In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.

Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.

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

This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.

Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.

This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.

The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.