MacKenna-Plotinus: Princípio-Intelectual

  

Thus it is not easy, without knowledge and the training of habit, to quiver with any very real rapture over the notion of becoming ‘wholly identified with the Intellectual-Principle’; when it is understood and at each moment deeply realized that ‘The Intellectual-Principle’ is the highest accessible ‘Person’ of the Godhead, is very God, is the Supreme Wisdom immanent within the human soul and yet ineffably superior to all the Universe besides, then perhaps we may feel the great call to the devotion that has such a reward.

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This Divine-Thought is, of course, a Real-Being, the first ‘thing’ of whom existence may, if only in some vaguer sense, be affirmed: it is an Intelligence, or rather is the Universal-Intelligence. As the act, offspring, and image of The First, it is a sort of mediation to us of the Unknowable One. It is in the Greek named ó nous, which has often, perhaps not very happily, been translated Divine-Mind, sometimes Divine Intelligence or Divine-Intellection: in the present translation it is most often conveyed by the rather clumsy term, found in practice expressive and convenient, ‘The Intellectual-Principle’.

In the English, it must be noted, as in the Greek, the same term is used for the parallel Principle and Act in man: in both realms, the divine and human, the Intellectual-Principle connotes the highest really knowable: often therefore to absorb the full mystical or religious suggestion of a passage the reader will find it expedient to re-translate, i.e. to substitute temporarily for the term ‘Intellectual-Principle’, the term Spirit, or despite the awkward clash, even the term ‘Supreme-Soul’.

With this nous, or Divine-Mind or Divine-Intellection, or Divine-Intellectual-Principle, begins the existence of Plurality or Complexity, or Multiplicity: the Divine Mind contains, or rather is, ta nonta = the Intellectual-Universe or Intelligible Universe, often known as The Intelligible or The Intelligibles.

The Intellectual or Intelligible Universe is the Totality of the Divine-Thoughts, generally known, in the phrase familiar in Platonism  , as The Ideas.

The Ideas, or Divine-Thoughts, are Real-Beings, Intelligences, Powers: they are the eternal Originals, Archetypes, Intellectual-Forms of all that exists in the lower spheres. In certain aspects this sphere of the Intelligibles would be best named The Spiritual Universe: Caird agrees with Whittaker in finding it closely like Dante  ’s conception of the circle of angels and blessed spirits gathered in contemplation and service round the throne of God.

The Intellectual or Intelligible Universe contains, or even in some sense is, all particular minds or intelligences and these in their kinds are images, representations, phantasms, ‘shadows’ of this Universal or Divine Mind. All the phases of existence - down even to Matter, the ultimate, the lowest faintest image of Real-Being - all are ‘ideally’ present from eternity in this Realm of the divine Thoughts, this Totality of the Supreme Wisdom or ‘Mentation’.

The Supreme Intellectual-Principle cannot be unproductive: accompanying its Act of Thought there is what we may, coarsely, indicate as an Act of Act: the Divine-Thinking ‘engenders a power apt to the realization of its Thought’, apt that is to ‘Creation’: this engendered power is the Third Hypostasis of the Divine Triad.

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And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself [Divine-Mind]. Enneads   I,1,

Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one. Enneads I,1,

And how do we possess the Divinity? In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul – we read – and that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors. Enneads I,1,

The Intellectual-Principle has held aloof from the act and so is guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on whether we ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the Intellectual-Realm either in the Intellectual-Principle or within ourselves; for it is possible at once to possess and not to use. Enneads I,1,

And Intellection in us is twofold: since the Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon us – for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising. Enneads I,1,

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness? As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body’s states and to think the body’s thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body’s moods and devoted itself to its own Act – the state of Intellection and Wisdom – never allowed the passions of the body to affect it – the virtue of Sophrosyne – knew no fear at the parting from the body – the virtue of Fortitude – and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled – in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom. Enneads I,2,

Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence. Enneads I,2,

The Soul’s true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new phase begins by a new orientation. Enneads I,2,

Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul’s sight is turned towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us. Enneads I,2,

What form, then, does virtue take in one so lofty? It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself. Enneads I,2,

And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul: this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue. Enneads I,2,

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle: its Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle; its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion. Enneads I,2,

The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,2,

In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar correspondences. Enneads I,2,

The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain – and then either come to a stand or pass beyond – has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him – a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial – he must learn to recognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way. Enneads I,3,

But whence does this science derive its own initial laws? The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the purest [perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And, being the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or true-knowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being. Enneads I,3,

This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one part of him: we have here a parallel to what happens in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the sensitive faculty to the rest of the man: if our physical life really constituted the "We," its Act would be our Act: but, in the fact, this physical life is not the "We"; the "We" is the activity of the Intellectual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in Act we are in Act. Enneads I,4,

Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this "Earlier-than-perception" must be a thing having Act. Enneads I,4,

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination. Enneads I,4,

This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh: it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the Sage: giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his very union with the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,4,

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry enter here? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the soul’s faculties or purposes? Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary? Enneads I,6,

What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above. Enneads I,6,

Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings. Enneads I,6,

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order-actions and pursuits for instance – comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds. Enneads I,6,

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There. Enneads I,6,

Existing beyond and above Being, it must be beyond and above the Intellectual-Principle and all Intellection. Enneads I,7,

But the Universe outside; how is it aligned towards the Good? The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,7,

With Soul it is different; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-Principle, since this follows immediately upon the Good. Enneads I,7,

In sum, then, life is the Good to the living, and the Intellectual-Principle to what is intellective; so that where there is life with intellection there is a double contact with the Good. Enneads I,7,

But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us could we possibly know Evil? All knowing comes by likeness. The Intellectual-Principle and the Soul, being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms and would have a natural tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good? If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and that as Evil is the contrary to Good the one act would grasp Good and Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear perception and understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good hold no such standing, are nearer to Non-Being. Enneads I,8,

The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and Existence and Soul and Life and all Intellective-Act. Enneads I,8,

The Intellectual-Principle we are discussing is not of such a kind: It possesses all: It is all: It is present to all by Its self-presence: It has all by other means than having, for what It possesses is still Itself, nor does any particular of all within It stand apart; for every such particular is the whole and in all respects all, while yet not confused in the mass but still distinct, apart to the extent that any participant in the Intellectual-Principle participates not in the entire as one thing but in whatsoever lies within its own reach. Enneads I,8,

And the First Act is the Act of The Good stationary within Itself, and the First Existence is the self-contained Existence of The Good; but there is also an Act upon It, that of the Intellectual-Principle which, as it were, lives about It. Enneads I,8,

And the Soul, outside, circles around the Intellectual-Principle, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It, through It sees God. Enneads I,8,

The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,8,

But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the Intellectual-Principle and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form. Enneads I,8,

But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil? And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but Vice? A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its divergence from the line of Virtue. Enneads I,8,

In fact it is another Intellectual-Principle, not the true, this which ventures a vision so uncongenial. Enneads I,8,

To see darkness the eye withdraws from the light; it is striving to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the light which would make the darkness invisible; away from the light its power is rather that of not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is its nearest approach to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its contrary [Matter], must leave its own light locked up within itself, and as it were go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its native brightness and submit itself to the very contradition of its being. Enneads I,8,

No; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly apart from the Good. Enneads I,8,

One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle: this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower. Enneads I,8,

But whence that circular movement? In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads II,2,

The Intellectual-Principle has no such progress in any region; its movement is a stationary act, for it turns upon itself. Enneads II,2,

It creates, then, on the model of the Ideas; for, what it has received from the Intellectual-Principle it must pass on in turn. Enneads II,3,

In sum, then, the Intellectual-Principle gives from itself to the Soul of the All which follows immediately upon it: this again gives forth from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it; and that secondary Soul at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in some of its creations, striving in others against the repugnance of Matter. Enneads II,3,

This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from the Divine Intelligence. But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third Kind. Enneads II,3,

Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and [through them] to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form. Enneads II,4,

And how can you predicate an ordered system without thinking of form, and how think of form apart from the notion of something in which the form is lodged? No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact, utterly without parts, but in some sense there is part there too. And in so far as these parts are really separate from each other, any such division and difference can be no other than a condition of Matter, of a something divided and differentiated: in so far as that realm, though without parts, yet consists of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in a unity of which they are variations, reside in a Matter; for this unity, since it is also a diversity, must be conceived of as varied and multiform; it must have been shapeless before it took the form in which variation occurs. For if we abstract from the Intellectual-Principle the variety and the particular shapes, the Reason-Principles and the Thoughts, what precedes these was something shapeless and undetermined, nothing of what is actually present there. Enneads II,4,

It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there. Enneads II,4,

Anaxagoras, in identifying his "primal-combination" with Matter – to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all – withdraws in this way the very Intellectual-Principle he had introduced; for this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea; and it is co-aeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible: for if the combination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior; if both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is imperative [a ground of unification]. And if this Creator, Mind, must pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-Ideas parcel-wise for the Mind, with unending labour, to assort and allot? Surely the undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive act? As for the notion that all is in all, this clearly is impossible. Enneads II,4,

Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of Intellectual-Principle and The First; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct. Enneads II,8,

They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of immaterial beings whose existence is in Act – even in lower forms no such division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the Intellectual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the others? No: the Intellectual-Principle is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement – towards it or within it – we are in the realm of the Soul’s operation: such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand between the two. Enneads II,8,

To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection. Enneads II,8,

Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father. Enneads II,8,

Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope: given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them? It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another: without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself be what it is: the law is, "some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary." Enneads II,8,

From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body; as for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm – the Authentic Existent, the Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul – all this is taken over from the Timaeus  , where we read: "As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained in this All." Enneads II,8,

The more perfect the man, the more compliant he is, even towards his fellows; we must temper our importance, not thrusting insolently beyond what our nature warrants; we must allow other beings, also, their place in the presence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves alone next after the First in a dream-flight which deprives us of our power of attaining identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the human Soul, that is to say, to the point of likeness to which the Intellectual-Principle leads us; to exalt ourselves above the Intellectual-Principle is to fall from it. Enneads II,8,

Once more, we have no right to ask that all men shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal virtue is not possible: this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the Supreme and treating evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom – as good lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out; it would be like calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not Sense-Perception and the thing of sense evil for not being a Reason-Principle. If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior. Enneads II,8,

This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications of eating and procreation; our life must be pointed towards the Intellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, towards God. Enneads III,4,

In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence – and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form. Enneads III,5,

From this basis we proceed: In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself – the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them; and in the advanced Soul the objects of knowledge, well on the way towards the Intellectual-Principle, are close to identity with their container. Enneads III,8,

Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing; we cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity. Enneads III,8,

The duality, thus, is a unity; but how is this unity also a plurality? The explanation is that in a unity there can be no seeing [a pure unity has no room for vision and an object]; and in its Contemplation the One is not acting as a Unity; if it were, the Intellectual-Principle cannot exist. The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began; all unknown to itself, it became manifold; it grew, as it were, pregnant: desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were better had it never known the desire by which a Secondary came into being: it is like a Circle [in the Idea] which in projection becomes a figure, a surface, a circumference, a centre, a system of radii, of upper and lower segments. The Whence is the better; the Whither is less good: the Whence is not the same as the Whence-followed-by-a-Whither; the Whence all alone is greater than with the Whither added to it. Enneads III,8,

The Intellectual-Principle on the other hand was never merely the Principle of an inviolable unity; it was a universal as well and, being so, was the Intellectual-Principle of all things. Being, thus, all things and the Principle of all, it must essentially include this part of itself [this element-of-plurality] which is universal and is all things: otherwise, it contains a part which is not Intellectual-Principle: it will be a juxtaposition of non-Intellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass of things into the Intellectual-Principle! Enneads III,8,

In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The Intellectual-Principle is a number [= the expression of a plurality]; and number derives from unity: the source of a number such as this must be the authentically One. Further, it is the sum of an Intellectual-Being with the object of its Intellection, so that it is a duality; and, given this duality, we must find what exists before it. Enneads III,8,

What is this? The Intellectual-Principle taken separately, perhaps? No: an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible object; eliminate the intelligible, and the Intellectual-Principle disappears with it. If, then, what we are seeking cannot be the Intellectual-Principle but must be something that rejects the duality there present, then the Prior demanded by that duality must be something on the further side of the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,8,

But might it not be the Intelligible object itself? No: for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality with the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,8,

If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible Object can be the First Existent, what is? Our answer can only be: The source of both. Enneads III,8,

What will This be; under what character can we picture It? It must be either Intellective or without Intellection: if Intellective it is the Intellectual-Principle; if not, it will be without even knowledge of itself – so that, either way, what is there so august about it? If we define it as The Good and the wholly simplex, we will, no doubt, be telling the truth, but we will not be giving any certain and lucid account of it as long as we have in mind no entity in which to lodge the conception by which we define it. Enneads III,8,

And what do we take when we thus point the Intelligence? The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins: essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over to those powers within it which tend upward; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it must become something more than Intellect. Enneads III,8,

For the Intellectual-Principle is the earliest form of Life: it is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal Order – the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous process. Enneads III,8,

For the Universe is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but the Source of plurality, since universally a begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has engendered the Intellectual-Principle must be more simplex than the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,8,

And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life. Enneads III,8,

Another approach: The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees; therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective. Enneads III,8,

This implies the distinction of Matter and Form in it – as there must be in all actual seeing – the Matter in this case being the Intelligibles which the Intellectual-Principle contains and sees. All actual seeing implies duality; before the seeing takes place there is the pure unity [of the power of seeing]. That unity [of principle] acquires duality [in the act of seeing], and the duality is [always to be traced back to] a unity. Enneads III,8,

Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realization, so the vision in the Intellectual-Principle demands, for its completion, The Good. Enneads III,8,

Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it; it would become a duality, Intellect and the Good. The Good has no need of the Intellectual-Principle which, on the contrary, needs it, and, attaining it, is shaped into Goodness and becomes perfect by it: the Form thus received, sprung from the Good, brings it to likeness with the Good. Enneads III,8,

Thus the traces of the Good discerned upon it must be taken as indication of the nature of that Archetype: we form a conception of its Authentic Being from its image playing upon the Intellectual-Principle. This image of itself, it has communicated to the Intellect that contemplates it: thus all the striving is on the side of the Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer. The Being beyond neither strives, since it feels no lack, nor attains, since it has no striving. And this marks it off from the Intellectual-Principle, to which characteristically belongs the striving, the concentrated strain towards its Form. Enneads III,8,

Yet: The Intellectual-Principle; beautiful; the most beautiful of all; lying lapped in pure light and in clear radiance; circumscribing the Nature of the Authentic Existents; the original of which this beautiful world is a shadow and an image; tranquil in the fullness of glory since in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing dark or out of rule; a living thing in a life of blessedness: this, too, must overwhelm with awe any that has seen it, and penetrated it, to become a unit of its Being. Enneads III,8,

But: As one that looks up to the heavens and sees the splendour of the stars thinks of the Maker and searches, so whoever has contemplated the Intellectual Universe and known it and wondered for it must search after its Maker too. What Being has raised so noble a fabric? And where? And how? Who has begotten such a child, this Intellectual-Principle, this lovely abundance so abundantly endowed? The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect; nor can it be an abundant power: it must have been before Intellect and abundance were; these are later and things of lack; abundance had to be made abundant and Intellection needed to know. Enneads III,8,

Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before the Intellectual-Principle so that it "sees them" as previously existent? The first step is to make sure whether the "Living Being" of the text is to be distinguished from the Intellectual-Principle as another thing than it. Enneads III,8,

It might be argued that the Intellectual-Principle is the Contemplator and therefore that the Living-Being contemplated is not the Intellectual-Principle but must be described as the Intellectual Object so that the Intellectual-Principle must possess the Ideal realm as something outside of itself. Enneads III,8,

No: even though the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Object are distinct, they are not apart except for just that distinction. Enneads III,8,

Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that these two constitute one substance – though, in a unity, admitting that distinction, of the intellectual act [as against passivity], without which there can be no question of an Intellectual-Principle and an Intellectual Object: what is meant is not that the contemplatory Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it contains the Intellectual Realm within itself. Enneads III,8,

The Intelligible Object is the Intellectual-Principle itself in its repose, unity, immobility: the Intellectual-Principle, contemplator of that object – of the Intellectual-Principle thus in repose is an active manifestation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating, stands as Intellectual-Principle to that of which it has the intellection: it is Intellectual-Principle in virtue of having that intellection, and at the same time is Intellectual Object, by assimilation. Enneads III,8,

No doubt the passage: [of the Timaeus] seems to imply tacitly that this planning Principle is distinct from the other two: but the three – the Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-Principle and this planning Principle will, to others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the discrimination. Enneads III,8,

We have dealt with the first two; but the third – this Principle which decides to work upon the objects [the Ideas] contemplated by the Intellectual-Principle within the Essentially-Living, to create them, to establish them in their partial existence – what is this third? It is possible that in one aspect the Intellectual-Principle is the principle of partial existence, while in another aspect it is not. Enneads III,8,

The entities thus particularized from the unity are products of the Intellectual-Principle which thus would be, to that extent, the separating agent. On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible; division begins with its offspring which, of course, means with Souls: and thus a Soul – with its particular Souls – may be the separative principle. Enneads III,8,

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third Principle and begins within the Third: for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the Intellectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division. Enneads III,8,

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards non-Being: and this is the step it takes when it is set on self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an image of itself – a non-Being – and so is wandering, as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from Authentic Being. Enneads III,8,

(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing – with the Intellectual-Principle as the object of its vision – it is undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see: in other words, Soul is Matter to [its determinant] the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,8,

(D) The Primal is a potentiality of Movement and of Repose – and so is above and beyond both – its next subsequent has rest and movement about the Primal. Now this subsequent is the Intellectual-Principle – so characterized by having intellection of something not identical with itself whereas the Primal is without intellection. A knowing principle has duality [that entailed by being the knower of something) and, moreover, it knows itself as deficient since its virtue consists in this knowing and not in its own bare Being. Enneads III,8,

(F)... But the First is not to be envisaged as made up from Gods of a transcendent order: no; the Authentic Existents constitute the Intellectual-Principle with Which motion and rest begin. The Primal touches nothing, but is the centre round which those other Beings lie in repose and in movement. For Movement is aiming, and the Primal aims at nothing; what could the Summit aspire to? Has It, even, no Intellection of Itself? It possesses Itself and therefore is said in general terms to know itself... But intellection does not mean self-ownership; it means turning the gaze towards the Primal: now the act of intellection is itself the Primal Act, and there is therefore no place for any earlier one. The Being projecting this Act transcends the Act so that Intellection is secondary to the Being in which it resides. Intellection is not the transcendently venerable thing – neither Intellection in general nor even the Intellection of The Good. Apart from and over any Intellection stands The Good itself. Enneads III,8,

In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division. Enneads IV,1,

There the Intellectual-Principle is a concentrated all – nothing of it distinguished or divided – and in that kosmos of unity all souls are concentrated also, with no spatial discrimination. Enneads IV,1,

But there is a difference: The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to partition. Soul, there without distinction and partition, has yet a nature lending itself to divisional existence: its division is secession, entry into body. Enneads IV,1,

We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul, while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human soul can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they are one and the same? There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing. Enneads IV,3,

Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all; those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which abides in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles, partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the Supreme. Enneads IV,3,

The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one [the creative All-Soul] looks towards the universal Intellectual-Principle [the exemplar of all that can be], while the others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator – the work accomplished before them – an impediment inevitable whichsoever of the souls were first to operate. Enneads IV,3,

The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere – let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos – and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises – as far as, through soul, anything can – from the lower to the highest. Enneads IV,3,

Even the Intellectual-Principle, which is before all the kosmos, has, it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact above, and of giving downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose existence is implied in the law of the universal; for the universal broods closely over the particular; it is not from without that the law derives the power by which it is executed; on the contrary the law is given in the entities upon whom it falls; these bear it about with them. Let but the moment arrive, and what it decrees will be brought to act by those beings in whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it prevails because it is within them; it becomes like a heavy burden, and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are bidden from within. Enneads IV,3,

But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be called reasoning souls? One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy issue, should occasion arise: but all is met by repudiating the particular kind of reasoning intended [the earthly and discursive type]; we may represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows uninterruptedly from the Intellectual-Principle in them, an inherent state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real; in this way they would be users of reason even when in that overworld. We certainly cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though they may occupy bodies in the heavenly region, they are essentially in the Intellectual: and very surely the deliberation of doubt and difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There; all their act must fall into place by sheer force of their nature; there can be no question of commanding or of taking counsel; they will know, each, what is to be communicated from another, by present consciousness. Even in our own case here, eyes often know what is not spoken; and There all is pure, every being is, as it were, an eye, nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech, everything is seen and known. As for the Celestials [the Daimones] and souls in the air, they may well use speech; for all such are simply Animate [= Beings]. Enneads IV,3,

No memory, therefore, can be ascribed to any divine being, or to the Authentic-Existent or the Intellectual-Principle: these are intangibly immune; time does not approach them; they possess eternity centred around Being; they know nothing of past and sequent; all is an unbroken state of identity, not receptive of change. Now a being rooted in unchanging identity cannot entertain memory, since it has not and never had a state differing from any previous state, or any new intellection following upon a former one, so as to be aware of contrast between a present perception and one remembered from before. Enneads IV,3,

But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity? No: there has already been discrimination within the Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a reading of this. Enneads IV,4,

But such a process would appear to introduce into the Intellectual that element of change against which we ourselves have only now been protesting? The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the borders of the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change; it has, for example, its inward advance, and obviously anything that attains position near to something motionless does so by a change directed towards that unchanging goal and is not itself motionless in the same degree. Nor is it really change to turn from the self to the constituents of self or from those constituents to the self; and in this case the contemplator is the total; the duality has become unity. Enneads IV,4,

None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own? No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the Intellectual-Principle – but not to its own destruction: the two are one, and two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change: the soul, without motion [but by right of its essential being] would be intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the Supreme. Enneads IV,4,

In that realm it has also vision, through the Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance – and, indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the tertiaries. Enneads IV,4,

Thus the Intellectual-Principle possesses: the Soul of the All eternally receives from it; this is the soul’s life; its consciousness is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it; what proceeds from it into Matter and is manifested there is Nature, with which – or even a little before it – the series of real being comes to an end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual order and the beginnings of the imitative. Enneads IV,4,

But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement: Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the soul – for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity of the soul, and springs from soul – and, since time is a thing of division and comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that past must imply that even the All-Soul has memory? We repeat, identity belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity; otherwise there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the activities of the soul can themselves experience change. Enneads IV,4,

But how are Order and this orderer one and the same? Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the Intellectual-Principle: and because the succession is a fact of the things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity. The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it still, an outspreading without interval. Enneads IV,4,

The total scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a centre, the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration: the Intellectual-Principle possesses and has ever embraced that which is beyond being; the soul must seek it still: the sphere of the universe, by its possession of the soul thus aspirant, is moved to the aspiration which falls within its own nature; this is no more than such power as body may have, the mode of pursuit possible where the object pursued is debarred from entrance; it is the motion of coiling about, with ceaseless return upon the same path – in other words, it is circuit. Enneads IV,4,

That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the vegetation upon it. But we see also that it produces animals; why then should we not argue that it is itself animated? And, animated, no small part of the All, must it not be plausible to assert that it possesses an Intellectual-Principle by which it holds its rank as a god? If this is true of every one of the stars, why should it not be so of the earth, a living part of the living All? We cannot think of it as sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one appropriate to itself. Enneads IV,4,

We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries its vestige of this principle of growth, an under-phase of that entire principle which belongs not to this or that member but to the earth as a whole: next in order is the nature [the soul-phase], concerned with sensation, this not interfused [like the vegetal principle] but in contact from above: then the higher soul and the Intellectual-Principle, constituting together the being known as Hestia [Earth-Mind] and Demeter [Earth-Soul] – a nomenclature indicating the human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a divine name and nature. Enneads IV,4,

Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views itself as from the outside – while seeing the Intellectual-Principal as a unity, and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity – this question is investigated elsewhere. Enneads IV,6,

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We will be told "By some partless part." But, at this, the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded – and it cannot be denied – that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the bodies [in which these forms appear] and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them. Enneads IV,7,

C. (11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition. This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has been tempered by cold: still that is the theory – the soul has an earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external accidents. Thus these teachers make the inferior precede the higher, and before that inferior they put something still lower, their "Habitude." It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and has sprung from the soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and always the later inferior, as the system actually stands. Enneads IV,7,

If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle – as later, engendered and deriving intellection from without – soul and intellect and God may prove to have no existence: this would follow if a potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual, unless the corresponding actuality exists. And what could lead it onward if there were no separate being in previous actuality? Even on the absurd supposition that the potentially existent brings itself to actuality, it must be looking to some Term, and that must be no potentiality but actual. Enneads IV,7,

Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body, and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle and Soul precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of body. Enneads IV,7,

To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look: or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual substance, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of the divine. Enneads IV,7,

(18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual? There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this, knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm. But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step outward; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-Principle: pregnant by those Beings, and in pain to the birth, it is eager to make, to create. In this new zest it strains towards the realm of sense: thus, while this primal soul in union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its concern: yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is not wholly and exclusively held by body: it is still in possession of the unembodied; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. As a whole it is partly in body, partly outside: it has plunged from among the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the universe with beauty and penetrant order – immortal mind, eternal in its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul. Enneads IV,7,

All that is Intellectual-Principle has its being – whole and all – in the place of Intellection, what we call the Intellectual Kosmos: but there exist, too, the intellective powers included in its being, and the separate intelligences – for the Intellectual-Principle is not merely one; it is one and many. In the same way there must be both many souls and one, the one being the source of the differing many just as from one genus there rise various species, better and worse, some of the more intellectual order, others less effectively so. Enneads IV,8,

In the Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made: there is the Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living organism contains potentially all the other forms; and there are the forms thus potentially included now realized as individuals. We may think of it as a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms of life; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living quality: or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the great fire and the minor fires; yet all have the one common essence, that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from which the essence of the universal fire proceeds. Enneads IV,8,

No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To its quality of being intellective it adds the quality by which it attains its particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as everything must that exists among real beings. Enneads IV,8,

The outgoing that takes place in the Intellectual-Principle is a descent to its own downward ultimate: it cannot be a movement to the transcendent; operating necessarily outwards from itself, wherein it may not stay inclosed, the need and law of Nature bring it to its extreme term, to soul – to which it entrusts all the later stages of being while itself turns back on its course. Enneads IV,8,

The object of the Intellectual Act comes within our ken only when it reaches downward to the level of sensation: for not all that occurs at any part of the soul is immediately known to us; a thing must, for that knowledge, be present to the total soul; thus desire locked up within the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours by the central faculty of perception, or by the individual choice or by both at once. Once more, every soul has something of the lower on the body side and something of the higher on the side of the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads IV,8,

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself. Enneads V,1,

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign [traceable to Matter] and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task. Enneads V,1,

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded. Enneads V,1,

What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior. Enneads V,1,

That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Kronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle as being the offspring or exuberance of God. For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but is Divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every soul. Here is rest unbroken: for how can that seek change, in which all is well; what need that reach to, which holds all within itself; what increase can that desire, which stands utterly achieved? All its content, thus, is perfect, that itself may be perfect throughout, as holding nothing that is less than the divine, nothing that is less than intellective. Its knowing is not by search but by possession, its blessedness inherent, not acquired; for all belongs to it eternally and it holds the authentic Eternity imitated by Time which, circling round the Soul, makes towards the new thing and passes by the old. Soul deals with thing after thing – now Socrates  ; now a horse: always some one entity from among beings – but the Intellectual-Principle is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is; and everything, in that entire content, is Intellectual-Principle and Authentic Existence; and the total of all is Intellectual-Principle entire and Being entire. Intellectual-Principle by its intellective act establishes Being, which in turn, as the object of intellection, becomes the cause of intellection and of existence to the Intellectual-Principle – though, of course, there is another cause of intellection which is also a cause to Being, both rising in a source distinct from either. Enneads V,1,

Now while these two are coalescents, having their existence in common, and are never apart, still the unity they form is two-sided; there is Intellectual-Principle as against Being, the intellectual agent as against the object of intellection; we consider the intellective act and we have the Intellectual-Principle; we think of the object of that act and we have Being. Enneads V,1,

Thus the Primals [the first "Categories"] are seen to be: Intellectual-Principle; Existence; Difference; Identity: we must include also Motion and Rest: Motion provides for the intellectual act, Rest preserves identity as Difference gives at once a Knower and a Known, for, failing this, all is one, and silent. Enneads V,1,

As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle, exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy. Enneads V,1,

Thus by what we call the Number and the Dyad of that higher realm, we mean Reason Principles and the Intellectual-Principle: but while the Dyad is, as regards that sphere, undetermined – representing, as it were, the underly [or Matter] of The One – the later Number [or Quantity] – that which rises from the Dyad [Intellectual-Principle] and The One – is not Matter to the later existents but is their forming-Idea, for all of them take shape, so to speak, from the ideas rising within this. The determination of the Dyad is brought about partly from its object – The One – and partly from itself, as is the case with all vision in the act of sight: intellection [the Act of the Dyad] is vision occupied upon The One. Enneads V,1,

But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its vision? The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated by the most ancient philosophers: from such a unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the Primal not remained self-gathered so that there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we observe in existence and yet are compelled to trace to that absolute unity? In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. But if we seek the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary – self-gathered, tranquilly remote above all else – we begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the moment, the first image that appears. How the Divine Mind comes into being must be explained: Everything moving has necessarily an object towards which it advances; but since the Supreme can have no such object, we may not ascribe motion to it: anything that comes into being after it can be produced only as a consequence of its unfailing self-intention; and, of course, we dare not talk of generation in time, dealing as we are with eternal Beings: where we speak of origin in such reference, it is in the sense, merely, of cause and subordination: origin from the Supreme must not be taken to imply any movement in it: that would make the Being resulting from the movement not a second principle but a third: the Movement would be the second hypostasis. Enneads V,1,

Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally an eternal being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor: what then are we to think of the All-Perfect but that it can produce nothing less than the very greatest that is later than itself. The greatest, later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans while the First has no need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it – the soul, for example, being an utterance and act of the Intellectual-Principle as that is an utterance and act of The One. But in soul the utterance is obscured, for soul is an image and must look to its own original: that Principle, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation – thus becoming what it is – and has that vision not as from a distance but as the immediate next with nothing intervening, close to the One as Soul to it. Enneads V,1,

We must be more explicit: The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its quality, in other words that there be something in its likeness as the sun’s rays tell of the sun. Yet The One is not an Intellectual-Principle; how then does it engender an Intellectual-Principle? Simply by the fact that in its self-quest it has vision: this very seeing is the Intellectual-Principle. Any perception of the external indicates either sensation or intellection, sensation symbolized by a line, intellection by a circle... [corrupt passage]. Enneads V,1,

Of course the divisibility belonging to the circle does not apply to the Intellectual-Principle; all, there too, is a unity, though a unity which is the potentiality of all existence. Enneads V,1,

And so the First is not a thing among the things contained by the Intellectual-Principle though the source of all. In virtue of this source, things of the later order are essential beings; for from that fact there is determination; each has its form: what has being cannot be envisaged as outside of limit; the nature must be held fast by boundary and fixity; though to the Intellectual Beings this fixity is no more than determination and form, the foundations of their substantial existence. Enneads V,1,

A being of this quality, like the Intellectual-Principle, must be felt to be worthy of the all-pure: it could not derive from any other than from the first principle of all; as it comes into existence, all other beings must be simultaneously engendered – all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual realm. And it still remains pregnant with this offspring; for it has, so to speak, drawn all within itself again, holding them lest they fall away towards Matter to be "brought up in the House of Rhea" [in the realm of flux]. This is the meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the [necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within itself, is Soul [the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind]. Enneads V,1,

Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a substantial existence: such then is that [Soul] which circles about the Divine Mind, its light, its image inseparably attached to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath; of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still with the Divine. Enneads V,1,

He teaches, also, that there is an author of the Cause, that is of the Intellectual-Principle, which to him is the Creator who made the Soul, as he tells us, in the famous mixing bowl. This author of the causing principle, of the divine mind, is to him the Good, that which transcends the Intellectual-Principle and transcends Being: often too he uses the term "The Idea" to indicate Being and the Divine Mind. Thus Plato knows the order of generation – from the Good, the Intellectual-Principle; from the Intellectual-Principle, the Soul. These teachings are, therefore, no novelties, no inventions of today, but long since stated, if not stressed; our doctrine here is the explanation of an earlier and can show the antiquity of these opinions on the testimony of Plato himself. Enneads V,1,

Earlier, Parmenides   made some approach to the doctrine in identifying Being with Intellectual-Principle while separating Real Being from the realm of sense. Enneads V,1,

We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to the scheme of things: There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul. Enneads V,1,

Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of soul, but [above the life-principle] there is the soul perfected as containing Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated – this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. We may not seek any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of all space: its distinct quality, its separateness, its immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all of the bodily order. This is why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the soul around it from without – understand that phase of soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual – and of ourselves that the charioteer’s head reaches upwards towards the heights. Enneads V,1,

Since there is a Soul which reasons upon the right and good – for reasoning is an enquiry into the rightness and goodness of this rather than that – there must exist some permanent Right, the source and foundation of this reasoning in our soul; how, else, could any such discussion be held? Further, since the soul’s attention to these matters is intermittent, there must be within us an Intellectual-Principle acquainted with that Right not by momentary act but in permanent possession. Similarly there must be also the principle of this principle, its cause, God. This Highest cannot be divided and allotted, must remain intangible but not bound to space, it may be present at many points, wheresoever there is anything capable of accepting one of its manifestations; thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its term at the centre; and to the centre the radii bring each their own. Within our nature is such a centre by which we grasp and are linked and held; and those of us are firmly in the Supreme whose collective tendency is There. Enneads V,1,

Possessed of such powers, how does it happen that we do not lay hold of them, but for the most part, let these high activities go idle – some, even, of us never bringing them in any degree to effect? The answer is that all the Divine Beings are unceasingly about their own act, the Intellectual-Principle and its Prior always self-intent; and so, too, the soul maintains its unfailing movement; for not all that passes in the soul is, by that fact, perceptible; we know just as much as impinges upon the faculty of sense. Any activity not transmitted to the sensitive faculty has not traversed the entire soul: we remain unaware because the human being includes sense-perception; man is not merely a part [the higher part] of the soul but the total. Enneads V,1,

But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality? It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being’s generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,2,

That station towards the one [the fact that something exists in presence of the One] establishes Being; that vision directed upon the One establishes the Intellectual-Principle; standing towards the One to the end of vision, it is simultaneously Intellectual-Principle and Being; and, attaining resemblance in virtue of this vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring forth a vast power. Enneads V,2,

This active power sprung from essence [from the Intellectual-Principle considered as Being] is Soul. Enneads V,2,

Soul arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual-Principle – which itself sprang from its own motionless prior – but the soul’s operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its movement. It takes fulness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by adopting another, a downward, movement. Enneads V,2,

Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the human Soul appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is within its province; but it is not present entire; when it has reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus far downwards it produces – by its outgoing and its tendency towards the less good – another hypostasis or form of being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the Soul) is produced from the Intellectual-Principle which yet remains in untroubled self-possession. Enneads V,2,

In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in soul entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general. Enneads V,2,

No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from soul as being still more free. Enneads V,2,

If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that mid-region is Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself – nothing else because deriving thence [and therefore of that name and rank], yet not that because the Intellectual-Principle in giving it forth is not merged into it. Enneads V,2,

It would be already absurd enough to deny this power to the soul or mind, but the very height of absurdity to deny it to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, presented thus as knowing the rest of things but not attaining to knowledge, or even awareness, of itself. Enneads V,3,

It is the province of sense and in some degree of understanding and judgement, but not of the Intellectual-Principle, to handle the external, though whether the Intellectual-Principle holds the knowledge of these things is a question to be examined, but it is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle must have knowledge of the Intellectual objects. Now, can it know those objects alone or must it not simultaneously know itself, the being whose function it is to know just those things? Can it have self-knowledge in the sense [dismissed above as inadequate] of knowing its content while it ignores itself? Can it be aware of knowing its members and yet remain in ignorance of its own knowing self? Self and content must be simultaneously present: the method and degree of this knowledge we must now consider. Enneads V,3,

The reasoning-principle in the Soul acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the impressions, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming impressions [those of sense] and adapts them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before – the act which may be described as the soul’s Reminiscence. Enneads V,3,

So far as this, the efficacy of the Intellectual-Principle in the Soul certainly reaches; but is there also introversion and self-cognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the Divine Mind? If we accord self-knowing to this phase of the soul we make it an Intellectual-Principle and will have to show what distinguishes it from its prior; if we refuse it self-knowing, all our thought brings us step by step to some principle which has this power, and we must discover what such self-knowing consists in. If, again, we do allow self-knowledge in the lower we must examine the question of degree; for if there is no difference of degree, then the reasoning principle in soul is the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed. Enneads V,3,

But how does it thus contain the good within itself? It is, itself, of the nature of the good and it has been strengthened still towards the perception of all that is good by the irradiation of the Intellectual-Principle upon it; for this pure phase of the soul welcomes to itself the images implanted from its prior. Enneads V,3,

But why may we not distinguish this understanding phase as Intellectual-Principle and take soul to consist of the later phases from the sensitive downwards? Because all the activities mentioned are within the scope of a reasoning faculty, and reasoning is characteristically the function of soul. Enneads V,3,

Why not, however, absolve the question by assigning self-cognisance to this phase? Because we have allotted to soul the function of dealing – in thought and in multiform action – with the external, and we hold that observation of self and of the content of self must belong to Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,3,

If any one says, "Still; what precludes the reasoning soul from observing its own content by some special faculty?" he is no longer posting a principle of understanding or of reasoning but, simply, bringing in the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed. Enneads V,3,

But what precludes the Intellectual-Principle from being present, unalloyed, within the soul? Nothing, we admit; but are we entitled therefore to think of it as a phase of soul? We cannot describe it as belonging to the soul though we do describe it as our Intellectual-Principle, something distinct from the understanding, advanced above it, and yet ours even though we cannot include it among soul-phases: it is ours and not ours; and therefore we use it sometimes and sometimes not, whereas we always have use of the understanding; the Intellectual-Principle is ours when we act by it, not ours when we neglect it. Enneads V,3,

But what is this acting by it? Does it mean that we become the Intellectual-Principle so that our utterance is the utterance of the Intellectual-Principle, or that we represent it? We are not the Intellectual-Principle; we represent it in virtue of that highest reasoning faculty which draws upon it. Enneads V,3,

Still; we perceive by means of the perceptive faculty and are, ourselves, the percipients: may we not say the same of the intellective act? No: our reasoning is our own; we ourselves think the thoughts that occupy the understanding – for this is actually the We – but the operation of the Intellectual-Principle enters from above us as that of the sensitive faculty from below; the We is the soul at its highest, the mid-point between two powers, between the sensitive principle, inferior to us, and the intellectual principle superior. We think of the perceptive act as integral to ourselves because our sense-perception is uninterrupted; we hesitate as to the Intellectual-Principle both because we are not always occupied with it and because it exists apart, not a principle inclining to us but one to which we incline when we choose to look upwards. Enneads V,3,

The sensitive principle is our scout; the Intellectual-Principle our King. Enneads V,3,

But we, too, are king when we are moulded to the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,3,

Thus the self-knower is a double person: there is the one that takes cognisance of the principle in virtue of which understanding occurs in the soul or mind; and there is the higher, knowing himself by the Intellectual-Principle with which he becomes identical: this latter knows the self as no longer man but as a being that has become something other through and through: he has thrown himself as one thing over into the superior order, taking with him only that better part of the soul which alone is winged for the Intellectual Act and gives the man, once established There, the power to appropriate what he has seen. Enneads V,3,

We can scarcely suppose this understanding faculty to be unaware that it has understanding; that it takes cognisance of things external; that in its judgements it decides by the rules and standards within itself held directly from the Intellectual-Principle; that there is something higher than itself, something which, moreover, it has no need to seek but fully possesses. What can we conceive to escape the self-knowledge of a principle which admittedly knows the place it holds and the work it has to do? It affirms that it springs from Intellectual-Principle whose second and image it is, that it holds all within itself, the universe of things, engraved, so to say, upon it as all is held There by the eternal engraver. Aware so far of itself, can it be supposed to halt at that? Are we to suppose that all we can do is to apply a distinct power of our nature and come thus to awareness of that Intellectual-Principle as aware of itself? Or may we not appropriate that principle – which belongs to us as we to it – and thus attain to awareness, at once, of it and of ourselves? Yes: this is the necessary way if we are to experience the self-knowledge vested in the Intellectual-Principle. And a man becomes Intellectual-Principle when, ignoring all other phases of his being, he sees through that only and sees only that and so knows himself by means of the self – in other words attains the self-knowledge which the Intellectual-Principle possesses. Enneads V,3,

At that, the object known must be identical with the knowing act [or agent], the Intellectual-Principle, therefore, identical with the Intellectual Realm. And in fact, if this identity does not exist, neither does truth; the Principle that should contain realities is found to contain a transcript, something different from the realities; that constitutes non-Truth; Truth cannot apply to something conflicting with itself; what it affirms it must also be. Enneads V,3,

Thus we find that the Intellectual-Principle, the Intellectual Realm and Real Being constitute one thing, which is the Primal Being; the primal Intellectual-Principle is that which contains the realities or, rather, which is identical with them. Enneads V,3,

But taking Primal Intellection and its intellectual object to be a unity, how does that give an Intellective Being knowing itself? An intellection enveloping its object or identical with it is far from exhibiting the Intellectual-Principle as self-knowing. Enneads V,3,

All turns on the identity. The intellectual object is itself an activity, not a mere potentiality; it is not lifeless; nor are the life and intellection brought into it as into something naturally devoid of them, some stone or other dead matter; no, the intellectual object is essentially existent, the primal reality. As an active force, the first activity, it must be, also itself, the noblest intellection, intellection possessing real being since it is entirely true; and such an intellection, primal and primally existent, can be no other than the primal principle of Intellection: for that primal principle is no potentiality and cannot be an agent distinct from its act and thus, once more, possessing its essential being as a mere potentiality. As an act – and one whose very being is an act – it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-Principle, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object seen in that act – self, is itself. Enneads V,3,

This self-knowing agent, perfect in the Intellectual-Principle, is modified in the Soul. Enneads V,3,

The difference is that, while the soul knows itself as within something else, the Intellectual-Principle knows itself as self-depending, knows all its nature and character, and knows by right of its own being and by simple introversion. When it looks upon the authentic existences it is looking upon itself; its vision as its effective existence, and this efficacy is itself since the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Act are one: this is an integral seeing itself by its entire being, not a part seeing by a part. Enneads V,3,

But has our discussion issued in an Intellectual-Principle having a persuasive activity [furnishing us with probability]? No: it brings compulsion not persuasion; compulsion belongs to the Intellectual-Principle, persuasion to the soul or mind, and we seem to desire to be persuaded rather than to see the truth in the pure intellect. Enneads V,3,

As long as we were Above, collected within the Intellectual nature, we were satisfied; we were held in the intellectual act; we had vision because we drew all into unity – for the thinker in us was the Intellectual-Principle telling us of itself – and the soul or mind was motionless, assenting to that act of its prior. But now that we are once more here – living in the secondary, the soul – we seek for persuasive probabilities: it is through the image we desire to know the archetype. Enneads V,3,

Our way is to teach our soul how the Intellectual-Principle exercises self-vision; the phase thus to be taught is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent soul, indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an Intellectual-Principle or that it holds its peculiar power through and from that Principle. This phase must be brought to understand by what means it has knowledge of the thing it sees and warrant for what it affirms: if it became what it affirms, it would by that fact possess self-knowing. All its vision and affirmation being in the Supreme or deriving from it – There where itself also is – it will possess self-knowledge by its right as a Reason-Principle, claiming its kin and bringing all into accord with the divine imprint upon it. Enneads V,3,

The soul therefore [to attain self-knowledge] has only to set this image [that is to say, its highest phase] alongside the veritable Intellectual-Principle which we have found to be identical with the truths constituting the objects of intellection, the world of Primals and Reality: for this Intellectual-Principle, by very definition, cannot be outside of itself, the Intellectual Reality: self-gathered and unalloyed, it is Intellectual-Principle through all the range of its being – for unintelligent intelligence is not possible – and thus it possesses of necessity self-knowing, as a being immanent to itself and one having for function and essence to be purely and solely Intellectual-Principle. This is no doer; the doer, not self-intent but looking outward, will have knowledge, in some kind, of the external, but, if wholly of this practical order, need have no self-knowledge; where, on the contrary, there is no action – and of course the pure Intellectual-Principle cannot be straining after any absent good – the intention can be only towards the self; at once self-knowing becomes not merely plausible but inevitable; what else could living signify in a being immune from action and existing in Intellect? Enneads V,3,

And what else is there to attribute to it? Repose, no doubt; but, to an Intellectual-Principle, Repose is not an abdication from intellect; its Repose is an Act, the act of abstention from the alien: in all forms of existence repose from the alien leaves the characteristic activity intact, especially where the Being is not merely potential but fully realized. Enneads V,3,

In the Intellectual-Principle, the Being is an Act and in the absence of any other object it must be self-directed; by this self-intellection it holds its Act within itself and upon itself; all that can emanate from it is produced by this self-centering and self-intention; first – self-gathered, it then gives itself or gives something in its likeness; fire must first be self-centred and be fire, true to fire’s natural Act; then it may reproduce itself elsewhere. Enneads V,3,

Once more, then; the Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but soul has the double phase, one inner, intent upon the Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces Ideal-forms – divine intellections perfectly wrought out – so that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source. Enneads V,3,

Now comes the question what sort of thing does the Intellectual-Principle see in seeing the Intellectual Realm and what in seeing itself? We are not to look for an Intellectual realm reminding us of the colour or shape to be seen on material objects: the intellectual antedates all such things; and even in our sphere the production is very different from the Reason-Principle in the seeds from which it is produced. The seed principles are invisible and the beings of the Intellectual still more characteristically so; the Intellectuals are of one same nature with the Intellectual Realm which contains them, just as the Reason-Principle in the seed is identical with the soul, or life-principle, containing it. Enneads V,3,

But the Soul (considered as apart from the Intellectual-Principle) has no vision of what it thus contains, for it is not the producer but, like the Reason-Principles also, an image of its source: that source is the brilliant, the authentic, the primarily existent, the thing self-sprung and self-intent; but its image, soul, is a thing which can have no permanence except by attachment, by living in that other; the very nature of an image is that, as a secondary, it shall have its being in something else, if at all it exist apart from its original. Hence this image (soul) has not vision, for it has not the necessary light, and, if it should see, then, as finding its completion elsewhere, it sees another, not itself. Enneads V,3,

What, then, is there that can pronounce upon the nature of this all-unity? That which sees: and to see is the function of the Intellectual-Principle. Even in our own sphere [we have a parallel to this self-vision of a unity], our vision is light or rather becomes one with light, and it sees light for it sees colours. In the intellectual, the vision sees not through some medium but by and through itself alone, for its object is not external: by one light it sees another not through any intermediate agency; a light sees a light, that is to say a thing sees itself. This light shining within the soul enlightens it; that is, it makes the soul intellective, working it into likeness with itself, the light above. Enneads V,3,

Think of the traces of this light upon the soul, then say to yourself that such, and more beautiful and broader and more radiant, is the light itself; thus you will approach to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Realm, for it is this light, itself lit from above, which gives the soul its brighter life. Enneads V,3,

If the soul is questioned as to the nature of that Intellectual-Principle – the perfect and all-embracing, the primal self-knower – it has but to enter into that Principle, or to sink all its activity into that, and at once it shows itself to be in effective possession of those priors whose memory it never lost: thus, as an image of the Intellectual-Principle, it can make itself the medium by which to attain some vision of it; it draws upon that within itself which is most closely resemblant, as far as resemblance is possible between divine Intellect and any phase of soul. Enneads V,3,

And by its own characteristic act, though not without reasoning process, it knows the nature of the Intellectual-Principle which, on its side, knows itself without need of reasoning, for it is ever self-present whereas we become so by directing our soul towards it; our life is broken and there are many lives, but that principle needs no changings of life or of things; the lives it brings to being are for others not for itself: it cannot need the inferior; nor does it for itself produce the less when it possesses or is the all, nor the images when it possesses or is the prototype. Enneads V,3,

This matter need not be elaborated at present: it suffices to say that if the created were all, these ultimates [the higher] need not exist: but the Supreme does include primals, the primals because the producers. In other words, there must be, with the made, the making source; and, unless these are to be identical, there will be need of some link between them. Similarly, this link which is the Intellectual-Principle demands yet a Transcendent. If we are asked why this Transcendent also should not have self-vision, our answer is that it has no need of vision; but this we will discuss later: for the moment we go back, since the question at issue is gravely important. Enneads V,3,

We repeat that the Intellectual-Principle must have, actually has, self-vision, firstly because it has multiplicity, next because it exists for the external and therefore must be a seeing power, one seeing that external; in fact its very essence is vision. Given some external, there must be vision; and if there be nothing external the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] exists in vain. Unless there is something beyond bare unity, there can be no vision: vision must converge with a visible object. And this which the seer is to see can be only a multiple, no undistinguishable unity; nor could a universal unity find anything upon which to exercise any act; all, one and desolate, would be utter stagnation; in so far as there is action, there is diversity. If there be no distinctions, what is there to do, what direction in which to move? An agent must either act upon the extern or be a multiple and so able to act upon itself: making no advance towards anything other than itself, it is motionless and where it could know only blank fixity it can know nothing. Enneads V,3,

The intellective power, therefore, when occupied with the intellectual act, must be in a state of duality, whether one of the two elements stand actually outside or both lie within: the intellectual act will always comport diversity as well as the necessary identity, and in the same way its characteristic objects [the Ideas] must stand to the Intellectual-Principle as at once distinct and identical. This applies equally to the single object; there can be no intellection except of something containing separable detail and, since the object is a Reason-principle [a discriminated Idea] it has the necessary element of multiplicity. The Intellectual-Principle, thus, is informed of itself by the fact of being a multiple organ of vision, an eye receptive of many illuminated objects. If it had to direct itself to a memberless unity, it would be dereasoned: what could it say or know of such an object? The self-affirmation of [even] a memberless unity implies the repudiation of all that does not enter into the character: in other words, it must be multiple as a preliminary to being itself. Enneads V,3,

Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not [fully realised] Intellectual-Principle; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of the multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold quality with which it has of its own act invested the simplex. Enneads V,3,

If it had not possessed a previous impression of the Transcendent, it could never have grasped it, but this impression, originally of unity, becomes an impression of multiplicity; and the Intellectual-Principle, in taking cognisance of that multiplicity, knows the Transcendent and so is realized as an eye possessed of its vision. Enneads V,3,

It is now Intellectual-Principle since it actually holds its object, and holds it by the act of intellection: before, it was no more than a tendance, an eye blank of impression: it was in motion towards the transcendental; now that it has attained, it has become Intellectual-Principle henceforth absorbed; in virtue of this intellection it holds the character of Intellectual-Principle, of Essential Existence and of Intellectual Act where, previously, not possessing the Intellectual Object, it was not Intellectual Perception, and, not yet having exercised the Intellectual Act, it was not Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,3,

The Principle before all these principles is no doubt the first principle of the universe, but not as immanent: immanence is not for primal sources but for engendering secondaries; that which stands as primal source of everything is not a thing but is distinct from all things: it is not, then, a member of the total but earlier than all, earlier, thus, than the Intellectual-Principle – which in fact envelops the entire train of things. Enneads V,3,

Thus we come, once more, to a Being above the Intellectual-Principle and, since the sequent amounts to no less than the All, we recognise, again, a Being above the All. This assuredly cannot be one of the things to which it is prior. We may not call it "Intellect"; therefore, too, we may not call it "the Good," if "the Good" is to be taken in the sense of some one member of the universe; if we mean that which precedes the universe of things, the name may be allowed. Enneads V,3,

The Intellectual-Principle is established in multiplicity; its intellection, self-sprung though it be, is in the nature of something added to it [some accidental dualism] and makes it multiple: the utterly simplex, and therefore first of all beings, must, then, transcend the Intellectual-Principle; and, obviously, if this had intellection it would no longer transcend the Intellectual-Principle but be it, and at once be a multiple. Enneads V,3,

We allow this to be true for the Intellectual-Principle to which we have allotted [the multiplicity of] self-knowing; but for the first principle of all, never. Before the manifold, there must be The One, that from which the manifold rises: in all numerical series, the unit is the first. Enneads V,3,

But, they will tell us, the Activities in question do proceed from a unity, from the Intellectual-Principle, a simplex. Enneads V,3,

Now if these activities arise from some unexplained first activity in that principle, then it too contains the manifold: if, on the contrary, they are the very earliest activities and the source and cause of any multiple product and the means by which that Principle is able, before any activity occurs, to remain self-centred, then they are allocated to the product of which they are the cause; for this principle is one thing, the activities going forth from it are another, since it is not, itself, in act. If this be not so, the first act cannot be the Intellectual-Principle: the One does not provide for the existence of an Intellectual-Principle which thereupon appears; that provision would be something [an Hypostasis] intervening between the One and the Intellectual-Principle, its offspring. There could, in fact, be no such providing in The One, for it was never incomplete; and such provision could name nothing that ought to be provided. It cannot be thought to possess only some part of its content, and not the whole; nor did anything exist to which it could turn in desire. Clearly anything that comes into being after it, arises without shaking to its permanence in its own habit. It is essential to the existence of any new entity that the First remain in self-gathered repose throughout: otherwise, it moved before there was motion and had intellectual act before any intellection – unless, indeed, that first act [as motionless and without intelligence] was incomplete, nothing more than a tendency. And what can we imagine it lights upon to become the object of such a tendency? The only reasonable explanation of act flowing from it lies in the analogy of light from a sun. The entire intellectual order may be figured as a kind of light with the One in repose at its summit as its King: but this manifestation is not cast out from it: we may think, rather, of the One as a light before the light, an eternal irradiation resting upon the Intellectual Realm; this, not identical with its source, is yet not severed from it nor of so remote a nature as to be less than Real-Being; it is no blind thing, but is seeing and knowing, the primal knower. Enneads V,3,

Those divinely possessed and inspired have at least the knowledge that they hold some greater thing within them though they cannot tell what it is; from the movements that stir them and the utterances that come from them they perceive the power, not themselves, that moves them: in the same way, it must be, we stand towards the Supreme when we hold the Intellectual-Principle pure; we know the divine Mind within, that which gives Being and all else of that order: but we know, too, that other, know that it is none of these, but a nobler principle than any-thing we know as Being; fuller and greater; above reason, mind and feeling; conferring these powers, not to be confounded with them. Enneads V,3,

That which engenders the world of sense cannot itself be a sense-world; it must be the Intellect and the Intellectual world; similarly, the prior which engenders the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual world cannot be either, but must be something of less multiplicity. The manifold does not rise from the manifold: the intellectual multiplicity has its source in what is not manifold; by the mere fact of being manifold, the thing is not the first principle: we must look to something earlier. Enneads V,3,

All life belongs to it, life brilliant and perfect; thus all in it is at once life-principle and Intellectual-Principle, nothing in it aloof from either life or intellect: it is therefore self-sufficing and seeks nothing: and if it seeks nothing this is because it has in itself what, lacking, it must seek. It has, therefore, its Good within itself, either by being of that order – in what we have called its life and intellect – or in some other quality or character going to produce these. Enneads V,3,

If this [secondary principle] were The Good [The Absolute], nothing could transcend these things, life and intellect: but, given the existence of something higher, this Intellectual-Principle must possess a life directed towards that Transcendent, dependent upon it, deriving its being from it, living towards it as towards its source. The First, then, must transcend this principle of life and intellect which directs thither both the life in itself, a copy of the Reality of the First, and the intellect in itself which is again a copy, though of what original there we cannot know. Enneads V,3,

If the Intellectual-Principle were the engendering Source, then the engendered secondary, while less perfect than the Intellectual-Principle, would be close to it and similar to it: but since the engendering Source is above the Intellectual-Principle, the secondary can only be that principle. Enneads V,4,

But why is the Intellectual-Principle not the generating source? Because [it is not a self-sufficing simplex]: the Act of the Intellectual-Principle is intellection, which means that, seeing the intellectual object towards which it has turned, it is consummated, so to speak, by that object, being in itself indeterminate like sight [a vague readiness for any and every vision] and determined by the intellectual object. This is why it has been said that "out of the indeterminate dyad and The One arise the Ideas and the numbers": for the dyad is the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,4,

But how can the Intellectual-Principle be a product of the Intellectual Object? In this way: the intellectual object is self-gathered [self-compact] and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing principle must be – deficient, mean, as needing an object – it is therefore no unconscious thing: all its content and accompaniment are its possession; it is self-distinguishing throughout; it is the seat of life as of all things; it is, itself, that self-intellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to say, in a mode other than that of the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,4,

But if something comes to being within an entity which in no way looks outside itself – and especially within a being which is the sum of being – that entity must be the source of the new thing: stable in its own identity, it produces; but the product is that of an unchanged being: the producer is unchangeably the intellectual object, the product is produced as the Intellectual Act, an Act taking intellection of its source – the only object that exists for it – and so becoming Intellectual-Principle, that is to say, becoming another intellectual being, resembling its source, a reproduction and image of that. Enneads V,4,

And if this is all things, that must be above and outside of all, so, must transcend real being. And again, if that secondary is all things, and if above its multiplicity there is a unity not ranking among those things, once more this unity transcends Real Being and therefore transcends the Intellectual-Principle as well. There is thus something transcending Intellectual-Principle, for we must remember that real being is no corpse, the negation of life and of intellection, but is in fact identical with the Intellectual-Principle. The Intellectual-Principle is not something taking cognisance of things as sensation deals with sense objects existing independently of sense: on the contrary, it actually is the things it knows: the ideas constituting them it has not borrowed: whence could it have taken them? No: it exists here together with the things of the universe, identical with them, making a unity with them; and the collective knowledge [in the divine mind] of the immaterial is the universe of things. Enneads V,4,

The Intellectual-Principle, the veritably and essentially intellective, can this be conceived as ever falling into error, ever failing to think reality? Assuredly no: it would no longer be intelligent and therefore no longer Intellectual-Principle: it must know unceasingly – and never forget; and its knowledge can be no guesswork, no hesitating assent, no acceptance of an alien report. Nor can it call on demonstration or, we are told it may at times act by this or, I method, at least there must be something patent to it in virtue of its own nature. In actual fact reason tells us that all its knowledge is thus inherent to it, for there is no means by which to distinguish between the spontaneous knowledge and the other. But, in any case, some knowledge, it is conceded, is inherent to it. Whence are we to understand the certainty of this knowledge to come to it or how do its objects carry the conviction of their reality? Consider sense-knowledge: its objects seem most patently certified, yet the doubt returns whether the apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him; the decision demands intelligence or reasoning. Besides, even granting that what the senses grasp is really contained in the objects, none the less what is thus known by the senses is an image: sense can never grasp the thing itself; this remains for ever outside. Enneads V,5,

Now, if the Intellectual-Principle in its act – that is in knowing the intellectual – is to know these its objects as alien, we have to explain how it makes contact with them: obviously it might never come upon them, and so might never know them; or it might know them only upon the meeting: its knowing, at that, would not be an enduring condition. If we are told that the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Objects are linked in a standing unity, we demand the description of this unity. Enneads V,5,

Again; either the objects of the Intellectual-Principle are senseless and devoid of life and intellect or they are in possession of Intellect. Enneads V,5,

Now, if they are in possession of Intellect, that realm is a union of both and is Truth. This combined Intellectual realm will be the Primal Intellect: we have only then to examine how this reality, conjoint of Intellectual-Principle and its object, is to be understood, whether as combining self-united identity with yet duality and difference, or what other relation holds between them. Enneads V,5,

If on the contrary the objects of Intellectual-Principle are without intelligence and life, what are they? They cannot be premises, axioms or predicates: as predicates they would not have real existence; they would be affirmations linking separate entities, as when we affirm that justice is good though justice and good are distinct realities. Enneads V,5,

If we are told that they are self-standing entities – the distinct beings Justice and Good – then [supposing them to be outside] the Intellectual Realm will not be a unity nor be included in any unity: all is sundered individuality. Where, then, are they and what spatial distinction keeps them apart? How does the Intellectual-Principle come to meet with them as it travels round; what keeps each true to its character; what gives them enduring identity; what conceivable shape or character can they have? They are being presented to us as some collection of figures, in gold or some other material substance, the work of some unknown sculptor or graver: but at once the Intellectual-Principle which contemplates them becomes sense-perception; and there still remains the question how one of them comes to be Justice and another something else. Enneads V,5,

But the great argument is that if we are to allow that these objects of Intellection are in the strict sense outside the Intellectual-Principle, which, therefore, must see them as external, then inevitably it cannot possess the truth of them. Enneads V,5,

In fine, there would be on the hypothesis no truth in the Intellectual-Principle. But such an Intellectual-Principle would not be truth, nor truly an Intellectual-Principle. There would be no Intellectual-Principle at all [no Divine Mind]: yet elsewhere truth cannot be. Enneads V,5,

Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects [the Ideas] outside of the Intellectual-Principle, treating them as impressions of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and so make its objects unknowable and non-existent and in the end annul the Intellectual-Principle itself. We must provide for knowledge and for truth; we must secure reality; being must become knowable essentially and not merely in that knowledge of quality which could give us a mere image or vestige of the reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, absorption. Enneads V,5,

The only way to this is to leave nothing out side of the veritable Intellectual-Principle which thus has knowledge in the true knowing [that of identification with the object], cannot forget, need not go wandering in search. At once truth is there, this is the seat of the authentic Existents, it becomes living and intellective: these are the essentials of that most lofty Principle; and, failing them, where is its worth, its grandeur? Only thus [by this inherence of the Ideas] is it dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith in the truth of its knowledge: it is its entire self, self-perspicuous: it knows a prior by recognising its own source; it knows a sequent to that prior by its self-identity; of the reality of this sequent, of the fact that it is present and has authentic existence, no outer entity can bring it surer conviction. Enneads V,5,

We have said that all must be brought back to a unity: this must be an authentic unity, not belonging to the order in which multiplicity is unified by participation in what is truly a One; we need a unity independent of participation, not a combination in which multiplicity holds an equal place: we have exhibited, also, the Intellectual Realm and the Intellectual-Principle as more closely a unity than the rest of things, so that there is nothing closer to The One. Yet even this is not The purely One. Enneads V,5,

But since the Intellectual-Principle is not to see this light as something external we return to our analogy; the eye is not wholly dependent upon an outside and alien light; there is an earlier light within itself, a more brilliant, which it sees sometimes in a momentary flash. At night in the darkness a gleam leaps from within the eye: or again we make no effort to see anything; the eyelids close; yet a light flashes before us; or we rub the eye and it sees the light it contains. This is sight without the act, but it is the truest seeing, for it sees light whereas its other objects were the lit not the light. Enneads V,5,

It is certainly thus that the Intellectual-Principle, hiding itself from all the outer, withdrawing to the inmost, seeing nothing, must have its vision – not of some other light in some other thing but of the light within itself, unmingled, pure, suddenly gleaming before it; Enneads V,5,

Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it is not, itself, in a universe or in any place – what place was there before the universe came to be? – its linked members form and occupy the whole. But Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily substance is not a place to the Soul; Soul is contained in Intellectual-Principle and is the container of body. The Intellectual-Principle in turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First? This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things nor directly within them; there is nothing containing it; it contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way, that towards it all things have their being, all dependent upon it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness according to its fuller possession of authentic being. Enneads V,5,

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object; eyes for one kind, ears for another: similarly some things, we must believe, are to be known by the Intellectual-Principle in us. We must not confuse intellection with hearing or seeing; this would be trying to look with the ears or denying sound because it is not seen. Certain people, we must keep in mind, have forgotten that to which, from the beginning onwards, their longing and effort are pointed: for all that exists desires and aspires towards the Supreme by a compulsion of nature, as if all had received the oracle that without it they cannot be. Enneads V,5,

Thus there is the primally intellective and there is that in which intellection has taken another mode; but this indicates that what transcends the primarily intellective has no intellection; for, to have intellection, it must become an Intellectual-Principle, and, if it is to become that, it must possess an intellectual object and, as primarily intellective, it must possess that intellectual object as something within itself. Enneads V,6,

Once there is any manifold, there must be a precedent unity: since any intellection implies multiplicity in the intellective subject, the non-multiple must be without intellection; that non-multiple will be the First: intellection and the Intellectual-Principle must be characteristic of beings coming later. Enneads V,6,

Again; an Intellectual-Principle is distinct from The Good and takes a certain goodness only by its intellection of The Good. Enneads V,6,

We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light from the sun: Soul carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the light which makes it essentially intellective; Intellectual-Principle carries the light as its own though it is not purely the light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character. Enneads V,6,

But all this may be made more evident by a clearer recognition of the twofold principle at work wherever there is intellection: When we affirm the reality of the Real Beings and their individual identity of being and declare that these Real Beings exist in the Intellectual Realm, we do not mean merely that they remain unchangeably self-identical by their very essence, as contrasted with the fluidity and instability of the sense-realm; the sense-realm itself may contain the enduring. No; we mean rather that these principles possess, as by their own virtue, the consummate fulness of being. The Essence described as the primally existent cannot be a shadow cast by Being, but must possess Being entire; and Being is entire when it holds the form and idea of intellection and of life. In a Being, then, the existence, the intellection, the life are present as an aggregate. When a thing is a Being, it is also an Intellectual-Principle, when it is an Intellectual-Principle it is a Being; intellection and Being are co-existents. Therefore intellection is a multiple not a unitary and that which does not belong to this order can have no Intellection. And if we turn to the partial and particular, there is the Intellectual form of man, and there is man, there is the Intellectual form of horse and there is horse, the Intellectual form of Justice, and Justice. Enneads V,6,

This prior, then, is the Intellectual-Principle, the veritable, abiding and not fluctuant since not taking intellectual quality from outside itself. By what image thus, can we represent it? We have nowhere to go but to what is less. Only from itself can we take an image of it; that is, there can be no representation of it, except in the sense that we represent gold by some portion of gold – purified, either actually or mentally, if it be impure – insisting at the same time that this is not the total thing-gold, but merely the particular gold of a particular parcel. In the same way we learn in this matter from the purified Intellect in ourselves or, if you like, from the Gods and the glory of the Intellect in them. Enneads V,8,

Now, if we could think of this as the primal wisdom, we need look no further, since, at that, we have discovered a principle which is neither a derivative nor a "stranger in something strange to it." But if we are told that, while this Reason-Principle is in Nature, yet Nature itself is its source, we ask how Nature came to possess it; and, if Nature derived it from some other source, we ask what that other source may be; if, on the contrary, the principle is self-sprung, we need look no further: but if we are referred to the Intellectual-Principle we must make clear whether the Intellectual-Principle engendered the wisdom: if we learn that it did, we ask whence: if from itself, then inevitably, it is itself Wisdom. Enneads V,8,

This is why in that other sphere, when we are deepest in that knowledge by intellection, we are aware of none; we are expecting some impression on sense, which has nothing to report since it has seen nothing and never could in that order see anything. The unbelieving element is sense; it is the other, the Intellectual-Principle, that sees; and if this too doubted, it could not even credit its own existence, for it can never stand away and with bodily eyes apprehend itself as a visible object. Enneads V,8,

The question thus becomes, "What principle is the giver of wisdom to the soul? and the only answer is "The Intellectual-Principle," the veritably intellectual, wise without intermission and therefore beautiful of itself. Enneads V,8,

Perhaps it is ridiculous to set out enquiring whether an Intellectual-Principle has place in the total of being: but there may be some to hesitate even as to this and certainly there will be the question whether it is as we describe it, whether it is a separate existence, whether it actually is the real beings, whether it is the seat of the Ideas; to this we now address ourselves. Enneads V,8,

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle – since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless – you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else – the Intellectual-Principle in it – representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. Enneads V,8,

Applying the same method to the total of things, here too we discover the Intellectual-Principle and this we set down as veritably the maker and creator of the All. The underly has adopted, we see, certain shapes by which it becomes fire, water, air, earth; and these shapes have been imposed upon it by something else. This other is Soul which, hovering over the Four [the elements], imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for which it has itself received from the Intellectual-Principle as the soul or mind of the craftsman draws upon his craft for the plan of his work. Enneads V,8,

The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the soul, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape – the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given – imparting to soul nearly the authentic reality while what body receives is but image and imitation. Enneads V,8,

But, soul reached, why need we look higher; why not make this The First? A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once something other and something more powerful than Soul and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is certainly not true, as people imagine, that the soul, brought to perfection, produces Intellect. How could that potentiality come to actuality unless there be, first, an effective principle to induce the actualization which, left to chance, might never occur? The Firsts must be supposed to exist in actuality, looking to nothing else, self-complete. Anything incomplete must be sequent upon these, and take its completion from the principles engendering it which, like fathers, labour in the improvement of an offspring born imperfect: the produced is a Matter to the producing principle and is worked over by it into a shapely perfection. Enneads V,8,

These and many other considerations establish the necessary existence of an Intellectual-Principle prior to Soul. Enneads V,8,

This Intellectual-Principle, if the term is to convey the truth, must be understood to be not a principle merely potential and not one maturing from unintelligence to intelligence – that would simply send us seeking, once more, a necessary prior – but a principle which is intelligence in actuality and in eternity. Enneads V,8,

Further, if the Intellectual-Principle is to be the maker of this All, it cannot make by looking outside itself to what does not yet exist. The Authentic Beings must, then, exist before this All, no copies made on a model but themselves archetypes, primals, and the essence of the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,8,

We may be told that Reason-Principles suffice [to the subsistence of the All]: but then these, clearly, must be eternal; and if eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an Intellectual-Principle such as we have indicated, a principle earlier than condition, than nature, than soul, than anything whose existence is potential for contingent]. Enneads V,8,

The Intellectual-Principle, therefore, is itself the authentic existences, not a knower knowing them in some sphere foreign to it. The Authentic Beings, thus, exist neither before nor after it: it is the primal legislator to Being or, rather, is itself the law of Being. Thus it is true that "Intellectual and Being are identical"; in the immaterial the knowledge of the thing is the thing. And this is the meaning of the dictum "I sought myself," namely as one of the Beings: it also bears on reminiscence. Enneads V,8,

For none of the Beings is outside the Intellectual-Principle or in space; they remain for ever in themselves, accepting no change, no decay, and by that are the authentically existent. Things that arise and fall away draw on real being as something to borrow from; they are not of the real; the true being is that on which they draw. Enneads V,8,

This universe, characteristically participant in images, shows how the image differs from the authentic beings: against the variability of the one order, there stands the unchanging quality of the other, self-situate, not needing space because having no magnitude, holding an existent intellective and self-sufficing. The body-kind seeks its endurance in another kind; the Intellectual-Principle, sustaining by its marvellous Being, the things which of themselves must fall, does not itself need to look for a staying ground. Enneads V,8,

We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all – not as in a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of them merged into any other, each acting its own part at call quite independently, every conception coming out from the inner total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a closer unity, that the Intellectual-Principle is all Being in one total – and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a distinct power which, however, the total Intellectual-Principle includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This relation may be illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in one kernel; yet in that unit there is eye-principle, and there is hand-principle, each of which is revealed as a separate power by its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher. This power is sometimes designated as Nature in the seed-life; its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as light from fire, it converts and shapes the matter of things, not by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but by bestowal of the Ideas. Enneads V,8,

Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can scarcely be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surface-knowing; it is of later origin than the objects since it is a reflection from them: but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning soul from the Intellectual-Principle and has no dealing with anything in sense. Being true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognisance; it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual object since it carries the Intellectual-Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote – for all such experience belongs to soul – but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things by the act of knowing them. Enneads V,8,

What, then, is that content? An Intellectual-Principle and an Intellective Essence, no concept distinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle, each actually being that Principle. The Intellectual-Principle entire is the total of the Ideas, and each of them is the [entire] Intellectual-Principle in a special form. Thus a science entire is the total of the relevant considerations each of which, again, is a member of the entire science, a member not distinct in space yet having its individual efficacy in a total. Enneads V,8,

This Intellectual-Principle, therefore, is a unity while by that possession of itself it is, tranquilly, the eternal abundance. Enneads V,8,

If the Intellectual-Principle were envisaged as preceding Being, it would at once become a principle whose expression, its intellectual Act, achieves and engenders the Beings: but, since we are compelled to think of existence as preceding that which knows it, we can but think that the Beings are the actual content of the knowing principle and that the very act, the intellection, is inherent to the Beings, as fire stands equipped from the beginning with fire-act; in this conception, the Beings contain the Intellectual-Principle as one and the same with themselves, as their own activity. Thus, Being is itself an activity: there is one activity, then, in both or, rather, both are one thing. Enneads V,8,

Being, therefore, and the Intellectual-Principle are one Nature: the Beings, and the Act of that which is, and the Intellectual-Principle thus constituted, all are one: and the resultant Intellections are the Idea of Being and its shape and its act. Enneads V,8,

What, then, is the content – inevitably separated by our minds – of this one Intellectual-Principle? For there is no resource but to represent the items in accessible form just as we study the various articles constituting one science. Enneads V,8,

This universe is a living thing capable of including every form of life; but its Being and its modes are derived from elsewhere; that source is traced back to the Intellectual-Principle: it follows that the all-embracing archetype is in the Intellectual-Principle, which, therefore, must be an intellectual Kosmos, that indicated by Plato in the phrase "The living existent." Enneads V,8,

It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an Absolute-Soul differing from Soul and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,8,

There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this Principle must be the source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly? The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes to be, why the Intellectual-Principle is all and whence it springs, these matters demand another approach. Enneads V,8,

But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea – whether there is an Idea of filth and mud – it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the Soul which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these. Enneads V,8,

But all this will be more clearly brought out, when we turn to the problem of the production of multiplicity from unity. Compounds, we shall see – as owing existence to hazard and not to the Intellectual-Principle, having been fused into objects of sense by their own impulse – are not to be included under Ideas. Enneads V,8,

And before the particular Soul there is another Soul, a universal, and, before that, an Absolute-Soul, which is the Life existing in the Intellectual-Principle before Soul came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life in the Divine] the Absolute-Soul. Enneads V,8,

We are agreed that diversity within the Authentic depends not upon spatial separation but sheerly upon differentiation; all Being, despite this plurality, is a unity still; "Being neighbours Being"; all holds together; and thus the Intellectual-Principle [which is Being and the Beings] remains an integral, multiple by differentiation, not by spatial distinction. Enneads VI,4,

If we are told that these powers fade out similarly, we are left with only one imperishable: the souls, the Intellectual-Principle, become perishable; then since Being [identical with the Intellectual-Principle] becomes transitory, so also must the Beings, its productions. Yet the sun, so long as it holds its station in the universe, will pour the same light upon the same places; to think its light may be lessened is to hold its mass perishable. But it has been abundantly stated that the emanants of the First are not perishable, that the souls, and the Intellectual-Principle with all its content, cannot perish. Enneads VI,4,

Still, this integral omnipresence admitted, why do not all things participate in the Intellectual Order in its entirety? Why has it a first participant, a second, and so on? We can but see that presence is determined by the fitness of the participant so that, while Being is omnipresent to the realm of Being, never falling short of itself, yet only the competent possess themselves of that presence which depends not upon situation but upon adequacy; the transparent object and the opaque answer very differently to the light. These firsts, seconds, thirds, of participance are determined by rank, by power, not by place but by differentiation; and difference is no bar to coexistence, witness soul and Intellectual-Principle: similarly our own knowledge, the trivial next the gravest; one and the same object yields colour to our sight, fragrance to smell, to every sense a particular experience, all presented simultaneously. Enneads VI,4,

And there is movement in its lack of consciousness; it has passed out of Intellectual-Principle, slid away. That it cannot break free but is under compulsion from without to keep to its circling with no possibility of advance, in this would be its rest. Thus it is not true to speak of Matter as being solely in flux. Enneads VI,6,

If, on the contrary, Number is a direct production of the Intellectual-Principle [an Idea in itself], there is the question whether it preceded or followed the other Ideas. Enneads VI,6,

Justice therefore is not the thought of Justice but, as we may put it, a state of the Intellectual-Principle, or rather an activity of it – an appearance so lovely that neither evening nor dawn is so fair, nor anything else in all the realm of sense, an Intellectual manifestation self-rising, self-seen, or, rather, self-being. Enneads VI,6,

It is inevitably necessary to think of all as contained within one nature; one nature must hold and encompass all; there cannot be as in the realm of sense thing apart from thing, here a sun and elsewhere something else; all must be mutually present within a unity. This is the very nature of the Intellectual-Principle as we may know from soul which reproduces it and from what we call Nature under which and by which the things of process are brought into their disjointed being while that Nature itself remains indissolubly one. Enneads VI,6,

Against doubters we cite the fact of participation; the greatness and beauty of the Intellectual-Principle we know by the soul’s longing towards it; the longing of the rest towards soul is set up by its likeness to its higher and to the possibility open to them of attaining resemblance through it. Enneads VI,6,

As then there is a Life-Form primal – which therefore is the Life-Form Absolute – and there is Intellectual-Principle or Being, Authentic Being, these, we affirm, contain all living things and all Number, and Absolute Justice and Beauty and all of that order; for we ascribe an existence of their own to Absolute Man, Absolute Number, Absolute Justice. It remains to discover, in so far as such knowledge is possible, how these distinct entities come to be and what is the manner of their being. Enneads VI,6,

At the outset we must lay aside all sense-perception; by Intellectual-Principle we know Intellectual-Principle. We reflect within ourselves there is life, there is intellect, not in extension but as power without magnitude, issue of Authentic Being which is power self-existing, no vacuity but a thing most living and intellective – nothing more living, more intelligent, more real – and producing its effect by contact and in the ratio of the contact, closely to the close, more remotely to the remote. If Being is to be sought, then most be sought is Being at its intensest; so too the intensest of Intellect if the Intellectual act has worth; and so, too, of Life. Enneads VI,6,

First, then, we take Being as first in order; then Intellectual-Principle; then the Living-Form considered as containing all things: Intellectual-Principle, as the Act of Real Being, is a second. Enneads VI,6,

Thus it is clear that Number cannot be dependent upon the Living-Form since unity and duality existed before that; nor does it rise in the Intellectual-Principle since before that there existed Real Being which is both one and numerous. Enneads VI,6,

But if Number thus preceded the Beings, then it is not included among them? The truth is that it existed within the Authentic Being but not as applying to it, for Being was still unparted; the potentiality of Number existed and so produced the division within Being, put in travail with multiplicity; Number must be either the substance of Being or its Activity; the Life-Form as such and the Intellectual-Principle must be Number. Clearly Being is to be, thought of as Number Collective, while the Beings are Number unfolded: the Intellectual-Principle is Number moving within itself, while the Living-Form is Number container of the universe. Even Being is the outcome of the Unity, and, since the prior is unity, the secondary must be Number. Enneads VI,6,

We must repeat: The Collective Being, the Authentic, There, is at once Being and Intellectual-Principle and the Complete Living Form; thus it includes the total of living things; the Unity There is reproduced by the unity of this living universe in the degree possible to it – for the sense-nature as such cannot compass that transcendental unity – thus that Living-All is inevitably Number-Entire: if the Number were not complete, the All would be deficient to the extent of some number, and if every number applicable to living things were not contained in it, it would not be the all-comprehending Life-Form. Therefore, Number exists before every living thing, before the collective Life-Form. Enneads VI,6,

Again: Man exists in the Intellectual and with him all other living things, both by possession of Real-Being and because that is the Life-Form Complete. Even the man of this sphere is a member of the Intellectual since that is the Life-Form Complete; every living thing by virtue of having life, is There, There in the Life-form, and man is There also, in the Intellectual, in so far as he is intellect, for all intelligences are severally members of That. Now all this means Number There. Yet even in Intellect Number is not present primally; its presence There is the reckoning of the Acts of Intellectual-Principle; it tallies with the justice in Intellectual-Principle, its moral wisdom, its virtues, its knowledge, all whose possession makes That Principle what it is. Enneads VI,6,

But knowledge – must not this imply presence to the alien? No; knowledge, known and knower are an identity; so with all the rest; every member of Intellectual-Principle is therefore present to it primally; justice, for example, is not accidental to it as to soul in its character as soul, where these virtues are mainly potential becoming actual by the intention towards Intellectual-Principle and association with it. Enneads VI,6,

But does the Life-Form contain the configurations by the mere fact of its life? They are in the Intellectual-Principle previously but they also exist in the Living-Form; if this be considered as including the Intellectual-Principle, then they are primally in the Life-Form, but if that Principle comes first then they are previously in that. And if the Life-Form entire contains also souls, it must certainly be subsequent to the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads VI,6,

No doubt there is the passage "Whatever Intellect sees in the entire Life-Form"; thus seeing, must not the Intellectual-Principle be the later? No; the seeing may imply merely that the reality comes into being by the fact of that seeing; the Intellectual-Principle is not external to the Life-Form; all is one; the Act of the Intellectual-Principle possesses itself of bare sphere, while the Life-Form holds the sphere as sphere of a living total. Enneads VI,6,

It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the "More than is present"; the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire; no number has been or could be omitted to make addition possible. It might be described as infinite in the sense that it has not been measured – who is there to measure it? – but it is solely its own, a concentrated unit, entire, not ringed round by any boundary; its manner of being is settled for it by itself alone. None of the Real-Beings is under limit; what is limited, measured, is what needs measure to prevent it running away into the unbounded. There every being is Measure; and therefore it is that all is beautiful. Because that is a living thing it is beautiful, holding the highest life, the complete, a life not tainted towards death, nothing mortal there, nothing dying. Nor is the life of that Absolute Living-Form some feeble flickering; it is primal, the brightest, holding all that life has of radiance; it is that first light which the souls There draw upon for their life and bring with them when they come here. It knows for what purpose it lives, towards What it lives, from Whence it lives; for the Whence of its life is the Whither... and close above it stands the wisdom of all, the collective Intellectual-Principle, knit into it, one with it, colouring it to a higher goodness, by kneading wisdom into it, making its beauty still more august. Even here the august and veritably beautiful life is the life in wisdom, here dimly seen, There purely. For There wisdom gives sight to the seer and power for the fuller living and in that tenser life both to see and to become what is seen. Enneads VI,6,

In virtue of this Essence it is that life endures, that the Intellectual-Principle endures, that the Beings stand in their eternity; nothing alters it, turns it, moves it; nothing, indeed, is in being besides it to touch it; anything that is must be its product; anything opposed to it could not affect it. Being itself could not make such an opposite into Being; that would require a prior to both and that prior would then be Being; so that Parmenides was right when he taught the identity of Being and Unity. Being is thus beyond contact not because it stands alone but because it is Being. For Being alone has Being in its own right. Enneads VI,6,

Thus we have even here the means of knowing the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, though, seeing it more closely than anything else, we still see it at less than its worth. We know that it exists but its cause we do not see, or, if we do, we see that cause as something apart. We see a man – or an eye, if you like – but this is an image or part of an image; what is in that Principle is at once Man and the reason of his being; for There man – or eye – must be, itself, an intellective thing and a cause of its being; it could not exist at all unless it were that cause, whereas here, everything partial is separate and so is the cause of each. In the Intellectual, all is at one so that the thing is identical with the cause. Enneads VI,7,

A thing of inactivity, even though alive, cannot include its own cause; but where could a Forming-Idea, a member of the Intellectual-Principle, turn in quest of its cause? We may be answered "In the Intellectual-Principle"; but the two are not distinct; the Idea is the Intellectual-Principle; and if that Principle must contain the Ideas complete, their cause must be contained in them. The Intellectual-Principle itself contains every cause of the things of its content; but these of its content are identically Intellectual-Principle, each of them Intellectual-Principle; none of them, thus, can lack its own cause; each springs into being carrying with it the reason of its being. No result of chance, each must rise complete with its cause; it is an integral and so includes the excellence bound up with the cause. This is how all participants in the Idea are put into possession of their cause. Enneads VI,7,

Further, since nothing There is chance-sprung, and the multiplicity in each comprehends the entire content, then the cause of every member can be named; the cause was present from the beginning, inherent, not a cause but a fact of the being; or, rather, cause and manner of being were one. What could an Idea have, as cause, over and above the Intellectual-Principle? It is a thought of that Principle and cannot, at that, be considered as anything but a perfect product. If it is thus perfect we cannot speak of anything in which it is lacking nor cite any reason for such lack. That thing must be present, and we can say why. The why is inherent, therefore, in the entity, that is to say in every thought and activity of the Intellectual-Principle. Take for example the Idea of Man; Man entire is found to contribute to it; he is in that Idea in all his fulness including everything that from the beginning belonged to Man. If Man were not complete There, so that there were something to be added to the Idea, that additional must belong to a derivative; but Man exists from eternity and must therefore be complete; the man born is the derivative. Enneads VI,7,

But, at this, sense-perception – even in its particular modes – is involved in the Idea by eternal necessity, in virtue of the completeness of the Idea; Intellectual-Principle, as all-inclusive, contains in itself all by which we are brought, later, to recognise this perfection in its nature; the cause, There, was one total, all-inclusive; thus Man in the Intellectual was not purely intellect, sense-perception being an addition made upon his entry into birth: all this would seem to imply a tendance in that great Principle towards the lower, towards this sphere. Enneads VI,7,

But how can that higher soul have sense-perception? It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul’s perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the sense-realm to the lowest extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the Reason-Principles in copy; and Man in the Intellectual-Principle contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all – not in the sense of actually living by them all but as standing in under-parallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the body, then if the second also departs – of course not losing hold on the Above – the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that. Enneads VI,7,

But [it will be objected] if this were a matter of mere thinking we might well admit that the intellectual concept, remaining concept, should take in the unintellectual, but where concept is identical with thing how can the one be an Intellection and the other without intelligence? Would not this be Intellect making itself unintelligent? No: the thing is not unintelligent; it is Intelligence in a particular mode, corresponding to a particular aspect of Life; and just as life in whatever form it may appear remains always life, so Intellect is not annulled by appearing in a certain mode. Intellectual-Principle adapted to some particular living being does not cease to be the Intellectual-Principle of all, including man: take it where you will, every manifestation is the whole, though in some special mode; the particular is produced but the possibility is of all. In the particular we see the Intellectual-Principle in realization; the realized is its latest phase; in one case the last aspect is "horse"; at "horse" ended the progressive outgoing towards the lesser forms of life, as in another case it will end at something lower still. The unfolding of the powers of this Principle is always attended by some abandonment in regard to the highest; the outgoing is by loss, and by this loss the powers become one thing or another according to the deficiency of the life-form produced by the failing principle; it is then that they find the means of adding various requisites; the safeguards of the life becoming inadequate there appear nail, talon, fang, horn. Thus the Intellectual-Principle by its very descent is directed towards the perfect sufficiency of the natural constitution, finding there within itself the remedy of the failure. Enneads VI,7,

For Intellectual-Principle is not a simplex, nor is the soul that proceeds from it: on the contrary things include variety in the degree of their simplicity, that is to say in so far as they are not compounds but Principles and Activities; – the activity of the lowest is simple in the sense of being a fading-out, that of the First as the total of all activity. Intellectual-Principle is moved in a movement unfailingly true to one course, but its unity and identity are not those of the partial; they are those of its universality; and indeed the partial itself is not a unity but divides to infinity. Enneads VI,7,

We know that Intellectual-Principle has a source and advances to some term as its ultimate; now, is the intermediate between source and term to thought of as a line or as some distinct kind of body uniform and unvaried? Where at that would be its worth? it had no change, if no differentiation woke it into life, it would not be a Force; that condition would in no way differ from mere absence of power and, even calling it movement, it would still be the movement of a life not all-varied but indiscriminate; now it is of necessity that life be all-embracing, covering all the realms, and that nothing fail of life. Intellectual-Principle, therefore, must move in every direction upon all, or more precisely must ever have so moved. Enneads VI,7,

Being, thus, at once Collective Identity and Collective Difference, Intellectual-Principle must reach over all different things; its very nature then is to modify into a universe. If the realm of different things existed before it, these different things must have modified it from the beginning; if they did not, this Intellectual-Principle produced all, or, rather, was all. Enneads VI,7,

Beings could not exist save by the activity of Intellectual-Principle; wandering down every way it produces thing after thing, but wandering always within itself in such self-bound wandering as authentic Intellect may know; this wandering permitted to its nature is among real beings which keep pace with its movement; but it is always itself; this is a stationary wandering, a wandering within the Meadow of Truth from which it does not stray. Enneads VI,7,

The Intellectual-Principle is the Intellectual Act; its movement is complete, filling Being complete; And the entire of Being is the Intellectual Act entire, comprehending all life and the unfailing succession of things. Because this Principle contains Identity and Difference its division is ceaselessly bringing the different things to light. Its entire movement is through life and among living things. To a traveller over land, all is earth but earth abounding in difference: so in this journey the life through which Intellectual-Principle passes is one life but, in its ceaseless changing, a varied life. Enneads VI,7,

Throughout this endless variation it maintains the one course because it is not, itself, subject to change but on the contrary is present as identical and unvarying Being to the rest of things. For if there be no such principle of unchanging identity to things, all is dead, activity and actuality exist nowhere. These "other things" through which it passes are also Intellectual-Principle itself; otherwise it is not the all-comprehending principle: if it is to be itself, it must be all-embracing; failing that, it is not itself. If it is complete in itself, complete because all-embracing, and there is nothing which does not find place in this total, then there can be nothing belonging to it which is not different; only by difference can there be such co-operation towards a total. If it knew no otherness but was pure identity its essential Being would be the less for that failure to fulfil the specific nature which its completion requires. Enneads VI,7,

On the nature of the Intellectual-Principle we get light from its manifestations; they show that it demands such diversity as is compatible with its being a monad. Take what principle you will, that of plant or animal: if this principle were a pure unity and not a specifically varied thing, it could not so serve as principle; its product would be Matter, the principle not having taken all those forms necessary if Matter is to be permeated and utterly transformed. A face is not one mass; there are nose and eyes; and the nose is not a unity but has the differences which make it a nose; as bare unity it would be mere mass. Enneads VI,7,

There is infinity in Intellectual-Principle since, of its very nature, it is a multiple unity, not with the unity of a house but with that of a Reason-Principle, multiple in itself: in the one Intellectual design it includes within itself, as it were in outline, all the outlines, all the patterns. All is within it, all the powers and intellections; the division is not determined by a boundary but goes ever inward; this content is held as the living universe holds the natural forms of the living creatures in it from the greatest to the least, down even to the minutest powers where there is a halt at the individual form. The discrimination is not of items huddled within a sort of unity; this is what is known as the Universal Sympathy, not of course the sympathy known here which is a copy and prevails amongst things in separation; that authentic Sympathy consists in all being a unity and never discriminate. Enneads VI,7,

That Life, the various, the all-including, the primal and one, who can consider it without longing to be of it, disdaining all the other? All other life is darkness, petty and dim and poor; it is unclean and polluting the clean for if you do but look upon it you no longer see nor live this life which includes all living, in which there is nothing that does not live and live in a life of purity void of all that is ill. For evil is here where life is in copy and Intellect in copy; There is the archetype, that which is good in the very Idea – we read – as holding The Good in the pure Idea. That Archetype is good; Intellectual-Principle is good as holding its life by contemplation of the archetype; and it sees also as good the objects of its contemplation because it holds them in its act of contemplating the Principle of Good. But these objects come to it not as they are There but in accord with its own condition, for it is their source; they spring thence to be here, and Intellectual-Principle it is that has produced them by its vision There. In the very law, never, looking to That, could it fail of Intellectual Act; never, on the other hand, could it produce what is There; of itself it could not produce; Thence it must draw its power to bring forth, to teem with offspring of itself; from the Good it takes what itself did not possess. From that Unity came multiplicity to Intellectual-Principle; it could not sustain the power poured upon it and therefore broke it up; it turned that one power into variety so as to carry it piecemeal. Enneads VI,7,

But this would be to see it from without, one thing seeing another; the true way is to become Intellectual-Principle and be, our very selves, what we are to see. Enneads VI,7,

But what is the Nature of this Transcendent in view of which and by way of which the Ideas are good? The best way of putting the question is to ask whether, when Intellectual-Principle looked towards The Good, it had Intellection of that unity as a multiplicity and, itself a unity, plied its Act by breaking into parts what it was too feeble to know as a whole. Enneads VI,7,

No: that would not be Intellection looking upon the Good; it would be a looking void of Intellection. We must think of it not as looking but as living; dependent upon That, it kept itself turned Thither; all the tendance taking place There and upon That must be a movement teeming with life and must so fill the looking Principle; there is no longer bare Act, there is a filling to saturation. Forthwith Intellectual-Principle becomes all things, knows that fact in virtue of its self-knowing and at once becomes Intellectual-Principle, filled so as to hold within itself that object of its vision, seeing all by the light from the Giver and bearing that Giver with it. Enneads VI,7,

In this way the Supreme may be understood to be the cause at once of essential reality and of the knowing of reality. The sun, cause of the existence of sense-things and of their being seen, is indirectly the cause of sight, without being either the faculty or the object: similarly this Principle, The Good, cause of Being and Intellectual-Principle, is a light appropriate to what is to be seen There and to their seer; neither the Beings nor the Intellectual-Principle, it is their source and by the light it sheds upon both makes them objects of Intellection. This filling procures the existence; after the filling, the being; the existence achieved, the seeing followed: the beginning is that state of not yet having been filled, though there is, also, the beginning which means that the Filling Principle was outside and by that act of filling gave shape to the filled. Enneads VI,7,

But in what mode are these secondaries, and Intellectual-Principle itself, within the First? They are not in the Filling Principle; they are not in the filled since before that moment it did not contain them. Enneads VI,7,

As what, then, is its unity determined? As Intellectual-Principle: determined Life is Intellectual-Principle. And the multiplicity? As the multiplicity of Intellectual-Principles: all its multiplicity resolves itself into Intellectual-Principles – on the one hand the collective Principle, on the other the particular Principles. Enneads VI,7,

But does this collective Intellectual-Principle include each of the particular Principles as identical with itself? No: it would be thus the container of only the one thing; since there are many Intellectual-Principles within the collective, there must be differentiation. Enneads VI,7,

Thus the Life in the Supreme was the collectivity of power; the vision taking place There was the potentiality of all; Intellectual-Principle, thus arising, is manifested as this universe of Being. It stands over the Beings not as itself requiring base but that it may serve as base to the Form of the Firsts, the Formless Form. And it takes position towards the soul, becoming a light to the soul as itself finds its light in the First; whenever Intellectual-Principle becomes the determinant of soul it shapes it into Reasoning Soul, by communicating a trace of what itself has come to possess. Enneads VI,7,

Thus Intellectual-Principle is a vestige of the Supreme; but since the vestige is a Form going out into extension, into plurality, that Prior, as the source of Form, must be itself without shape and Form: if the Prior were a Form, the Intellectual-Principle itself could be only a Reason-Principle. It was necessary that The First be utterly without multiplicity, for otherwise it must be again referred to a prior. Enneads VI,7,

But in what way is the content of Intellectual-Principle participant in good? Is it because each member of it is an Idea or because of their beauty or how? Anything coming from The Good carries the image and type belonging to that original or deriving from it, as anything going back to warmth or sweetness carries the memory of those originals: Life entered into Intellectual-Principle from The Supreme, for its origin is in the Activity streaming Thence; Intellectual-Principle springs from the Supreme, and with it the beauty of the Ideas; at once all these, Life, Intellectual-Principle, Idea, must inevitably have goodness. Enneads VI,7,

But if in that higher Life there must be something from That, something which is the Authentic Life, we must admit that since nothing worthless can come Thence Life in itself is good; so too we must admit, in the case of Authentic Intellectual-Principle, that its Life because good derives from that First; thus it becomes clear that every Idea is good and informed by the Good. The Ideas must have something of good, whether as a common property or as a distinct attribution or as held in some distinct measure. Enneads VI,7,

Thus it is established that the particular Idea contains in its essence something of good and thereby becomes a good thing; for Life we found to be good not in the bare being but in its derivation from the Authentic, the Supreme whence it sprung: and the same is true of Intellectual-Principle: we are forced therefore admit a certain identity. Enneads VI,7,

Thus virtue and Intellectual-Principle and life and soul – reasoning soul, at least – belong to the idea of good and so therefore does all that a reasoned life aims at. Enneads VI,7,

Why not halt, then – it will be asked – at Intellectual-Principle and make that The Good? Soul and life are traces of Intellectual-Principle; that principle is the Term of Soul which on judgement sets itself towards Intellectual-Principle, pronouncing right preferable to wrong and virtue in every form to vice, and thus ranking by its choosing. Enneads VI,7,

The soul aiming only at that Principle would need a further lessoning; it must be taught that Intellectual-Principle is not the ultimate, that not all things look to that while all do look to the good. Not all that is outside of Intellectual-Principle seeks to attain it; what has attained it does not halt there but looks still towards good. Besides, Intellectual-Principle is sought upon motives of reasoning, the good before all reason. And in any striving towards life and continuity of existence and activity, the object is aimed at not as Intellectual-Principle but as good, as rising from good and leading to it: life itself is desirable only in view of good. Enneads VI,7,

Now what in all these objects of desire is the fundamental making them good? We must be bold: Intellectual-Principle and that life are of the order of good and hold their desirability, even they, in virtue of belonging to that order; they have their goodness, I mean, because Life is an Activity in The Good, – Or rather, streaming from The Good – while Intellectual-Principle is an Activity already defined Therein; both are of radiant beauty and, because they come Thence and lead Thither, they are sought after by the soul-sought, that is, as things congenial though not veritably good while yet, as belonging to that order not to be rejected; the related, if not good, is shunned in spite of that relationship, and even remote and ignobler things may at times prove attractive. Enneads VI,7,

The intense love called forth by Life and Intellectual-Principle is due not to what they are but to the consideration of their nature as something apart, received from above themselves. Enneads VI,7,

That light known, then indeed we are stirred towards those Beings in longing and rejoicing over the radiance about them, just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the Beauty manifested upon it. Every one of those Beings exists for itself but becomes an object of desire by the colour cast upon it from The Good, source of those graces and of the love they evoke. The soul taking that outflow from the divine is stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love. Before that, even Intellectual-Principle with all its loveliness did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the light of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all, unquickened even to Intellectual-Principle there before it. But when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and however urged by its nearer environing, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something greater to its memory: so long as there exists anything loftier than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the giver of that love. Beyond Intellectual-Principle it passes but beyond The Good it cannot, for nothing stands above That. Let it remain in Intellectual-Principle and it sees the lovely and august, but it is not there possessed of all it sought; the face it sees is beautiful no doubt but not of power to hold its gaze because lacking in the radiant grace which is the bloom upon beauty. Enneads VI,7,

That which soul must quest, that which sheds its light upon Intellectual-Principle, leaving its mark wherever it falls, surely we need not wonder that it be of power to draw to itself, calling back from every wandering to rest before it. From it came all, and so there is nothing mightier; all is feeble before it. Of all things the best, must it not be The Good? If by The Good we mean the principle most wholly self-sufficing, utterly without need of any other, what can it be but this? Before all the rest, it was what it was, when evil had yet no place in things. Enneads VI,7,

What then does it effect out of its greatness? It has produced Intellectual-Principle, it has produced Life, the souls which Intellectual-Principle sends forth and everything else that partakes of Reason, of Intellectual-Principle or of Life. Source and spring of so much, how describe its goodness and greatness? But what does it effect now? Even now it is preserver of what it produced; by it the Intellectual Beings have their Intellection and the living their life; it breathes Intellect in breathes Life in and, where life is impossible, existence. Enneads VI,7,

But ourselves – how does it touch us? We may recall what we have said of the nature of the light shining from it into Intellectual-Principle and so by participation into the soul. But for the moment let us leave that aside and put another question: Does The Good hold that nature and name because some outside thing finds it desirable? May we put it that a thing desirable to one is good to that one and that what is desirable to all is to be recognised as The Good? No doubt this universal questing would make the goodness evident but still there must be in the nature something to earn that name. Enneads VI,7,

And we must not overlook what some surly critic will surely bring up against us: What’s all this: you scatter praises here, there and everywhere: Life is good, Intellectual-Principle is good: and yet The Good is above them; how then can Intellectual-Principle itself be good? Or what do we gain by seeing the Ideas themselves if we see only a particular Idea and nothing else [nothing "substantial"]? If we are happy here we may be deceived into thinking life a good when it is merely pleasant; but suppose our lot unhappy, why should we speak of good? Is mere personal existence good? What profit is there in it? What is the advantage in existence over utter non-existence – unless goodness is to be founded upon our love of self? It is the deception rooted in the nature of things and our dread of dissolution that lead to all the "goods" of your positing. Enneads VI,7,

It is in view, probably, of this difficulty that Plato, in the Philebus  , makes pleasure an element in the Term; the good is not defined as a simplex or set in Intellectual-Principle alone; while he rightly refrains from identifying the good with the pleasant, yet he does not allow Intellectual-Principle, foreign to pleasure, to be The Good, since he sees no attractive power in it. He may also have had in mind that the good, to answer to its name, must be a thing of delight and that an object of pursuit must at least hold some pleasure for those that acquire and possess it, so that where there is no joy the good too is absent, further that pleasure, implying pursuit, cannot pertain to the First and that therefore good cannot. Enneads VI,7,

Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. Each of these progressive priors must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place, others life, others wisdom and the good life: Intellectual-Principle will draw upon the Authentic Good which we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking light from it. This good we will define later. Enneads VI,7,

But if Matter by very essence is evil how could it choose the good? This question implies that if Evil were self-conscious it would admire itself: but how can the unadmirable be admired; and did we not discover that the good must be apt to the nature? There that question may rest. But if universally the good is Form and the higher the ascent the more there is of Form-Soul more truly Form than body is and phases of soul progressively of higher Form and Intellectual-Principle standing as Form to soul collectively – then the Good advances by the opposite of Matter and, therefore, by a cleansing and casting away to the utmost possible at each stage: and the greatest good must be there where all that is of Matter has disappeared. The Principle of Good rejecting Matter entirely – or rather never having come near it at any point or in any way – must hold itself aloft with that Formless in which Primal Form takes its origin. But we will return to this. Enneads VI,7,

If the knowing principle – and specially primal Intellectual-Principle – is valuable and beautiful, what must be present to those of power to see the Author and Father of Intellect? Anyone thinking slightingly of this principle of Life and Being brings evidence against himself and all his state: of course, distaste for the life that is mingled with death does not touch that Life Authentic. Enneads VI,7,

But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. Intellectual-Principle was raised thus to that Supreme and remains with it, happy in that presence. Soul too, that soul which as possessing knowledge and vision was capable, clung to what it saw; and as its vision so its rapture; it saw and was stricken; but having in itself something of that principle it felt its kinship and was moved to longing like those stirred by the image of the beloved to desire of the veritable presence. Lovers   here mould themselves to the beloved; they seek to increase their attraction of person and their likeness of mind; they are unwilling to fall short in moral quality or in other graces lest they be distasteful to those possessing such merit – and only among such can true love be. In the same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. The soul which has never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love – perhaps unawares – it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter, befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could never venture into the mud of body to be soiled, annulled. Enneads VI,7,

The Intellectual-Principle is the less for seeing things as distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the multiple content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual shape; but, even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us still with the question how we are to envisage that which stands beyond this all-lovely, beyond this principle at once multiple and above multiplicity, the Supreme for which the soul hungers though unable to tell why such a being should stir its longing-reason, however, urging that This at last is the Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. Bring something under Form and present it so before the mind; immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers that while there exists the giver having shape to give – a giver that is shape, idea, an entirely measured thing – yet this is not alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own right but is a mingled thing. Shape and idea and measure will always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the Beyond-Beauty cannot be under measure and therefore cannot have admitted shape or be Idea: the primal existent, The First, must be without Form; the beauty in it must be, simply, the Nature of the Intellectual Good. Enneads VI,7,

Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and Matter is needed for the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest away, since of itself it has not even the lowest degree of shape. Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws upon Form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable; Intellectual-Principle, nearer still, is even more to be loved: by these steps we are led to know that the First Principle, principle of Beauty, must be formless. Enneads VI,7,

Such in this union is the soul’s temper that even the act of Intellect, once so intimately loved, she now dismisses; Intellection is movement and she has no wish to move; she has nothing to say of this very Intellectual-Principle by means of which she has attained the vision, herself made over into Intellectual-Principle and becoming that principle so as to be able to take stand in that Intellectual space. Entered there and making herself over to that, she at first contemplates that realm, but once she sees that higher still she leaves all else aside. Thus when a man enters a house rich in beauty he might gaze about and admire the varied splendour before the master appears; but, face to face with that great person – no thing of ornament but calling for the truest attention – he would ignore everything else and look only to the master. In this state of absorbed contemplation there is no longer question of holding an object: the vision is continuous so that seeing and seen are one thing; object and act of vision have become identical; of all that until then filled the eye no memory remains. And our comparison would be closer if instead of a man appearing to the visitor who had been admiring the house it were a god, and not a god manifesting to the eyes but one filling the soul. Enneads VI,7,

Intellectual-Principle, thus, has two powers, first that of grasping intellectively its own content, the second that of an advancing and receiving whereby to know its transcendent; at first it sees, later by that seeing it takes possession of Intellectual-Principle, becoming one only thing with that: the first seeing is that of Intellect knowing, the second that of Intellect loving; stripped of its wisdom in the intoxication of the nectar, it comes to love; by this excess it is made simplex and is happy; and to be drunken is better for it than to be too staid for these revels. Enneads VI,7,

But is its vision parcelwise, thing here and thing there? No: reason unravelling gives process; Intellectual-Principle has unbroken knowledge and has, moreover, an Act unattended by knowing, a vision by another approach. In this seeing of the Supreme it becomes pregnant and at once knows what has come to be within it; its knowledge of its content is what is designated by its Intellection; its knowing of the Supreme is the virtue of that power within it by which, in a later [lower] stage it is to become "Intellective." Enneads VI,7,

As for soul, it attains that vision by – so to speak – confounding and annulling the Intellectual-Principle within it; or rather that Principle immanent in soul sees first and thence the vision penetrates to soul and the two visions become one. Enneads VI,7,

The soul now knows no movement since the Supreme knows none; it is now not even soul since the Supreme is not in life but above life; it is no longer Intellectual-Principle, for the Supreme has not Intellection and the likeness must be perfect; this grasping is not even by Intellection, for the Supreme is not known Intellectively. Enneads VI,7,

Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the all-important: this – we read – is the grand learning, the learning we are to understand, not of looking towards it but attaining, first, some knowledge of it. We come to this learning by analogies, by abstractions, by our understanding of its subsequents, of all that is derived from The Good, by the upward steps towards it. Purification has The Good for goal; so the virtues, all right ordering, ascent within the Intellectual, settlement therein, banqueting upon the divine – by these methods one becomes, to self and to all else, at once seen and seer; identical with Being and Intellectual-Principle and the entire living all, we no longer see the Supreme as an external; we are near now, the next is That and it is close at hand, radiant above the Intellectual. Enneads VI,7,

Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty, the quester holds knowledge still of the ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with light, but it is not a light showing some other object, the light is itself the vision. No longer is there thing seen and light to show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection; this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intellectual object into being for the later use and allowed them to occupy the quester’s mind. With This he himself becomes identical, with that radiance whose Act is to engender Intellectual-Principle, not losing in that engendering but for ever unchanged, the engendered coming to be simply because that Supreme exists. If there were no such principle above change, no derivative could rise. Enneads VI,7,

Since the Supreme has no interval, no self-differentiation what can have this intuitional approach to it but itself? Therefore it quite naturally assumes difference at the point where Intellectual-Principle and Being are differentiated. Enneads VI,7,

To us intellection is a boon since the soul needs it; to the Intellectual-Principle it is appropriate as being one thing with the very essence of the principle constituted by the intellectual Act so that principle and act coincide in a continuous self-consciousness carrying the assurance of identity, of the unity of the two. But pure unity must be independent, in need of no such assurance. Enneads VI,7,

Thus, Intellectual-Principle, finding place in the universe, cannot have place in Him. Where we read that He is the cause of all beauty we are clearly to understand that beauty depends upon the Forms, He being set above all that is beautiful here. The Forms are in that passage secondaries, their sequels being attached to them as dependent thirds: it is clear thus that by "the products of the thirds" is meant this world, dependent upon soul. Enneads VI,7,

Soul dependent upon Intellectual-Principle and Intellectual-Principle upon the Good, all is linked to the Supreme by intermediaries, some close, some nearing those of the closer attachment, while the order of sense stands remotest, dependent upon soul. Enneads VI,7,

Taking it that the presentment of fancy is not a matter of our will and choice, how can we think those acting at its dictation to be free agents? Fancy strictly, in our use, takes it rise from conditions of the body; lack of food and drink sets up presentments, and so does the meeting of these needs; similarly with seminal abundance and other humours of the body. We refuse to range under the principle of freedom those whose conduct is directed by such fancy: the baser sort, therefore, mainly so guided, cannot be credited with self-disposal or voluntary act. Self-disposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the Intellectual-Principle, live above the states of the body. The spring of freedom is the activity of Intellectual-Principle, the highest in our being; the proposals emanating thence are freedom; such desires as are formed in the exercise of the Intellectual act cannot be classed as involuntary; the gods, therefore, that live in this state, living by Intellectual-Principle and by desire conformed to it, possess freedom. Enneads VI,8,

Intellectual-Principle itself comes under the doubt; having a certain nature and acting by that nature can it be said to have freedom and self-disposal – in an act which it cannot leave unenacted? It may be asked, also, whether freedom may strictly be affirmed of such beings as are not engaged in action. Enneads VI,8,

In a principle, act and essence must be free. No doubt Intellectual-Principle itself is to be referred to a yet higher; but this higher is not extern to it; Intellectual-Principle is within the Good; possessing its own good in virtue of that indwelling, much more will it possess freedom and self-disposal which are sought only for the sake of the good. Acting towards the good, it must all the more possess self-disposal for by that Act it is directed towards the Principle from which it proceeds, and this its act is self-centred and must entail its very greatest good. Enneads VI,8,

Are we, however, to make freedom and self-disposal exclusive to Intellectual-Principle as engaged in its characteristic Act, Intellectual-Principle unassociated, or do they belong also to soul acting under that guidance and performing act of virtue? If freedom is to be allowed to soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours? Because there is war, we perform some brave feat; how is that our free act since had there been no war it could not have been performed? So in all cases of fine conduct; there is always some impinging event leading out our quality to show itself in this or that act. And suppose virtue itself given the choice whether to find occasion for its exercise – war evoking courage; wrong, so that it may establish justice and good order; poverty that it may show independence – or to remain inactive, everything going well, it would choose the peace of inaction, nothing calling for its intervention, just as a physician like Hippocrates would prefer no one to stand in need of his skill. Enneads VI,8,

If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have untrammelled self-disposal? Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and reasoning? But in setting freedom in those preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal attributed to virtue as state or disposition. Are we to put it that virtue comes in to restore the disordered soul, taming passions and appetites? In what sense, at that, can we hold our goodness to be our own free act, our fine conduct to be uncompelled? In that we will and adopt, in that this entry of virtue prepares freedom and self-disposal, ending our slavery to the masters we have been obeying. If then virtue is, as it were, a second Intellectual-Principle, and heightens the soul to Intellectual quality, then, once more, our freedom is found to lie not in act but in Intellectual-Principle immune from act. Enneads VI,8,

How then did we come to place freedom in the will when we made out free action to be that produced – or as we also indicated, suppressed – at the dictate of will? If what we have been saying is true and our former statement is consistent with it, the case must stand thus: Virtue and Intellectual-Principle are sovereign and must be held the sole foundation of our self-disposal and freedom; both then are free; Intellectual-Principle is self-confined: Virtue, in its government of the soul which it seeks to lift into goodness, would wish to be free; in so far as it does so it is free and confers freedom; but inevitably experiences and actions are forced upon it by its governance: these it has not planned for, yet when they do arise it will watch still for its sovereignty calling these also to judgement. Virtue does not follow upon occurrences as a saver of the emperilled; at its discretion it sacrifices a man; it may decree the jettison of life, means, children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to the safeguarding of anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our self-disposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the external thing done but to the inner activity, to the Intellection, to virtue’s own vision. Enneads VI,8,

So understood, virtue is a mode of Intellectual-Principle, a mode not involving any of the emotions or passions controlled by its reasonings, since such experiences, amenable to morality and discipline, touch closely – we read – on body. Enneads VI,8,

The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has self-disposal to the point that its operation is utterly independent; it turns wholly upon itself; its very action is itself; at rest in its good it is without need, complete, and may be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it is called will because it expresses the Intellectual-Principle in the willing-phase and, besides, what we know as will imitates this operation taking place within the Intellectual-Principle. Will strives towards the good which the act of Intellectual-Principle realizes. Thus that principle holds what will seeks, that good whose attainment makes will identical with Intellection. Enneads VI,8,

Soul becomes free when it moves, through Intellectual-Principle, towards The Good; what it does in that spirit is its free act; Intellectual-Principle is free in its own right. That principle of Good is the sole object of desire and the source of self-disposal to the rest, to soul when it fully attains, to Intellectual-Principle by connate possession. Enneads VI,8,

How then can the sovereign of all that august sequence – the first in place, that to which all else strives to mount, all dependent upon it and taking from it their powers even to this power of self-disposal – how can This be brought under the freedom belonging to you and me, a conception applicable only by violence to Intellectual-Principle itself? It is rash thinking drawn from another order that would imagine a First Principle to be chance – made what it is, controlled by a manner of being imposed from without, void therefore of freedom or self-disposal, acting or refraining under compulsion. Such a statement is untrue to its subject and introduces much difficulty; it utterly annuls the principle of freewill with the very conception of our own voluntary action, so that there is no longer any sense in discussion upon these terms, empty names for the non-existent. Anyone upholding this opinion would be obliged to say not merely that free act exists nowhere but that the very word conveys nothing to him. To admit understanding the word is to be easily brought to confess that the conception of freedom does apply where it is denied. No doubt a concept leaves the reality untouched and unappropriated, for nothing can produce itself, bring itself into being; but thought insists upon distinguishing between what is subject to others and what is independent, bound under no allegiance, lord of its own act. Enneads VI,8,

Where – since we must use such words – the essential act is identical with the being – and this identity must obtain in The Good since it holds even in Intellectual-Principle – there the act is no more determined by the Being than the Being by the Act. Thus "acting according to its nature" does not apply; the Act, the Life, so to speak, cannot be held to issue from the Being; the Being accompanies the Act in an eternal association: from the two [Being and Act] it forms itself into The Good, self-springing and unspringing. Enneads VI,8,

Even Being is exempt from happening: of course, anything happening happens to Being, but Being itself has not happened nor is the manner of its Being a thing of happening, of derivation; it is the very nature of Being to be; how then can we think that this happening can attach to the Transcendent of Being, That in whose power lay the very engendering of Being? Certainly this Transcendent never happened to be what it is; it is so, just as Being exists in complete identity with its own essential nature and that of Intellectual-Principle. Certainly that which has never passed outside of its own orbit, unbendingly what it is, its own unchangeably, is that which may most strictly be said to possess its own being: what then are we to say when we mount and contemplate that which stands yet higher; can we conceivably say "Thus, as we see it, thus has it happened to be"? Neither thus nor in any mode did it happen to be; there is no happening; there is only a "Thus and No Otherwise than Thus." And even "Thus" is false; it would imply limit, a defined form: to know This is to be able to reject both the "Thus" and the "Not-Thus," either of which classes among Beings to which alone Manner of Being can attach. Enneads VI,8,

The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false happening can be supposed to have come about, taking it that it did, and haw the happening, then, is not universally prevalent. If there is to be a natural scheme at all, it must be admitted that this happening does not and cannot exist: for if we attribute to chance the Principle which is to eliminate chance from all the rest, how can there ever be anything independent of chance? And this Nature does take away the chanced from the rest, bringing in form and limit and shape. In the case of things thus conformed to reason the cause cannot be identified with chance but must lie in that very reason; chance must be kept for what occurs apart from choice and sequence and is purely concurrent. When we come to the source of all reason, order and limit, how can we attribute the reality there to chance? Chance is no doubt master of many things but is not master of Intellectual-Principle, of reason, of order, so as to bring them into being. How could chance, recognised as the very opposite of reason, be its Author? And if it does not produce Intellectual-Principle, then certainly not that which precedes and surpasses that Principle. Chance, besides, has no means of producing, has no being at all, and, assuredly, none in the Eternal. Enneads VI,8,

And when we say that neither does He absorb anything nor anything absorb Him, thus again we are setting Him outside of all happening – not only because we declare Him unique and untouched by all but in another way also. Suppose we found such a nature in ourselves; we are untouched by all that has gathered round us subjecting us to happening and chance; all that accruement was of the servile and lay exposed to chance: by this new state alone we acquire self-disposal and free act, the freedom of that light which belongs to the order of the good and is good in actuality, greater than anything Intellectual-Principle has to give, an actuality whose advantage over Intellection is no adventitious superiority. When we attain to this state and become This alone, what can we say but that we are more than free, more than self-disposing? And who then could link us to chance, hazard, happening, when thus we are become veritable Life, entered into That which contains no alloy but is purely itself? Isolate anything else and the being is inadequate; the Supreme in isolation is still what it was. The First cannot be in the soulless or in an unreasoning life; such a life is too feeble in being; it is reason dissipated, it is indetermination; only in the measure of approach towards reason is there liberation from happening; the rational is above chance. Ascending we come upon the Supreme, not as reason but as reason’s better: thus God is far removed from all happening: the root of reason is self-springing. Enneads VI,8,

If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He "happened to be"; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in entirety: at once, He is that everywhere and everywise: He is not in the everywhere but is the everywhere as well as the giver to the rest of things of their being in that everywhere. Holding the supreme place – or rather no holder but Himself the Supreme – all lies subject to Him; they have not brought Him to be but happen, all, to Him – or rather they stand there before Him looking upon Him, not He upon them. He is borne, so to speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is, He Himself being that which He. loves. That is to say, as self-dwelling Act and Intellectual-Principle, the most to be loved, He has given Himself existence. Intellectual-Principle is the issue of Act: God therefore is issue of Act, but, since no other has generated Him, He is what He made Himself: He is not, therefore, "as He happened to be" but as He acted Himself into being. Enneads VI,8,

That his being is constituted by this self-originating self-tendence – at once Act and repose – becomes clear if we imagine the contrary; inclining towards something outside of Himself, He would destroy the identity of his being. This self-directed Act is, therefore, his peculiar being, one with Himself. If, then, his act never came to be but is eternal – a waking without an awakener, an eternal wakening and a supra-Intellection – He is as He waked Himself to be. This awakening is before being, before Intellectual-Principle, before rational life, though He is these; He is thus an Act before Intellectual-Principle and consciousness and life; these come from Him and no other; his being, then, is a self-presence, issuing from Himself. Thus not "as He happened to be" is He but as He willed to be. Enneads VI,8,

Or consider it another way: We hold the universe, with its content entire, to be as all would be if the design of the maker had so willed it, elaborating it with purpose and prevision by reasonings amounting to a Providence. All is always so and all is always so reproduced: therefore the reason-principles of things must lie always within the producing powers in a still more perfect form; these beings of the divine realm must therefore be previous to Providence and to preference; all that exists in the order of being must lie for ever There in their Intellectual mode. If this regime is to be called Providence it must be in the sense that before our universe there exists, not expressed in the outer, the Intellectual-Principle of all the All, its source and archetype. Enneads VI,8,

Now if there is thus an Intellectual-Principle before all things, their founding principle, this cannot be a thing lying subject to chance – multiple, no doubt, but a concordance, ordered so to speak into oneness. Such a multiple – the co-ordination of all particulars and consisting of all the Reason-Principles of the universe gathered into the closest union – this cannot be a thing of chance, a thing "happening so to be." It must be of a very different nature, of the very contrary nature, separated from the other by all the difference between reason and reasonless chance. And if the Source is precedent even to this, it must be continuous with this reasoned secondary so that the two be correspondent; the secondary must participate in the prior, be an expression of its will, be a power of it: that higher therefore [as above the ordering of reason] is without part or interval [implied by reasoned arrangement], is a one – all Reason-Principle, one number, a One greater than its product, more powerful, having no higher or better. Thus the Supreme can derive neither its being nor the quality of its being. God Himself, therefore, is what He is, self-related, self-tending; otherwise He becomes outward-tending, other-seeking – who cannot but be wholly self-poised. Enneads VI,8,

Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not attempt. He is, Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all things; or rather He is within, at the innermost depth; the outer, circling round Him, so to speak, and wholly dependent upon Him, is Reason-Principle and Intellectual-Principle-or becomes Intellectual-Principle by contact with Him and in the degree of that contact and dependence; for from Him it takes the being which makes it Intellectual-Principle. Enneads VI,8,

In the same way we are to take Intellectual-Principle and Being. This combined power springs from the Supreme, an outflow and as it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that Intellective nature, showing forth That which, in the purity of its oneness, is not Intellectual-Principle since it is no duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or circumference to be identified with that Centre which is the source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by indwelling power and, as products of a certain vigour in it, not cut off from it. Enneads VI,8,

Thus the Intellective power circles in its multiple unity around the Supreme which stands to it as archetype to image; the image in its movement round about its prior has produced the multiplicity by which it is constituted Intellectual-Principle: that prior has no movement; it generates Intellectual-Principle by its sheer wealth. Enneads VI,8,

Such a power, author of Intellectual-Principle, author of being – how does it lend itself to chance, to hazard, to any "So it happened"? What is present in Intellectual-Principle is present, though in a far transcendent mode, in the One: so in a light diffused afar from one light shining within itself, the diffused is vestige, the source is the true light; but Intellectual-Principle, the diffused and image light, is not different in kind from its prior; and it is not a thing of chance but at every point is reason and cause. Enneads VI,8,

It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the unity are distinct, yet in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when we have grasped Being we hold unity; Real Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, taking the Intellectual-Principle as Essential Being, that principle and the Unity Absolute would be at once Primal Being and Pure Unity, purveying, accordingly, to the rest of things something of Being and something, in proportion, of the unity which is itself. Enneads VI,8,

If Being is identical with Intellectual-Principle, even at that it is a manifold; all the more so when count is taken of the Ideal Forms in it; for the Idea, particular or collective, is, after all, a numerable agglomeration whose unity is that of a kosmos. Enneads VI,8,

Above all, unity is The First: but Intellectual-Principle, Ideas and Being, cannot be so; for any member of the realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore – since components must precede their compound – is a later. Enneads VI,8,

Other considerations also go to show that the Intellectual-Principle cannot be the First. Intellect must be above the Intellectual Act: at least in its higher phase, that not concerned with the outer universe, it must be intent upon its Prior; its introversion is a conversion upon the Principle. Enneads VI,8,

There is no other way of stating Intellectual-Principle than as that which, holding itself in the presence of The Good and First and looking towards That, is self-present also, self-knowing and Knowing itself as All-Being: thus manifold, it is far from being The Unity. Enneads VI,8,

In sum: The Unity cannot be the total of beings, for so its oneness is annulled; it cannot be the Intellectual-Principle, for so it would be that total which the Intellectual-Principle is; nor is it Being, for Being is the manifold of things. Enneads VI,8,

We are in search of unity; we are to come to know the principle of all, the Good and First; therefore we may not stand away from the realm of Firsts and lie prostrate among the lasts: we must strike for those Firsts, rising from things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared of all evil in our intention towards The Good, we must ascend to the Principle within ourselves; from many, we must become one; only so do we attain to knowledge of that which is Principle and Unity. We shape ourselves into Intellectual-Principle; we make over our soul in trust to Intellectual-Principle and set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul will waken to see; it is through the Intellectual-Principle that we have this vision of The Unity; it must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even of soul to enter into Intellectual-Principle: with Intellect pure, and with the summit of Intellect, we are to see the All-Pure. Enneads VI,8,

If quester has the impression of extension or shape or mass attaching to That Nature he has not been led by Intellectual-Principle which is not of the order to see such things; the activity has been of sense and of the judgement following upon sense: only Intellectual-Principle can inform us of the things of its scope; its competence is upon its priors, its content and its issue: but even its content is outside of sense; and still purer, still less touched by multiplicity, are its priors, or rather its Prior. Enneads VI,8,

The Unity, then, is not Intellectual-Principle but something higher still: Intellectual-Principle is still a being but that First is no being but precedent to all Being; it cannot be a being, for a being has what we may call the shape of its reality but The Unity is without shape, even shape Intellectual. Enneads VI,8,

Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation from Intellectual-Principle and as holding its value by a Reason-Principle thence infused. Next this Intellect must be apprehended, an Intellect other than the reasoning faculty known as the rational principle; with reasoning we are already in the region of separation and movement: our sciences are Reason-Principles lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly acquired their character by the presence in the soul of Intellectual-Principle, source of all knowing. Enneads VI,8,

Thus we come to see Intellectual-Principle almost as an object of sense: the Intellectual Kosmos is perceptible as standing above soul, father to soul: we know Intellectual-Principle as the motionless, not subject to change, containing, we must think, all things; a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting difference. It is not discriminate as are the Reason-Principles, which can in fact be known one by one: yet its content is not a confusion; every item stands forth distinctly, just as in a science the entire content holds as an indivisible and yet each item is a self-standing verity. Enneads VI,8,

Thus it eludes our knowledge, so that the nearer approach to it is through its offspring, Being: we know it as cause of existence to Intellectual-Principle, as fount of all that is best, as the efficacy which, self-perduring and undiminishing, generates all beings and is not to be counted among these its derivatives, to all of which it must be prior. Enneads VI,8,

There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme: if from that heightened self we pass still higher – image to archetype – we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we awaken the virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the burden and move by virtue towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme. Enneads VI,8,