subordinate natures. If
therefore, these are in the latter, they will also be in the former. I mean
the subsistence of a thing by itself, and essentialized in itself; and such
are essence and life, intellect, soul, and body. For body, though it does
not subsist from, yet subsists by itself; and through this belongs to the
genus of substance, and is contra-distinguished from accident, which cannot
exist independent of a subject.

Self-subsistent superessential natures therefore are the immediate
progeny of the one, if it be lawful thus to denominate things, which
ought rather to be called ineffable unfoldings into light from the
ineffable; for progeny implies a producing cause, and the one must be
conceived as something even more excellent than this. From this divine
self-perfect and self-producing multitude, a series of self-perfect
natures, viz. of beings, lives, intellects, and souls proceeds, according
to Plato, in the last link of which luminous series he also classes the
human soul; proximately suspended from the daemoniacal order: for this
order, as he clearly asserts in the Banquet, "stands in the middle rank
between the divine and human, fills up the vacant space, and links
together all intelligent nature." And here to the reader, who has not
penetrated the depths of Plato's philosophy, it will doubtless appear
paradoxical in the extreme, that any being should be said to produce
itself, and yet at the same time proceed from a superior cause. The
solution of this difficulty is as follows:--Essential production, or that
energy through which any nature produces something else by its very
being, is the most perfect mode of production, because vestiges of it are
seen in the last of things; thus fire imparts heat, by its very essence,
and snow coldness. And in short, this is a producing of that kind, in
which the effect is that secondarily which the cause is primarily. As
this mode of production therefore, from its being the most perfect of all
others, originates from the highest natures, it will consequently first
belong to those self-subsistent powers, who immediately proceed from the
ineffable, and will from them be derived to all the following orders of
beings. But this energy, as being characterized by the essential, will
necessarily be different in different producing causes. Hence, from that
which subsists, at the summit of self subsistent natures, a series of
self subsisting beings will indeed proceed, but the