and leave the perfect without any subsistence. Nor is it lawful, that our soul should fabricate more certain, perfect, and orderly figures, than intellect and the gods themselves. There are, therefore, prior to sensible figures, self-moving, intellectual, and divine reasons of figures. And we are excited, indeed, from the obscurity of sensible forms, but we produce internal reasons, which are the lucid images of others. And we possess a knowledge of sensible figures, by their exemplars resident in soul (παραδειγματικῶς), but we comprehend by images (εἰκονικῶς) such as are intellectual and divine. For the reasons we contain, emerging from the dark night of oblivion, and propagating themselves in sciential variety, exhibit the forms of the gods, and the uniform bounds of the universe, by which they ineffably convert all things into themselves. In the gods, therefore, there is both an egregious knowledge of universal figures, and a power of generating and constituting all inferiors. But in natures, figures are endued with a power generative of apparent forms; but are destitute of cognition and intellectual perception. And, in particular souls, there is, indeed, an immaterial intellection, and a self-energizing knowledge; but there is wanting a prolific, and efficacious cause. As, therefore, nature, by her forming power presides over sensible figures, in the same manner, soul, by her gnostic energy, drops in the phantasy as in a mirror, the reasons of figures. But the phantasy receiving these in her shadowy forms, and possessing images of the inherent reasons of the soul, affords by these the means of inward conversion to the soul, and of an energy directed to herself, from the spectres of imagination. Just as if any one beholding his image in a mirror, and admiring the power of nature, and his own beauty, should desire to see himself in perfection, and should receive a power of becoming, at the same time, the perceiver, and the thing perceived. For the soul, after this manner, looking abroad into the bright mirror of the phantasy, and surveying the shadowy figures it contains, and admiring their beauty and order, pursues, in consequence of her admiration, the reasons from which these images proceed; and being wonderfully delighted, dismisses their beauty, as conversant about spectres alone; but afterwards seeks her own purer beauty, and desires to pass into her own profound retreats, and there to perceive the circle and the triangle, and all things subsisting together, in an impartible manner, and to insert herself in the objects, to contract her multitude into one; and lastly, to behold the occult and ineffable figures of the gods, seated in the most sacred and divine recesses of her nature. She is likewise desirous of bringing into light, from its awful concealment, the solitary beauty, of the gods, and of perceiving the circle, subsisting in its true perfection, more impartible than any centre, and the triangle