The treatise is written in the esoteric manner typical of the Corpus Aristotelicum, and it often appropriates popular concepts from other philosophical schools—in particular the Peripatetic and Stoic schools—which could be seen as having been prefigured in the works of Plato.
[5] This soul of the universe was not created by God, but, to use the image of Alcinous, it was awakened by him as from a profound sleep, and turned towards himself, "that it might look out upon intellectual things and receive forms and ideas from the divine mind.
[6] The idea proceeded immediately from the mind of God, and were the highest object of our intellect; the "form" of matter, the types of sensible things, having a real being in themselves.
[9] God, the first fountain of the ideas, could not be known as he is: it is but a faint notion of him we obtain from negations and analogies: his nature is equally beyond our power of expression or conception.
The human soul passes through various transmigrations, thus connecting the series with the lower classes of being, until it is finally purified and rendered acceptable to God.