But it has been observed that the Couplement, too- especially
before our emancipation- is a member of this total We, and in fact
what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two
distinct notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it
transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the true
man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the
virtues which belong to the Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose
seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here
may be kept apart. [This Soul constitutes the human being] for when it
has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which is a radiation [or
emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it.

    Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from
contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical discipline belong to
the Couplement: to the Couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its
repugnances, desires, sympathies.

    And Friendship?

    This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the
interior man.

    11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and
there is but little irradiation from the higher principles of our
being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely
upon us their action is directed towards the Supreme; they work upon
us only when they stand at the mid-point.

    But does not the include that phase of our being which stands
above the mid-point?

    It does, but on condition that we lay hold of it: our entire
nature is not ours at all times but only as we direct the mid-point
upwards or downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature from
potentiality or native character into act.

    And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the
Animate?

    If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have
sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase does not
enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they
are aware only of the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and
of that only by being aware of the body organised and determined by
that image.

    If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted
for them by a radiation from the All-Soul.

    12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely
is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on
the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it
is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.

    We may take either view at will: they are easily reconciled.

    When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and
Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity.

    By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include
that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and
passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it
falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this
compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays
penalty.

    It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as
those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And," reading on, "if we
mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all
that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it,
examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what
Existences it is what it is."

    Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator
yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this
body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes
place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other
[lower] phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has been indicated
elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something
being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in
the declension.

    Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it
not certainly sin?

    If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object
beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed not
to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were
not there, the light could cause no shadow.

    And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the
object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall
only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall,
not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image
has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the
Supreme.

    The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this
image separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower