Plotinus is describing a discipline of recollection — the soul practicing its way back toward what it already, in some sense, is. The analogy is careful: the foot does not contain walking, the hand does not contain the throw, and yet training produces capacity. Memory, for Plotinus, works the same way. You do not retrieve a stored datum; you strengthen the mind's orientation toward its own nature.

There is something genuinely illuminating in that, and something worth pressing on. The training Plotinus describes is already inside the pneumatic logic — the wager that if the soul attends rigorously enough, it will arrive at a kind of ease, a frictionlessness, that suffering cannot reach. The athlete's foot does not ache once it is trained; Plotinus is suggesting the mind may reach something analogous. That is the desire beneath the discipline: not mastery as such, but immunity dressed as mastery. The strengthening is real — he is not wrong about the practice — but what gets quietly excluded is the body that trains and breaks, the mind that remembers and is undone by what it recalls. The analogy holds only if the soul's proper function, once reached, costs nothing. That assumption is doing the heaviest lifting in the room, and Plotinus never quite looks at it directly.