ior and inferior
powers, with the superior it turns round the divinity, and with the
inferior, towards the mass of the worlds, which is by it vivified and
maintained between the tropics of generation and the corruption of
living things in those worlds, serving its own life eternally; because
the act of the divine providence, always preserves it with divine heat
and light, with the same order and measure, in the ordinary and
self-same being.

CIC. I have now heard enough upon this subject.

TANS. It happens then that individual souls come to be influenced
differently as to their habits and inclinations, according to the
diverse degrees of ascension and descension, and come to display various
kinds and orders of enthusiasms, of loves, and of senses, not only in
the scale of Nature according to the orders of diverse lives which the
soul takes up in different bodies, as is expressly declared by the
Pythagoreans, Saduchimi and others, and by implication, Plato, and those
who dive more profoundly into it, but still more in the scale of human
affections, which has as many degrees as the scale of Nature; for man,
in all his powers, displays every species of being.

CIC. Therefore from the affections one may know souls, whether they are
going up or down, or whether they are from above or from below, whether
they are going on towards becoming beasts or towards divine beings,
according to the specific being as the Pythagoreans understood it; or
according to the similitude of the affections only, as is commonly
believed, the human soul not being able, (so long as it is truly human)
to become soul of a brute, as Plotinus and other Platonists well said,
on account of the quality of its beginning.

TANS. Now to come to the proposition: From animal enthusiasm, this soul,
as described, is promoted to heroic enthusiasm, saying, "When shall it
be that I rise up to the height of the object, there to dwell in company
with my heart and with my fledglings[C] and his?" This same proposition
he continues when he says:

24.

Destiny, when, shall I that mountain mount,
Which, blissful to the high gates bringing, bring,
Where those rare beauties I shall counting, count,
When _he_ my pain with comfort comforting,
Who my disjointed members joined,
And leaves my dying powers not dead?
My spirit's rival more than rivalled is
If, far from sin, it unassailed may sail,
If thither tending, it may waiting, wait