12. Concerning what would it be most worth while to speak, except the Soul? Let us therefore know ourselves. 13. Without virtue, God is but a name. 14. The object of virtue is to separate the soul from the body. 15. We can never become perfect, because he who thinks himself so has already forgotten the supreme divinity towards which he must hasten. 16. The world was created by a concurrence of intelligence and necessity. 17. The Soul is the image, word, and interpreter of the One. 18. The divinities though present to many human beings often reveal themselves only to some one person, because he alone is able to contemplate them. 19. To act without suffering is the sign of a great power. 20. Only virtue is independent. 21. We are beautiful when we know ourselves. 22. The Soul is the child of the universal Father. 23. True happiness is being wise, and exercising this within oneself. 24. To become again what one was originally is to live in the Superior world. 25. The desired goal is not to cease failing, but to grow divine. 26. Virtue demands preliminary purification. 27. Our effort at assimilation should be directed not at mere respectability, but at the gods themselves. 28. One should study mathematics in order to accustom oneself to think of incorporeal things, and to believe in their existence. 29. Soul is not in body, but body in Soul. 30. The Soul's higher part remains in heaven. 31. We should not leave the earth, but not be of it. 32. The object of life is not to avoid evil, or copy the good, but to become good. 33. Dying, to Eustochius: "I am awaiting you, in order to draw the divine in me to the divine in all." FOOTNOTES: [1] It is significant that the subject of the first treatise of Plotinos, after the departure of Porphyry, should treat of happiness as the object of life. These may have been the arguments he advanced to persuade Porphyry to abstain from suicide (to which he refers in sections 8, 16), and, rather, to take a trip to Sicily, the land of natural beauty. He also speaks of losing friends, in section 8. The next book, on Providence, may also have been inspired by reflections on this untoward and unexpected circumstance. We see also a change from abstract speculation to his more youthful fancy and comparative learning and culture. [2] Diog. Laert. x.; Cicero, de Fin. i. 14, 46. [3] Cicero, de Fin. 11, 26. [4] See Arist. Nic. Eth. vii. 13; Sextus Empiricus, Hypotyp. Pyrrhon, iii. 180; Stob. Ecl. ii. 7. [5] Arist. Nic. Eth. i. 10, 14. [6] Stob. Floril. i. 76. [7] See vi. 8. [8] In Plutarch, of Wickedness, and in Seneca, de Tranquil, Animi, 14. [9] De Providentia, 3. [10] De Provid. 5. [11] Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 327. [12] The vegetative soul, the power that presides over the nutrition and growth of the body; see iv. 3.23. [13] See i. 8; also Numenius, 16. [14] i. 2.4. [15] Cicero, Tusculans. ii. 7. [16] The animal; see i. 1.10. [17] See i. 1.8, 10.