Whilst every image of the universe is deceptive, since its true nature is beyond our apprehension, Plotinus invites us to picture the Triad, as Dante did, by concentric circles through which radiate the energy and splendour of the “flower of all beauty,” the Transcendent One. “The first act is the act of the Good, at rest within itself, and the first existence is the self-contained existence of the Good. But there is also an act upon it, that of the _Nous_; which, as it were, lives about it. And the Soul, outside, circles about the _Nous_, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of it, through it sees God” (I. 8. 2). Again, “The One is not a Being, but the Source of being, which is its first offspring. The One is perfect, that is, it has nothing, seeks nothing, needs nothing; but as we may say it overflows, and this overflowing is creative” (V. 1. 2). Yet this eternal creative action “beyond spirit, sense, and life,” involves no self-loss. It is the welling forth of an unquenchable spring, the eternal fountain of life. As Christian Platonists described the Son as the self-expression of the Father, so Plotinus describes his second Divine Principle as the eternal irradiation of the Absolute—_il ciel che più della sua luce prende_. This principle he calls _Nous_; a word carrying many shades of meaning, which the older commentators generally rendered as Divine Mind, or Intelligible Principle. Dean Inge has shown good reason for translating it as “Spirit,” thus bringing the language of Plotinus into line with the many later mystics who derive from him. As a matter of fact, _Nous_ contains both meanings. It is more spiritual than mind, more intellectual than spirit, in the sense in which that word is commonly employed. Those mediæval theologians who made a mystical identification between the Hebrew conception of the Eternal Wisdom as we find it described in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and the Second Person of the Trinity, came very near the Plotinian concept of _Nous_, which is at once Intelligence and the intelligible sphere, Spirit and the spiritual universe; the home of reality, and object of religious and poetic intuition. It is, in one aspect, the “Father and Companion” of the soul (V. 1. 3), in another “the Intellectual Universe, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as intelligence in us” (I. 8. 2). This is the “Yonder” to which he so often refers; the “middle heaven” of Indian philosophy, Ruysbroeck’s “clear-shining world between ourselves and God.” “... e questo cielo non ha altro dove Che la mente divina,” says Dante; once more condensing the whole Neoplatonic vision in one vivid phrase.