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.

We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.

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.

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

The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.

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.