Intelligences as covert agreements

Meaning

Intelligences here means covert agreements or understandings among allies. Disease and poverty are personified as hostile armies that conspire against life and arrange their secret coordination. The phrase belongs to ordinary political and military language within the figure.

It must be kept distinct from the human faculty of intelligence and from the metaphysical intelligences in the cabala quotation. The same spelling does not give the adversaries a special class of spiritual beings. The supplied English “secret agreements” makes this local sense clear while preserving the argument that combined internal disease and external deprivation intensify life’s vulnerability.