Soul, one section, the Seventh Tractate, is devoted to the discussion of immortality.
The body, being compound, is clearly not immortal; if, then, it is part of us, we are not wholly immortal. But what is the relation of the soul to the body? Aristotle (who is not mentioned explicitly) said the soul was the form of the body, but Plotinus rejects this view, on the ground that the intellectual act would be impossible if the soul were any form of body. The Stoics think that the soul is material, but the unity of the soul proves that this is impossible. Moreover, since matter is passive, it cannot have created itself; matter could not exist if soul had not created it, and, if soul did not exist, matter would disappear in a twinkling. The soul is neither matter nor the form of a material body, but Essence, and Essence is eternal. This view is implicit in Plato's argument that the soul is immortal because ideas are eternal; but it is only with Plotinus that it becomes explicit.
How does the soul enter the body from the aloofness of the intellectual world? The answer is, through appetite. But appetite though sometimes ignoble, may be comparatively noble. At best, the soul 'has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-Principle (nous)'. That is to say, soul contemplates the inward realm of essence, and wishes to produce something, as like it as possible, that can be seen by looking without instead of looking within—like (we might say) a composer who first imagines his music, and then wishes to hear it performed by an orchestra.
But this desire of the soul to create has unfortunate results. So long as the soul lives in the pure world of essence, it is not separated from other souls living in the same world; but as soon as it becomes joined to a body, it has the task of governing what is lower than itself, and by this task it becomes separate from other souls, which have other bodies. Except in a few men at a few moments, the soul becomes chained to the body. 'The body obscures the truth, but there7 all stands out clear and separate' (IV, 9, 5).
This doctrine, like Plato's, has difficulty in avoiding the view that the creation was a mistake. The soul at its best is content with nous, the world of essence; if it were always at its best, it would not create, but only contemplate. It seems that the act of creation is to be excused on the ground that the created world, in its main lines, is the best that is logically possible; but this is