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.

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.

People often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.

For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they're the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about.

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.

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.

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.