The whole creation, says Plotinus, in one of his great poetic passages, is “awake and alive at every point.” Each thing has its own peculiar life in the all; though we, because our senses cannot discern the life within wood and stone, deny that life. “Their living is in secret, but they live” (IV. 4. 36). Here we are reminded of the Logos-Christ of the “Sayings”—“Raise the stone and thou shalt find me: cleave the wood, and there am I.” By this conception, which is elaborated from the doctrine of the world-soul in the _Timæus_, Neoplatonism bridges the gap between appearance and reality, and also solves the paradox of multitude in unity. “We do not declare the Soul to be one in the sense of entirely excluding multiplicity. This absolute oneness belongs only to the higher nature. We make it both one and manifold; it has part in the nature which is divided among bodies, but it has part also in the indivisible, and so again we find it to be one” (IV. 9. 2). Soul, which has in its highest manifestations many of the characters of Spirit, is the eternal upholder of the world of change. “Things have a beginning, and perish when the soul that leads the chorus-dance of life departs; but the soul itself is eternal and cannot suffer change ... what the soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more splendidly evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts the heavens; how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and ensouls it through all its extension, so that every fragment lives by the soul entire, which is present everywhere like the Father which begat it” (V. 1. 2). Soul, then, which is in one sense the reality of the world of becoming and immanent therein, is also a denizen of eternity, in virtue of its continuity with and direct dependence on _Nous_. An unbroken series of ascending values unites the world of living effort with the One. It is this which makes the system of Plotinus a philosophy of infinite adventure and infinite hope.