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.

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.

Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.

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.

Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.

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.

I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.