in so far as the material is incapable of being assimilated to a completely immaterial principle; however, the incorporeal is present to the corporeal in so far as the corporeal can be assimilated thereto. Nor is the incorporeal present to the material by receptivity (in the sense that one of these two substances would receive something from the other); otherwise the material and the immaterial would be altered; the former, on receiving the immaterial, into which it would be transformed, and the latter, on becoming material. Therefore, when a relation is established between two substances that are as different as the corporeal and the incorporeal, an assimilation and participation that is reciprocal to the power of the one, and the impotence of the other, occurs. That is why the world always remains very distant from the power of real existence, and the latter from the impotence of material nature. But that which occupies the middle, that which simultaneously assimilates and is assimilated, that which unites the extremes, becomes a cause of error in respect to them, because the substances it brings together by assimilation are very different. RELATION OF INDIVIDUAL SOULS TO THE UNIVERSAL SOUL. 39. "It[341] would be wrong to suppose that the manifoldness of souls was derived from the manifoldness of bodies. The individual souls, as well as the universal Soul, subsist independently of the bodies, without the unity of the universal Soul absorbing the manifoldness of individual souls, and without the manifoldness of the latter splitting up the unity of the universal Soul." Individual souls are distinct without being separated from each other, and without dividing the universal Soul into a number of parts; they are united to each other without becoming confused, and without making the universal Soul a mere total; "for they are not separated by limits," and they are not confused with each other; "they are as distinct from each other as different sciences in a single soul." Further, individual souls are not contained in the universal Soul as if they were bodies, that is, like really different substances (?), for they are qualitative actualizations of the soul. Indeed, "the power of the universal Soul is infinite," and all that participates in her is soul; all the souls form the universal Soul, and, nevertheless, the universal Soul exists independently of all individual souls. Just as one does not arrive at the incorporeal by infinite division of bodies, seeing that such a division would modify them only in respect to magnitude, likewise, on infinitely dividing the soul, which is a living form, we reach nothing but species (not individuals); for the Soul contains specific differences, and she exists entire with them as well as without them. Indeed, though the Soul should be divided within herself, her diversity does not destroy her identity. If the unity of bodies, in which manifoldness prevails over identity, is not broken up by their