Before we move on to discuss the outer effect of this inner activity of Consciousness, we must correct the common assertion that what we are dealing with here is a process of “emanation”. To be sure, Consciousness (or Intellect) somehow emerges from the activity of the First, but calling this a process of emanation, with its obviously materialist connotations, is misleading. The Neoplatonists used the words “procession and return” (prohodos and epistrophê), which, as spatial metaphors, are not much better either. And even though the analogy oftentimes invoked in this context is that of light radiating out from the sun, this too does not do much to help us grasp the nature of the Neoplatonic theory of how Consciousness, and by implication the entire rest of reality, eternally emerges from the first cause. In essence, there is no process of generation or production; nothing material or spatial is happening; no agent exerts its influence on a patient. Although the Neoplatonists followed Platonic tradition in talking about a demiurge (divine craftsman), their cosmology has nothing demiurgic about it, as Plotinus rarely failed to point out. Craftsmen think, forge, labor, arrange, and coordinate a host of diverse technical operations towards the creation of some product of their craft. Unlike Plato’s character Timaeus or the authors of Genesis, Neoplatonic metaphysics has no room for such crude analogies. In the realm of Consciousness, the activity is one and constitutes itself as a multiplicity within that unity. In the identity of the activity of thought with its objects, the Neoplatonists contended, the ideal world of all forms and ideas came to be conceptualized. Here again, in an unintentional and effortless way, this inner active life of Consciousness produces further outer effect, the Soul.