The soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.

The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.

We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.

If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.

There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.

There's a stronger and more kind of controversial element of Plotinus' view of matter, which is that he actually identifies it with evil, or at least the principle of evil, and the reason for this is that he thinks that the the One, the highest principle, can also be thought of as the Good, and that's kind of surprising like, because he has this negative theology which doesn't allow us to say anything about the One. But he believes that it can be seen as the principle of goodness as well as unity, and that if you think about it, goodness and unity sort of go along with each other.

Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.