Note 268 — SECOND ENNEAD, BOOK THREE. Whether Astrology is of any Value.198

Plotinos here makes in the world-Soul a distinction analogous to that obtaining in the human one (where there is a reasonable soul, and its image, the vegetative soul, see i. 1.8–12; iv. 4. 13, 14). Here he asserts that there are two souls; the superior soul (the principal power of the soul, which receives the forms from Intelligence (see iv. 4.9–12, 35), and the inferior soul (nature, or the generative power), which transmits them to matter, so as to fashion it by seminal reasons (see iii. 4.13, 14, 22, 27). Bouillet, no doubt remembering Plotinos's own earlier invectives against those who divided the world-soul (ii. 9.6), evidently directed against Amelius and the Numenian influence, which till then he had followed—tries to minimize it, claiming that this does not mean two different hypostases, but only two functions of one and the same hypostasis. But he acknowledges that this gave the foundation for Plotinos's successors' distinction between the supermundane and the mundane souls (hyperkosmios, and egkosmios). Plotinos was therefore returning to Numenius's two world-souls (fr. 16), which was a necessary logical consequence of his belief in two human souls (fr. 53), as he himself had taught in iii. 8.5. Plotinos objectifies this doubleness of the soul in the myth of the two Hercules, in the next book, i. 1.12.