The ethical system of Plato appears to be a strict deduction from his physical. As man in his view is a compound of matter, vivified by a portion of the world-soul, which the divine reason takes and unites with a portion of itself, so his virtues correspond to this threefold composition.(380) For man has an immortal portion in his soul, the reason, the godlike, in him, but the divine reason, in joining a portion of the world-soul with matter, invests it with two mortal parts, one the courageous, or manly, the other, sensuous desire, or the female element, having their seat in the body’s activity. To these answer respectively the virtues of prudence, of courage, and of temperance, while justice comes in afterwards as a right ordering of the three, or as prudence applied to practice. The seat of all irregular desires, of all evil, in fact, is to Plato in this union of the soul with matter. As this matter is primordial, evil in its origin does not indeed spring from God, but it is beyond his power: it springs from that state of things which existed before the action of God on chaos:(381) it must stand over against the good: and of necessity encompasses this mortal nature and the place of its habitation: and to man it lies not in the perverted use of free-will, but in his original composition, wherein his body is its seat. But in this triple composition of man Plato does not seem to have clearly apprehended a human personality at all: he has not even attempted to explain(382) in what the unity of the soul consists besides these its three portions, two of which, being tied to the body, drop off at death.