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.

If you think about even very common examples like, say, something that you would build, like a clock or a car or a group of people trying to accomplish something, it fails when its unity breaks down. So when it stops having a single form, which is functioning all together, then it sort of falls apart into discrete elements.

Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.

The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.

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.

Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.

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.