MacKenna-Plotinus: principle

  

And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to light. Enneads   I,1,

And the principle that reasons out these matters? Is it We or the Soul? We, but by the Soul. Enneads I,1,

Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of virtue in the Supreme. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must persuade as well as demonstrate. Enneads I,2,

There is the likeness demanding an identical nature in the objects which, further, must draw their likeness from a common principle: and there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not concerned about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case, likeness is understood in a distinct sense: we no longer look for identity of nature, but, on the contrary, for divergence since the likeness has come about by the mode of difference. Enneads I,2,

The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched above, are a principle or order and beauty in us as long as we remain passing our life here: they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our entire sensibility, and dispelling false judgement – and this by sheer efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the bounds, by the fact that the measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless. Enneads I,2,

And, further, these Civic Virtues – measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to their forming – are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the Soul we see God entire. 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 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,

Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure’s value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order? No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life. Enneads I,4,

Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible. Enneads I,4,

It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the most complete. Enneads I,4,

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode. Enneads I,4,

The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searching and thinking, but the one greatest principle is ever present to him, like a part of his being – most of all present, should he be even a victim in the much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an agreeable lodging; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture; in the Sage there is something else as well, The Self-Gathered which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can never be robbed of the vision of the All-Good. Enneads I,4,

Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle? Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of thought; are we to call in symmetry here? What symmetry is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit? What symmetry can there be in points of abstract thought? The symmetry of being accordant with each other? But there may be accordance or entire identity where there is nothing but ugliness: the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will; the accordance is complete. Enneads I,6,

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter? On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity? So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul. Enneads I,6,

Some conception of it would be reached by thinking of measurelessness as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against bound, the unshaped against a principle of shape, the ever-needy against the self-sufficing: think of the ever-undefined, the never at rest, the all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth; and make all this character not mere accident in it but its equivalent for essential-being, so that, whatsoever fragment of it be taken, that part is all lawless void, while whatever participates in it and resembles it becomes evil, though not of course to the point of being, as itself is, Evil-Absolute. Enneads I,8,

But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought under the causing principle indicated? Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a body made of Matter. Enneads I,8,

Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the Soul’s seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence but to Process – whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in it but merely looks towards it. Enneads I,8,

In fine we are not to think of Evil as some particular bad thing – injustice, for example, or any other ugly trait – but as a principle distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition of certain elements, it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in the Soul; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that operate and by the nature of their operation, whether seeing, acting, or merely admitting impression. Enneads I,8,

But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil – sickness, poverty and so forth – how can they be referred to the principle we have described? Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but matter not mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to be one long want. Enneads I,8,

But of what nature would this contrary be, the contrary to universal existence and in general to the Primals? To essential existence would be opposed the non-existence; to the nature of Good, some principle and source of evil. Both these will be sources, the one of what is good, the other of what is evil; and all within the domain of the one principle is opposed, as contrary, to the entire domain of the other, and this in a contrariety more violent than any existing between secondary things. Enneads I,8,

Now to the content of the divine order, the fixed quality, the measuredness and so forth – there is opposed the content of the evil principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth: total is opposed to total. The existence of the one genus is a falsity, primarily, essentially, a falseness: the other genus has Essence-Authentic: the opposition is of truth to lie; essence is opposed to essence. Enneads I,8,

This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of Evil in the Soul; the Evil, the Vice, will be a Negation and not anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine which denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek elsewhere; we may at once place Evil in the Soul, recognising it as the mere absence of Good. But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the Soul, then the Soul produces vice within itself by the operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, Soul though it be, devoid of life: the Soul, if it has no life, is soulless; the Soul is no Soul. Enneads I,8,

But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself, perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence: this view obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of the union envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary [in the heavens] even Matter must conduce to the scheme of the standing result. Enneads: II I

But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our present problem. We are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system exposed to any such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration corresponding to nourishment; or do its members, once set in their due places, suffer no loss of substance, permanent by Kind? Does it consist of fire only, or is it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and carried in the circuit by the dominant Principle? Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle   is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars. Enneads: II I

Still, the great argument remains, the Soul, moving in its marvellous might second only to the very loftiest Existents: how could anything once placed within this Soul break away from it into non-being? No one that understands this principle, the support of all things, can fail to see that, sprung from God, it is a stronger stay than any bonds. Enneads: II I

Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that [inferior] soul, given forth [not directly from God but] from the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way of that inferior soul that we are associated with the body [which therefore will not be persistent]; for the higher soul which constitutes the We is the principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also of our existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine Reason in support of the existence. Enneads: II I

On this principle, nothing possesses an essential-nature of its very own; every several thing is a blend, and its name is merely an indication of the dominant constituent. Enneads: II I

We have authority for this where we read: "At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light": he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm: this light is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other "light" which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the veritable "incandescent body." Plato’s word earthy is commonly taken in too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay. Enneads: II I

And why not our very bodies, also? Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the body’s impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it at all. Enneads II,2,

This is a separatist theory, tenable only by minds ignorant of the nature of a Universe which has a ruling principle and a first cause operative downwards through every member. Enneads II,3,

But, if the stars announce the future – as we hold of many other things also – what explanation of the cause have we to offer? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless the particular is included under some general principle of order, there can be no signification. Enneads II,3,

We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies. Enneads II,3,

But what is the comprehensive principle of co-ordination? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in our varied concerns. Enneads II,3,

All things must be enchained; and the sympathy and correspondence obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist, first, and most intensely, in the All. There must be one principle constituting this unit of many forms of life and enclosing the several members within the unity, while at the same time, precisely as in each thing of detail the parts too have each a definite function, so in the All each several member must have its own task – but more markedly so since in this case the parts are not merely members but themselves Alls, members of the loftier Kind. Enneads II,3,

All that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity and every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it; for horse comes by horse, and man by man: the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the man has his origin in the Human-Principle. Outer things have their effect, sometimes to hurt and sometimes to help; like a father, they often contribute to good but sometimes also to harm; but they do not wrench the human being from the foundations of its nature; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection; the Ideal has been attenuated. Enneads II,3,

The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force of the Soul is represented in the All, but, in the parts, Soul is present only in proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such partial objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other entities, whose approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes helpful to the purpose of its nature; but to the All taken in its length and breadth each and every separate existent is an adjusted part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing by its own native tendency to the entire life-history of the Universe. Enneads II,3,

The greater and most valuable among them have an important operation over a wide range: their contribution towards the life of the whole consists in acting, not in being acted upon; others, but feebly equipped for action, are almost wholly passive; there is an intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a principle of productivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet serve also by their passivity. Enneads II,3,

When the success is due to labour, tillage for example, it must be put down to the tiller, with all his environment as contributory. In the case of treasure-trove, something from the All has entered into action; and if this be so, it will be foreshown – since all things make a chain, so that we can speak of things universally. Money is lost: if by robbery, the blame lies with the robber and the native principle guiding him: if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events. As for good fame, it is either deserved and then is due to the services done and to the merit of those appraising them, or it is undeserved, and then must be attributed to the injustice of those making the award. And the same principle holds is regards power – for this also may be rightly or unrightly placed – it depends either upon the merit of the dispensers of place or upon the man himself who has effected his purpose by the organization of supporters or in many other possible ways. Marriages, similarly, are brought about either by choice or by chance interplay of circumstance. And births are determined by marriages: the child is moulded true to type when all goes well; otherwise it is marred by some inner detriment, something due to the mother personally or to an environment unfavourable to that particular conception. Enneads II,3,

But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the Reason-Principles, though the arts and their guiding principle do not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the work of art. 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,

If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself [since it is certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so by virtue of Identicalness [the Absolute principle of Identity]. Enneads II,4,

But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this Privation is lodged? Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in reason from the other: that which defines Matter must be kept quite apart from that defining the Privation and vice versa. Enneads II,4,

Now if they should stand quite apart, neither calling for the other, they are two distinct things: Matter is something other than Privation even though Privation always goes with it: into the principle of the one, the other cannot enter even potentially. Enneads II,4,

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order – like all that shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same principle – therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not merely the recipient of a nonessential quality of Indefiniteness entering as an attribute. Enneads II,4,

For in Matter we have no mere absence of means or of strength; it is utter destitution – of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of pattern, of Ideal principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter disgracefulness, unredeemed evil. Enneads II,4,

And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body: thus the body will be Matter associated with an indwelling Reason-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man – treated elsewhere – which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle. Enneads: II VII.

Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality of Intellectual Principles on the ground that there is one that knows and thinks and another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction be possible in the Divine between its Intellectual Act and its Consciousness of that Act, still all must be one projection not unaware of its own operation: it would be absurd to imagine any such unconsciousness in the Authentic Intelligence; the knowing principle must be one and the selfsame with that which knows of the knowing. Enneads: II VIII.

If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to know that it knows – a limitation which would be charged as imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master of our emotions and mental processes. Enneads: II VIII.

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset [as the Body], necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle [as the Soul], and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned. Enneads: II VIII.

They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the Ideal-Form realized in the Kosmos. They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the principle void of parts which is its model – the greatness of power there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere [the All-Soul] as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer governance: either approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe. Enneads: II VIII.

Others rise to the first-principle of all that exists and from it derive all they tell of a cause penetrating all things, not merely moving all but making each and everything; but they pose this as a fate and a supremely dominating cause; not merely all else that comes into being, but even our own thinking and thoughts would spring from its movement, just as the several members of an animal move not at their own choice but at the dictation of the leading principle which animal life presupposes. Enneads: III I

Finally, there are those that dwell on the interconnection of the causative forces and on their linked descent – every later phenomenon following upon an earlier, one always leading back to others by which it arose and without which it could not be, and the latest always subservient to what went before them – but this is obviously to bring in fate by another path. This school may be fairly distinguished into two branches; a section which makes all depend upon some one principle and a section which ignores such a unity. Enneads: III I

No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate: unable to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations of our action. Enneads: III I

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes [or, by chance-causes]: there will therefore be a compromise; the action of the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler Soul will have the greater power; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. The soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence. Enneads: III I

The Intellectual Sphere [the Divine] alone is Reason, and there can never be another Sphere that is Reason and nothing else; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be Reason: yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence. Enneads III,2,

The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in good, and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it is lodged in the alien: the good here is in something else, in something distinct from the Good, and this something else constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this is why evil is ineradicable: there is, first, the fact that in relation to this principle of Good, thing will always stand less than thing, and, besides, all things come into being through it and are what they are by standing away from it. Enneads III,2,

Our progress towards the object of our investigation must begin from this principle of gradation which will open to us the wonder of the Providence and of the power by which our universe holds its being. Enneads III,2,

Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us powerless: if the universe were something outside and apart from us it would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their part, no man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to their intention. But, as things are, efficient act does come from men: given the starting Principle, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevitably completed; but each and every principle contributes towards the sequence. Now Men are Principles, or, at least, they are moved by their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature is a Principle, a freely acting cause. Enneads III,2,

We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence – the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total; the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness as one would think Providence must disdain: the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form; the world of vegetation, too; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom; and all this not issuing once, and then to die out, but made ever and ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth. Enneads III,2,

But desire often destroys the desired; it seeks its own good, and, if the desired object is perishable, the ruin follows: and the partial thing straining towards its completing principle draws towards itself all it possibly can. Enneads III,2,

The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal life: there is one genus, horse, though horses among themselves fight and bite and show malice and angry envy: so all the others within the unity of their Kind; and so humanity. Enneads III,3,

For [in the case of an evil life] whether it is that the constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled paths or whether [the fault is mental or spiritual in that] the desires have gained control, we are compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum [something inferior to the highest principle in Man]. We would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum [the responsible source of evil] must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-Principle; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle but Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free Principle in man [which is a phase of the All Soul] the Substratum [the direct inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter but] the Reason-Principle itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is sovereign within us. Enneads III,3,

Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely vegetative principle, for the body grows and propagates: all the graded phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the body it is what it is, what it most intensely lived. Enneads III,4,

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,

That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession of the human being at birth? No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The words "You shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by our life we elect our own loftier. Enneads III,4,

But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate? It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there; it operates during the lifetime; when we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career. Enneads III,4,

That principle [of the new birth] strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit [its next higher]: if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the height. Enneads III,4,

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic Soul. The world Soul is distributed so as to produce the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers: so with our Souls; they must have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul: each must give out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary spirit. Enneads III,4,

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things – animal or vegetal – produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance – in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue – for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is produced from one organism. Enneads III,4,

As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single Soul holds to the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will. Enneads III,5,

This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated: the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not self-sufficient, but unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving and the self-sufficient Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration ill-defined, unreasoned, unlimited – it can never be sated as long as it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love, then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad; it is without resource in itself; even winning its end, it is poor again. Enneads III,5,

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite [= the habra, delicate] indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul. Enneads III,5,

On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas – the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely – Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love – "born at the banquet   of the gods" – has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has been. Enneads III,5,

But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind? The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. It should, however, be quite clear that the Soul or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation – both the higher representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the "Nature" of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the body, belongs to the sense-order; trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. The Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited. Enneads III,6,

The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity; it operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently – and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not – but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the strings of his instrument, and once more, the Melodic Principle itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody. Enneads III,6,

It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be opposed in faculty, and in quality to the forces that enter and act upon it. Enneads III,6,

Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing changing must remain within its constitutive Idea so that the alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential thing; the changing object must retain this fundamental permanence, and the permanent substance cannot be the member of it which accepts modification. Enneads III,6,

It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact, unaffected by Ideal-forms present within it, especially seeing that these are affected by each other. It is surprising, too, that the entrant Forms should regularly expel preceding shapes and qualities, and that the modification [which cannot touch Matter] should affect what is a compound [of Idea with Matter] and this, again, not a haphazard but precisely where there is need of the incoming or outgoing of some certain Ideal-form, the compound being deficient through the absence of a particular principle whose presence will complete it. Enneads III,6,

The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant principle neither possesses it nor is possessed by it. Consider, as an example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in the mind; there is no admixture; the notion that came goes in its time, still integrally itself alone, taking nothing with it, leaving nothing after it, because it has not been blended with the mind; there is no "outside" in the sense of contact broken, and the distinction between base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the reason. Enneads III,6,

That a thing essentially devoid of magnitude should come to a certain size is no more astonishing than that a thing essentially devoid of heat should become warm: Matter’s essential existence is quite separate from its existing in bulk, since, of course, magnitude is an immaterial principle as pattern is. Besides, if we are not to reduce Matter to nothing, it must be all things by way of participation, and Magnitude is one of those all things. Enneads III,6,

Now, we must believe that some of the venerable philosophers of old discovered the truth; but it is important to examine which of them really hit the mark and by what guiding principle we can ourselves attain to certitude. Enneads III,7,

To begin with, we have the doubt which met us when we probed its identification with extent of Movement: is Time the measure of any and every Movement? Have we any means of calculating disconnected and lawless Movement? What number or measure would apply? What would be the principle of such a Measure? One Measure for movement slow and fast, for any and every movement: then that number and measure would be like the decade, by which we reckon horses and cows, or like some common standard for liquids and solids. If Time is this Kind of Measure, we learn, no doubt, of what objects it is a Measure – of Movements – but we are no nearer understanding what it is in itself. Enneads III,7,

If, on the other hand, Time is [not such an abstraction but] a Measure possessing a continuous extent of its own, it must have quantity, like a foot-rule; it must have magnitude: it will, clearly, be in the nature of a line traversing the path of Movement. But, itself thus sharing in the movement, how can it be a Measure of Movement? Why should the one of the two be the measure rather than the other? Besides an accompanying measure is more plausibly considered as a measure of the particular movement it accompanies than of Movement in general. Further, this entire discussion assumes continuous movement, since the accompanying principle; Time, is itself unbroken [but a full explanation implies justification of Time in repose]. Enneads III,7,

But from the Divine Beings thus at rest within themselves, how did this Time first emerge? We can scarcely call upon the Muses to recount its origin since they were not in existence then – perhaps not even if they had been. The engendered thing, Time, itself, can best tell us how it rose and became manifest; something thus its story would run: Time at first – in reality before that "first" was produced by desire of succession – Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent: it was not yet Time; it was merged in the Authentic and motionless with it. But there was an active principle there, one set on governing itself and realizing itself [= the All-Soul], and it chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest, and Time stirred with it. And we, stirring to a ceaseless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the establishment of ever-new difference, traversed a portion of the outgoing path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time. Enneads III,7,

We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle – Time – a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other – a Principle, then, whose Act is sequent. Enneads III,7,

Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind: their success is the laying up of a vision. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind? Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for [mind or] Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper. Enneads III,8,

Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established – some self-evident, others brought out by our treatment above: All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision-manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to produce Ideal-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all produce objects of vision, Ideal-forms. In the engendering of these sub-existences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that the creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal. 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,

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,

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,

(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,

But to that order is opposed Essence [Real-Being]; this is in no degree susceptible of partition; it is unparted and impartible; interval is foreign to it, cannot enter into our idea of it: it has no need of place and is not, in diffusion or as an entirety, situated within any other being: it is poised over all beings at once, and this is not in the sense of using them as a base but in their being neither capable nor desirous of existing independently of it; it is an essence eternally unvaried: it is common to all that follows upon it: it is like the circle’s centre to which all the radii are attached while leaving it unbrokenly in possession of itself, the starting point of their course and of their essential being, the ground in which they all participate: thus the indivisible is the principle of these divided existences and in their very outgoing they remain enduringly in contact with that stationary essence. Enneads IV,2,

What can justify this assigning of parts to the soul, the distinguishing one part from another? What quantity, or what difference of quality, can apply to a thing defined as a self-consistent whole of unbroken unity? Again, would perception be vested in that leading principle alone, or in the other phases as well? If a given experience bears only on that "leading principle," it would not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism; if, on the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul – one not constituted for sensation – that phase cannot transmit any experience to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation. Enneads IV,2,

If, on the contrary, the sensation is vested not merely in the "leading principle," but in any and every part of the soul, what special function raises the one rather than the other into that leading rank, or why is the sensation to be referred to it rather than elsewhere? And how, at this, account for the unity of the knowledge brought in by diverse senses, by eyes, by ears? On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity – utterly strange to part, a self-gathered whole – if it continuously eludes all touch of multiplicity and divisibility – then, no whole taken up into it can ever be ensouled; soul will stand as circle-centre to every object [remote on the circumference], and the entire mass of a living being is soulless still. Enneads IV,2,

There is, therefore, no escape: soul is, in the degree indicated, one and many, parted and impartible. We cannot question the possibility of a thing being at once a unity and multi-present, since to deny this would be to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the universe; there must be a Kind which encircles and supports all and conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence is multiple, and yet is one soul always since a container must be a unity: by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the multiplicity of the series of an all; by its impartible unity, it will conduct a total to wise ends. Enneads IV,2,

The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt – with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us – this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else, it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who bade us know ourselves. Enneads IV,3,

A further proof [of the unity of Soul] is that perception demands a common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these impressions must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all that is said and done. Enneads IV,3,

Even supposing Real-Beings [such as soul] to be produced by some other principle, they are certainly not made from Matter; or, if they were, the creating principle must infuse into them, from within itself, something of the nature of Real-Being; but, at this, it would itself suffer change, as it created more or less. And, after all, why should it thus produce at any given moment rather than remain for ever stationary? Moreover the produced total, variable from more to less, could not be an eternal: yet the soul, it stands agreed, is eternal. Enneads IV,3,

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the created. Enneads IV,3,

The Ineluctable, the Kosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural principle under which each several entity is overruled to go, duly and in order, towards that place and Kind to which it characteristically tends, that is towards the image of its primal choice and constitution. Enneads IV,3,

The vehicles of touch are mainly centred in the nerves – which moreover are vehicles of the faculty by which the movements of the living being are affected – in them the soul-faculty concerned makes itself present; the nerves start from the brain. The brain therefore has been considered as the centre and seat of the principle which determines feeling and impulse and the entire act of the organism as a living thing; where the instruments are found to be linked, there the operating faculty is assumed to be situated. But it would be wiser to say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating faculty: the power to be exercised by the operator – in keeping with the particular instrument – must be considered as concentrated at the point at which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the soul’s faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act. Enneads IV,3,

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood – subtle, light, swift, pure – is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature. Enneads IV,3,

A true investigation of this matter requires us to establish first what a remembering principle must be – I do not mean what memory is, but in what order of beings it can occur. The nature of memory has been indicated, laboured even, elsewhere; we still must try to understand more clearly what characteristics are present where memory exists. Enneads IV,3,

It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily constitution determines our memories good or bad; but the answer would come that, whether the body happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would still be an act of the soul. And in the case of matters learned [and not merely felt, as corporeal experiences], how can we think of the Couplement of soul and body as the remembering principle? Here, surely, it must be soul alone? We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of something entirely distinct formed from the two elements [so that it might have memory though neither soul nor body had it]. But, to begin with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither body nor soul; these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the animate whole. And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness will be due to the honey. Enneads IV,3,

It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body, it may reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in such a manner as to retain them [thus in some sense possessing memory]. Enneads IV,3,

If the soul is to have any significance – to be a definite principle with a function of its own – we are forced to recognize two orders of fact, an order in which the body is a means but all culminates in soul, and an order which is of the soul alone. This being admitted, aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a consequence, will that memory of the aspiration and of its attainment or frustration, without which the soul’s nature would fall into the category of the unstable [that is to say of the undivine, unreal]. Deny this character of the soul and at once we refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of comparison, almost any understanding. Yet these powers of which, embodied it becomes the source cannot be absent from its own nature. On the contrary; it possesses certain activities to be expressed in various functions whose accomplishment demands bodily organs; at its entry it brings with it [as vested in itself alone] the powers necessary for some of these functions, while in the case of others it brings the very activities themselves. Enneads IV,3,

Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance? Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold. Enneads IV,3,

And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the principle by which we perceive should be the principle by which we remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one faculty? Why must the seat of our intellectual action be also the seat of our remembrance of that action? The most powerful thought does not always go with the readiest memory; people of equal perception are not equally good at remembering; some are especially gifted in perception, others, never swift to grasp, are strong to retain. Enneads IV,3,

Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how explain this grasping first of the unity and later of the rest? The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the soul], to which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like its essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually become all things. Enneads IV,4,

If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the same principle of penetration comes into play, and it possesses itself, by memory and imagination, of the thing it desired: and hence the memory, even dealing with the highest, is not the highest. Memory, of course, must be understood not merely of what might be called the sense of remembrance, but so as to include a condition induced by the past experience or vision. There is such a thing as possessing more powerfully without consciousness than in full knowledge; with full awareness the possession is of something quite distinct from the self; unconscious possession runs very close to identity, and any such approach to identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the soul. Enneads IV,4,

But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective in us? At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed it: this principle awakens where it wakens; and it alone has vision in that order; for this is no matter to be brought to us by way of analogy, or by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere; the power which, even here, we possess of discoursing upon the Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to speak, and thus attain the vision of the Supreme, as one, standing on some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have not mounted with him is invisible. Enneads IV,4,

The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe. Enneads IV,4,

But the life in the kosmos, the life which carries the leading principle of the universe, still needs elucidation; does it operate without calculation, without searching into what ought to be done? Yes: for what must be stands shaped before the kosmos, and is ordered without any setting in order: the ordered things are merely the things that come to be; and the principle that brings them into being is Order itself; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. It is an unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away from it – and in doubt because it has turned away – but an unremitting soul performing an unvarying task. Enneads IV,4,

The leading principle of the universe is a unity – and one that is sovereign without break, not sometimes dominant and sometimes dominated. What source is there for any such multiplicity of leading principles as might result in contest and hesitation? And this governing unity must always desire the one thing: what could bring it to wish now for this and now for that, to its own greater perplexing? But observe: no perplexity need follow upon any development of this soul essentially a unity. The All stands a multiple thing no doubt, having parts, and parts dashing with parts, but that does not imply that it need be in doubt as to its conduct: that soul does not take its essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals; it has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. To suppose it pursuing one new object after another is to raise the question whence that novelty comes into being; the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to its action; its very work, the kosmos, would be the less well done by reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail. Enneads IV,4,

The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a living unit: there is the action determined by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals and on the parts directly affected will often be baffled and obliged to all sorts of calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of principle and need no deliberation. And in so far as the kosmos is a conducted thing, its administration and its administrator will follow not the way of the doctor but the way of Nature. Enneads IV,4,

What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what place for memory, where wisdom and knowledge are eternal, unfailingly present, effective, dominant, administering in an identical process? The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more certain the unchanging identity of the producer: even in the single animal the events produced by Nature are many and not simultaneous; there are the periods, the developments at fixed epochs – horns, beard, maturing breasts, the acme of life, procreation – but the principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not thereby annulled; there is process of growth, but no diversity in the initial principle. The identity underlying all the multiplicity is confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent is exhibited unchanged, undiminished, in the offspring. We have reason, then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops both, and that this is the unalterable wisdom of the kosmos taken as a whole; it is manifold, diverse and yet simplex, presiding over the most comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise altered within itself by this multiplicity, but stably one Reason-Principle, the concentrated totality of things: if it were not thus all things, it would be a wisdom of the later and partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme. Enneads IV,4,

But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what in fact is unwisdom, taking the search for wisdom to be wisdom itself. For what can reasoning be but a struggle, the effort to discover the wise course, to attain the principle which is true and derives from real-being? To reason is like playing the cithara for the sake of achieving the art, like practising with a view to mastery, like any learning that aims at knowing. What reasoners seek, the wise hold: wisdom, in a word, is a condition in a being that possesses repose. Think what happens when one has accomplished the reasoning process: as soon as we have discovered the right course, we cease to reason: we rest because we have come to wisdom. If then we are to range the leading principle of the All among learners, we must allow it reasonings, perplexities and those acts of memory which link the past with the present and the future: if it is to be considered as a knower, then the wisdom within it consists in a rest possessing the object [absolved, therefore, from search and from remembrance]. Enneads IV,4,

Again, if the leading principle of the universe knows the future as it must – then obviously it will know by what means that future is to come about; given this knowledge, what further need is there of its reasoning towards it, or confronting past with present? And, of course, this knowledge of things to come – admitting it to exist – is not like that of the diviners; it is that of the actual causing principles holding the certainty that the thing will exist, the certainty inherent in the all-disposers, above perplexity and hesitancy; the notion is constituent and therefore unvarying. The knowledge of future things is, in a word, identical with that of the present; it is a knowledge in repose and thus a knowledge transcending the processes of cogitation. Enneads IV,4,

If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future which it is of itself to produce, it cannot produce with knowledge or to purpose; it will produce just what happens to come, that is to say by haphazard. As this cannot be, it must create by some stable principle; its creations, therefore, will be shaped in the model stored up in itself; there can be no varying, for, if there were, there could also be failure. Enneads IV,4,

But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the universe and the principle known as Nature? This Wisdom is a first [within the All-Soul] while Nature is a last: for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul, possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle: we may imagine a thick waxen seal, in which the imprint has penetrated to the very uttermost film so as to show on both sides, sharp cut on the upper surface, faint on the under. Nature, thus, does not know, it merely produces: what it holds it passes, automatically, to its next; and this transmission to the corporeal and material constitutes its making power: it acts as a thing warmed, communicating to what lies in next contact to it the principle of which it is the vehicle so as to make that also warm in some less degree. Enneads IV,4,

Nature, being thus a mere communicator, does not possess even the imaging act. There is [within the Soul] intellection, superior to imagination; and there is imagination standing midway between that intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. For Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything; imagination [the imaging faculty] has consciousness of the external, for it enables that which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience encountered, while Nature’s function is to engender – of itself though in an act derived from the active principle [of the soul]. Enneads IV,4,

Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and vegetable forms stand to it? Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them? Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light and air remain each itself, never coalescing: is this the relation of Nature to the formed object? It is rather that existing between fire and the object it has warmed: the fire withdrawn, there remains a certain warmth, distinct from that in the fire, a property, so to speak, of the object warmed. For the shape which Nature imparts to what it has moulded must be recognized as a form quite distinct from Nature itself, though it remains a question to be examined whether besides this [specific] form there is also an intermediary, a link connecting it with Nature, the general principle. Enneads IV,4,

Now, apartness may be explained as simply differentiation: but how account for priority unless on the assumption of some ordering principle arranging from above, and in that disposal necessarily affirming a serial order? There must be such a principle, or all would exist simultaneously; but the indicated conclusion does not follow unless order and ordering principle are distinct; if the ordering principle is Primal Order, there is no such affirmation of series; there is simply making, the making of this thing after that thing. The affirmation would imply that the ordering principle looks away towards Order and therefore is not, itself, Order. 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 lowest human type exhibits the baser nature; the man is a compost calling to mind inferior political organization: in the mid-type we have a citizenship in which some better section sways a demotic constitution not out of control: in the superior type the life is aristocratic; it is the career of one emancipated from what is a base in humanity and tractable to the better; in the finest type, where the man has brought himself to detachment, the ruler is one only, and from this master principle order is imposed upon the rest, so that we may think of a municipality in two sections, the superior city and, kept in hand by it, the city of the lower elements. Enneads IV,4,

There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of its own – so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some individuality – or whether all it has is this Nature we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with it. Enneads IV,4,

Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain [non-material] conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity. Enneads IV,4,

And as regards vegetal forms? Are we to imagine beneath the leading principle [the "Nature" phase] some sort of corporeal echo of it, something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them? Or are we to think that, while the earth [which nourishes them] contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire? The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth. Enneads IV,4,

A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them. Enneads IV,4,

This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the material object so as to be an exact reproduction of its states, and it must be of the one elemental-stuff: it, thus, will exhibit the condition which the higher principle is to perceive; and the condition must be such as to preserve something of the originating object, and yet not be identical with it: the essential vehicle of knowledge is an intermediary which, as it stands between the soul and the originating object, will, similarly, present a condition midway between the two spheres, of sense and the intellectual-linking the extremes, receiving from one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to assimilate itself to each. As an instrument by which something is to receive knowledge, it cannot be identical with either the knower or the known: but it must be apt to likeness with both – akin to the external object by its power of being affected, and to the internal, the knower, by the fact that the modification it takes becomes an idea. Enneads IV,4,

But what perception? Why not, to begin with, that of contact-feeling, the apprehension of part by part, the apprehension of fire by the rest of the entire mass in a sensation transmitted upwards to the earth’s leading principle? A corporeal mass [such as that of the earth] may be sluggish but is not utterly inert. Such perceptions, of course, would not be of trifles, but of the graver movement of things. Enneads IV,4,

For sight it would not need eyes – though if light is indispensable how can it see? That the earth contains the principle of growth must be admitted; it is difficult not to allow in consequence that, since this vegetal principle is a member of spirit, the earth is primarily of the spiritual order; and how can we doubt that in a spirit all is lucid? This becomes all the more evident when we reflect that, besides being as a spirit lightsome, it is physically illuminated moving in the light of kosmic revolution. Enneads IV,4,

If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things – or retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal principle in them – at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing: this phase of the soul is immanent in the body of the growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere lump of material. 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,

Pleasures and pains – the conditions, that is, not the perception of them – and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life: are we entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion? Are we to consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined body or in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile necessarily taking condition within a body not dead? Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in this case – the passionate element being one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient faculty? Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal, pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it – there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed – but in general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver and body – the seat, because the spring. Enneads IV,4,

On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states; people in whom the blood and the bile are intensely active are as quick to anger as those of cool blood and no bile are slow; animals grow angry though they pay attention to no outside combinations except where they recognize physical danger; all this forces us again to place the seat of anger in the strictly corporeal element, the principle by which the animal organism is held together. Similarly, that anger or its first stirring depends upon the condition of the body follows from the consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than well, fasting than after food: it would seem that the bile and the blood, acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions. Enneads IV,4,

Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by which the body becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this principle it was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states – churlish and angry under stress of environment – so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition. Enneads IV,4,

That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present in trees and yet passion be lacking in them cannot surprise us since they are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If the occasions of anger presented themselves where there is no power of sensation there could be no more than a physical ebullition with something approaching to resentment [an unconscious reaction]; where sensation exists there is at once something more; the recognition of wrong and of the necessary defence carries with it the intentional act. Enneads IV,4,

But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring faculty and a passionate faculty – the first identical with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the blood or bile or upon the entire living organism – such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the relation of earlier phase to derivative. Enneads IV,4,

But – keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it – how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle? For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly hair and nails still grow on the dead; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time after; these are signs of a life force still indwelling. Enneads IV,4,

Thus, too, whatever is hurtful to man – the passionate spirit, for example, drawn by the medium of the gall into the principle seated in the liver – comes with no intention of hurt; it is simply as one transferring fire to another might innocently burn him: no doubt, since he actually set the other on fire he is a cause, but only as the attacking fire itself is a cause, that is by the merely accidental fact that the person to whom the fire was being brought blundered in taking it. Enneads IV,4,

In sum, we must hold that the All cannot be affected; its leading principle remains for ever immune whatsoever happens to its members; the affection is really present to them, but since nothing existent can be at strife with the total of existence, no such affection conflicts with its impassivity. Enneads IV,4,

In the other way of life, it is not the essential man that gives the impulse; it is not the reason; the unreasoning also acts as a principle, and this is the first condition of the misfortune. Caring for children, planning marriage – everything that works as bait, taking value by dint of desire – these all tug obviously: so it is with our action, sometimes stirred, not reasonably, by a certain spirited temperament, sometimes as foolishly by greed; political interests, the siege of office, all betray a forth-summoning lust of power; action for security springs from fear; action for gain, from desire; action undertaken for the sake of sheer necessities – that is, for supplying the insufficiency of nature – indicates, manifestly, the cajoling force of nature to the safeguarding of life. Enneads IV,4,

The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation be, the soul is the man. Enneads IV,7,

But of what nature is this sovereign principle? If material, then definitely it must fall apart; for every material entity, at least, is something put together. Enneads IV,7,

No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give such results: some regulating principle would be necessary, some Cause directing the admixture: that guiding principle would be – soul. Enneads IV,7,

It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode has this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal. Enneads IV,7,

Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this "pneuma," what is the import of that repeated qualification of theirs "in a certain state," their refuge when they are compelled to recognize some acting principle apart from body? If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this "certain state" is soul, what follows? Either this "certain state," this shaping or configuration of things, is a real being or it is nothing. Enneads IV,7,

Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? Predilections, reasons, they will say; that is all very well, but these already contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to body which is one and simplex, and, besides, is not participant in reason – that is, not in the sense here meant, but only as it is influenced by some principle which confers upon it the qualities of, for instance, being warm or cold. Enneads IV,7,

Then there is growth under a time-law, and within a definite limit: how can this belong strictly to body? Body can indeed be brought to growth, but does not itself grow except in the sense that in the material mass a capacity for growing is included as an accessory to some principle whose action upon the body causes growth. Enneads IV,7,

We come to the same result by examining the sense of pain. We say there is pain in the finger: the trouble is doubtless in the finger, but our opponents must admit that the sensation of the pain is in the centre of consciousness. The suffering member is one thing, the sense of suffering is another: how does this happen? By transmission, they will say: the psychic pneuma [= the semi-material principle of life] stationed at the finger suffers first; and stage by stage the trouble is passed on until at last it reaches the centre of consciousness. Enneads IV,7,

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,

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its own accord or note], so that there would be many souls to each person. Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune. Enneads IV,7,

Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from body; this also is no inseparable Entelechy. Enneads IV,7,

There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant’s development the life-principle is situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why should it not pass outside altogether? An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present partwise in the partible body? An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another: how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet that this transference does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis. Enneads IV,7,

(14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul. Enneads IV,7,

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider of motion to all else: it moves by its own quality, and every living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life that, being essentially innate, can never fail. Enneads IV,7,

Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear: the very word, strictly used, means that the thing is perdurable. Similarly white, the colour, cannot be now white and now not white: if this "white" were a real being it would be eternal as well as being white: the colour is merely white but whatsoever possesses being, indwelling by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an entity this primal and eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it remains self-gathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own. Enneads IV,7,

Of course, life is no such mere condition, but an independent principle, effectively living. Enneads IV,7,

Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches the same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of the celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking to win to what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the primal source. Enneads IV,7,

(19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order. Enneads IV,7,

In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls, their issue stifled: every Kind must produce its next; it must unfold from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance to its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat; but there is the lower phase, begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the Supreme. Enneads IV,8,

There is, besides, no principle that can prevent anything from partaking, to the extent of its own individual receptivity in the Nature of Good. If therefore Matter has always existed, that existence is enough to ensure its participation in the being which, according to each receptivity, communicates the supreme good universally: if on the contrary, Matter has come into being as a necessary sequence of the causes preceding it, that origin would similarly prevent it standing apart from the scheme as though it were out of reach of the principle to whose grace it owes its existence. Enneads IV,8,

Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul and vegetal? Yet if we reject that unity, the universe itself ceases to be one thing and souls can no longer be included under any one principle. Enneads IV,8,

But why are not all the powers of this unity present everywhere? The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described, similarly, as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of growth is at work where there is no sensation – and yet all these powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside. Enneads IV,8,

Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being. Enneads: V I

So too the objects of intellection [the ideal content of the Divine Mind] – identical in virtue of the self-concentration of the principle which is their common ground – must still be distinct each from another; this distinction constitutes Difference. Enneads: V I

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 I

The items of this potentiality the divine intellection brings out, so to speak, from the unity and knows them in detail, as it must if it is to be an intellectual principle. Enneads: V I

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 I

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 I

In Empedocles  , similarly, we have a dividing principle, "Strife," set against "Friendship" – which is The One and is to him bodiless, while the elements represent Matter. Enneads: V I

Later there is Aristotle; he begins by making the First transcendent and intellective but cancels that primacy by supposing it to have self-intellection. Further he affirms a multitude of other intellective beings – as many indeed as there are orbs in the heavens; one such principle as in – over to every orb – and thus his account of the Intellectual Realm differs from Plato’s and, failing reason, he brings in necessity; though whatever reasons he had alleged there would always have been the objection that it would be more reasonable that all the spheres, as contributory to one system, should look to a unity, to the First. Enneads: V I

If on the contrary each is a principle, then the effective powers become a matter of chance; under what compulsion are they to hold together and act with one mind towards that work of unity, the harmony of the entire heavenly system? Again what can make it necessary that the material bodies of the heavenly system be equal in number to the Intellectual moving principles, and how can these incorporeal Beings be numerically many when there is no Matter to serve as the basis of difference? For these reasons the ancient philosophers that ranged themselves most closely to the school of Pythagoras   and of his later followers and to that of Pherekudes, have insisted upon this Nature, some developing the subject in their writings while others treated of it merely in unwritten discourses, some no doubt ignoring it entirely. Enneads: V I

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 I

This image of Soul is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle. Enneads V,2,

To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other hand every being is in identity with its prior as long as it holds that contact. 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,

We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating. Enneads V,3,

The sense-principle in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance only of the external; even in any awareness of events within the body it occupies, this is still the perception of something external to a principle dealing with those bodily conditions not as within but as beneath itself. 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,

We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior and inferior, which it receives. 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,

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,

Hence our self-knowing comes to the knowing of all the rest of our being in virtue of this thing patently present; or by that power itself communicating to us its own power of self-knowing; or by our becoming identical with that principle of knowledge. 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,

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,

Of course we do not pretend that the sun’s light [as the analogy might imply] remains a self-gathered and sun-centred thing: it is at once outrushing and indwelling; it strikes outward continuously, lap after lap, until it reaches us upon our earth: we must take it that all the light, including that which plays about the sun’s orb, has travelled; otherwise we would have a void expanse, that of the space – which is material – next to the sun’s orb. The Soul, on the contrary – a light springing from the Divine Mind and shining about it – is in closest touch with that source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in likeness to that principle, it has no place: the light of the sun is actually in the air, but the soul is clean of all such contact so that its immunity is patent to itself and to any other of the same order. 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,

In sum, then, a knowing principle must handle distinct items: its object must, at the moment of cognition, contain diversity; otherwise the thing remains unknown; there is mere conjunction, such a contact, without affirmation or comprehension, as would precede knowledge, the intellect not yet in being, the impinging agent not percipient. Enneads V,3,

Similarly the knowing principle itself cannot remain simplex, especially in the act of self-knowing: all silent though its self-perception be, it is dual to itself. Of course it has no need of minute self-handling since it has nothing to learn by its intellective act; before it is [effectively] Intellect, it holds knowledge of its own content. Knowledge implies desire, for it is, so to speak, discovery crowning a search; the utterly undifferentiated remains self-centred and makes no enquiry about that self: anything capable of analysing its content, must be a manifold. 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,

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,

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,

The wholly simplex and veritable self-sufficing can be lacking at no point: self-intellection begins in that principle which, secondarily self-sufficing, yet needs itself and therefore needs to know itself: this principle, by its self-presence, achieves its sufficiency in virtue of its entire content [it is the all]: it becomes thus competent from the total of its being, in the act of living towards itself and looking upon itself. 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,

We have, of course, already seen that a secondary must follow upon the First, and that this is a power immeasurably fruitful; and we indicated that this truth is confirmed by the entire order of things since there is nothing, not even in the lowest ranks, void of the power of generating. We have now to add that, since things engendered tend downwards and not upwards and, especially, move towards multiplicity, the first principle of all must be less a manifold than any. 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,

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,

What then is this in which each particular entity participates, the author of being to the universe and to each item of the total? Since it is the author of all that exists, and since the multiplicity in each thing is converted into a self-sufficing existence by this presence of The One, so that even the particular itself becomes self-sufficing, then clearly this principle, author at once of Being and of self-sufficingness, is not itself a Being but is above Being and above even self-sufficing. Enneads V,3,

May we stop, content, with that? No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety? All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle – to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun. Enneads V,3,

Our One-First is not a body: a body is not simplex and, as a thing of process cannot be a First, the Source cannot be a thing of generation: only a principle outside of body, and utterly untouched by multiplicity, could be The First. Enneads V,4,

How then could the most perfect remain self-set – the First Good, the Power towards all, how could it grudge or be powerless to give of itself, and how at that would it still be the Source? If things other than itself are to exist, things dependent upon it for their reality, it must produce since there is no other source. And further this engendering principle must be the very highest in worth; and its immediate offspring, its secondary, must be the best of all that follows. Enneads V,4,

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,

Thus it is not a simplex; it is manifold; it exhibits a certain composite quality – within the Intellectual or divine order, of course – as the principle that sees the manifold. It is, further, itself simultaneously object and agent of intellection and is on that count also a duality: and it possesses besides another object of intellection in the Order following upon itself. 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,

In the case of numbers, the unit remains intact while something else produces, and thus number arises in dependence on the unit: much more then does the unit, The One, remain intact in the principle which is before all beings; especially since the entities produced in its likeness, while it thus remains intact, owe their existence to no other, but to its own all-sufficient power. Enneads V,5,

Its definition, in fact, could be only "the indefinable": what is not a thing is not some definite thing. We are in agony for a true expression; we are talking of the untellable; we name, only to indicate for our own use as best we may. And this name, The One, contains really no more than the negation of plurality: under the same pressure the Pythagoreans found their indication in the symbol "Apollo" [a= not; pollon= of many] with its repudiation of the multiple. If we are led to think positively of The One, name and thing, there would be more truth in silence: the designation, a mere aid to enquiry, was never intended for more than a preliminary affirmation of absolute simplicity to be followed by the rejection of even that statement: it was the best that offered, but remains inadequate to express the Nature indicated. For this is a principle not to be conveyed by any sound; it cannot be known on any hearing but, if at all, by vision; and to hope in that vision to see a form is to fail of even that. Enneads V,5,

Everything brought into being under some principle not itself is contained either within its maker or, if there is any intermediate, within that: having a prior essential to its being, it needs that prior always, otherwise it would not be contained at all. It is the order of nature: The last in the immediately preceding lasts, things of the order of the Firsts within their prior-firsts, and so thing within thing up to the very pinnacle of source. 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,

Now it is clear that we cannot possess ourselves of the power of this principle in its concentrated fulness: so to do one must be identical with it: but some partial attainment is within our reach. Enneads V,5,

Reason recognising it as such a nature, you may not hope to see it with mortal eyes, nor in any way that would be imagined by those who make sense the test of reality and so annul the supremely real. For what passes for the most truly existent is most truly non-existent – the thing of extension least real of all – while this unseen First is the source and principle of Being and sovereign over Reality. Enneads V,5,

For, once more, the nature of the Good is not such as to make it all things or a thing among all: that would range it under the same classification with them all and it would differ, thus, only by its individual quality, some specialty, some addition. At once it becomes not a unity but a duality; there is one common element not good and another element that is good; but a combination so made up of good and not good cannot be the purely good, the primarily good; the primarily good must be that principle in which the better element has more effectively participated and so attained its goodness. Any good thing has become so by communion; but that in which it has communion is not a thing among the things of the all; therefore the Good is not a thing of the All. Enneads V,5,

Sixth tractate - That the principle transcending being has no intellectual act. What being has intellection primally and what being has it secondarily. Enneads V,6,

There is a principle having intellection of the external and another having self-intellection and thus further removed from duality. Enneads V,6,

This principle is the primally intellective since there can be no intellection without duality in unity. If there is no unity, perceiving principle and perceived object will be different, and the intellection, therefore, not primal: a principle concerned with something external cannot be the primally intellective since it does not possess the object as integrally its own or as itself; if it does possess the object as itself – the condition of true intellection – the two are one. Thus [in order to primal intellection] there must be a unity in duality, while a pure unity with no counterbalancing duality can have no object for its intellection and ceases to be intellective: in other words the primally intellective must be at once simplex and something else. Enneads V,6,

But it is not inevitable that every intellectual object should both possess the intellective principle in itself and exercise intellection: at that, it would be not merely object but subject as well and, besides, being thus dual, could not be primal: further, the intellectual principle that is to possess the intellectual object could not cohere unless there existed an essence purely intellectual, something which, while standing as intellectual object to the intellectual principle, is in its own essence neither an agent nor an object of intellection. The intellectual object points to something beyond itself [to a percipient]; and the intellectual agent has its intellection in vain unless by seizing and holding an object – since, failing that, it can have no intellection but is consummated only when it possesses itself of its natural term. Enneads V,6,

Thus we arrive at: a principle having no intellection, a principle having intellection primarily, a principle having it secondarily. Enneads V,6,

It may be suggested that its existence takes substantial form only by its being resident among outside things: but, at this, it is itself no longer simplex nor could any coherence of manifolds occur. On the one hand things could take substantial existence only if they were in their own virtue simplex. On the other hand, failing a simplex, the aggregate of multiples is itself impossible: for the simplex individual thing could not exist if there were no simplex unity independent of the individual, [a principle of identity] and, not existing, much less could it enter into composition with any other such: it becomes impossible then for the compound universe, the aggregate of all, to exist; it would be the coming together of things that are not, things not merely lacking an identity of their own but utterly non-existent. Enneads V,6,

Yet again: In any dual object there is the unity [the principle of identity] side by side with the rest of the thing; an associated member cannot be the unity of the two and there must be a self-standing unity [within the duality] before this unity of members can exist: by the same reasoning there must be also the supreme unity entering into no association whatever, something which is unity-simplex by its very being, utterly devoid of all that belongs to the thing capable of association. Enneads V,6,

The intellective act is a movement towards the unmoved Good: thus the self-intellection in all save the Absolute Good is the working of the imaged Good within them: the intellectual principle recognises the likeness, sees itself as a good to itself, an object of attraction: it grasps at that manifestation of The Good and, in holding that, holds self-vision: if the state of goodness is constant, it remains constantly self-attractive and self-intellective. The self-intellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act; and, in all that exists, the Act is towards The Good. Enneads V,6,

That primal Activity, then, is not an intellection, for there is nothing upon which it could Exercise intellection since it is The First; besides, intellection itself does not exercise the intellective act; this belongs to some principle in which intellection is vested. There is, we repeat, duality in any thinking being; and the First is wholly above the dual. 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,

What stands above Being stands above intellection: it is no weakness in it not to know itself, since as pure unity it contains nothing which it needs to explore. But it need not even spend any knowing upon things outside itself: this which was always the Good of all gives them something greater and better than its knowledge of them in giving them in their own identity to cling, in whatever measure be possible, to a principle thus lofty. Enneads V,6,

We have to examine the question whether there exists an ideal archetype of individuals, in other words whether I and every other human being go back to the Intellectual, every [living] thing having origin and principle There. Enneads V,7,

And so of the differences among children of the same parents: it is a matter of varying dominance: either the offspring – whether it so appears or not – has been mainly determined by, now, the male, now, the female or, while each principle has given itself entire and lies there within, yet it effectively moulds one portion of the bodily substance rather than another. Enneads V,7,

It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation. Enneads V,8,

If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then the creating principle, being without extension, could not be beautiful: but beauty cannot be made to depend upon magnitude since, whether in a large object or a small, the one Idea equally moves and forms the mind by its inherent power. A further indication is that as long as the object remains outside us we know nothing of it; it affects us by entry; but only as an Idea can it enter through the eyes which are not of scope to take an extended mass: we are, no doubt, simultaneously possessed of the magnitude which, however, we take in not as mass but by an elaboration upon the presented form. Enneads V,8,

Then again the principle producing the beauty must be, itself, ugly, neutral or beautiful: ugly, it could not produce the opposite; neutral, why should its product be the one rather than the other? The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it. Enneads V,8,

Movement There is pure [as self-caused] for the moving principle is not a separate thing to complicate it as it speeds. 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,

But – to our immediate purpose – it is possible to give a reason why the earth is set in the midst and why it is round and why the ecliptic runs precisely as it does, but, looking to the creating principle, we cannot say that because this was the way therefore things were so planned: we can say only that because the All is what it is, therefore there is a total of good; the causing principle, we might put it, reached the conclusion before all formal reasoning and not from any premises, not by sequence or plan but before either, since all of that order is later, all reason, demonstration, persuasion. Enneads V,8,

If this principle were not beautiful, what other could be? Its prior does not deign to be beautiful; that which is the first to manifest itself – Form and object of vision to the intellect – cannot but be lovely to see. It is to indicate this that Plato, drawing on something well within our observation, represents the Creator as approving the work he has achieved: the intention is to make us feel the lovable beauty of the autotype and of the Divine Idea; for to admire a representation is to admire the original upon which it was made. Enneads V,8,

Of those looking upon that Being and its content, and able to see, all take something but not all the same vision always: intently gazing, one sees the fount and principle of Justice, another is filled with the sight of Moral Wisdom, the original of that quality as found, sometimes at least, among men, copied by them in their degree from the divine virtue which, covering all the expanse, so to speak, of the Intellectual Realm is seen, last attainment of all, by those who have known already many splendid visions. 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,

We will have to examine this Nature, the Intellectual, which our reasoning identifies as the authentically existent and the veritable essential: but first we must take another path and make certain that such a principle does necessarily exist. 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,

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,

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,

Now a principle whose wisdom is not borrowed must derive from itself any intellection it may make; and anything it may possess within itself it can hold only from itself: it follows that, intellective by its own resource and upon its own content, it is itself the very things on which its intellection acts. 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,

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,

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,

If it is maintained that the continuous is a Quantity by the fact of its continuity, then the discrete will not be a Quantity. If, on the contrary, the continuous possesses Quantity as an accident, what is there common to both continuous and discrete to make them quantities? Suppose we concede that numbers are quantities: we are merely allowing them the name of quantity; the principle which gives them this name remains obscure. Enneads: VI I

Now the common principle in question cannot be a body. The only alternative is that, if it does exist, it be something bodiless, either in the objects thus brought together or outside of them. Enneads: VI I

But how can they all be powers? Beauty or health of soul or body, very well: but surely not ugliness, disease, weakness, incapacity. In a word, is powerlessness a power? It may be urged that these are qualities in so far as qualia are also named after them: but may not the qualia be so called by analogy, and not in the strict sense of the single principle? Not only may the term be understood in the four ways [of Aristotle], but each of the four may have at least a twofold significance. Enneads: VI I

But if Quality is determined by formation and characteristic and Reason-Principle, how explain the various cases of powerlessness and deformity? Doubtless we must think of Principles imperfectly present, as in the case of deformity. And disease – how does that imply a Reason-Principle? Here, no doubt, we must think of a principle disturbed, the Principle of health. Enneads: VI I

If then we do not propose to divide Quality in this [fourfold] manner, what basis of division have we? We must examine whether qualities may not prove to be divisible on the principle that some belong to the body and others to the soul. Those of the body would be subdivided according to the senses, some being attributed to sight, others to hearing and taste, others to smell and touch. Those of the soul would presumably be allotted to appetite, emotion, reason; though, again, they may be distinguished by the differences of the activities they condition, in so far as activities are engendered by these qualities; or according as they are beneficial or injurious, the benefits and injuries being duly classified. This last is applicable also to the classification of bodily qualities, which also produce differences of benefit and injury: these differences must be regarded as distinctively qualitative; for either the benefit and injury are held to be derived from Quality and the quale, or else some other explanation must be found for them. Enneads: VI I

The "category of Action": The quantum has been regarded as a single genus on the ground that Quantity and Number are attributes of Substance and posterior to it; the quale has been regarded as another genus because Quality is an attribute of Substance: on the same principle it is maintained that since activity is an attribute of Substance, Action constitutes yet another genus. Enneads: VI I

Are we told that Motion is necessarily in time, inasmuch as it involves continuity? But, at this, sight, never ceasing to see, will also be continuous and in time. Our critic, it is true, may find support in that principle of proportion which states that you may make a division of no matter what motion, and find that neither the motion nor its duration has any beginning but that the division may be continued indefinitely in the direction of the motion’s origin: this would mean that a motion just begun has been in progress from an infinity of time, that it is infinite as regards its beginning. Enneads: VI I

But though not opposed, it is still different from Action and cannot belong to the same genus as activity; though if they are both Motion, it will so belong, on the principle that alteration must be regarded as qualitative motion. Enneads: VI I

To the first genus are assigned Substrates, including Matter, to which is given a priority over the others; so that what is ranked as the first principle comes under the same head with things which must be posterior to it since it is their principle. Enneads: VI I

Furthermore, God becomes a secondary to Matter, inasmuch as even he is regarded as a body composed of Matter and Form – though how he acquires the Form is not revealed. If however he be admitted to exist apart from Matter in virtue of his character as a principle and a rational law [logos], God will be bodiless, the Creative Power bodiless. If we are told that he is without Matter but is composite in essence by the fact of being a body, this amounts to introducing another Matter, the Matter of God. Enneads: VI I

This philosophy began by identifying the Real with body; then, viewing with apprehension the transmutations of bodies, decided that Reality was that which is permanent beneath the superficial changes – which is much as if one regarded space as having more title to Reality than the bodies within it, on the principle that space does not perish with them. They found a permanent in space, but it was a fault to take mere permanence as in itself a sufficient definition of the Real; the right method would have been to consider what properties must characterize Reality, by the presence of which properties it has also that of unfailing permanence. Thus if a shadow had permanence, accompanying an object through every change, that would not make it more real than the object itself. The sensible universe, as including the Substrate and a multitude of attributes, will thus have more claim to be Reality entire than has any one of its component entities (such as Matter): and if the sensible were in very truth the whole of Reality, Matter, the mere base and not the total, could not be that whole. Enneads: VI I

A first point demanding consideration: Bodies – those, for example, of animals and plants – are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from Reality. Since, thus, bodies take their rise from unity, but not "unity" in the sense of the complete unity or Unity-Absolute – for this could never yield discrete plurality – it remains that they be derived from a unity Pluralized. But the creative principle [in bodies] is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity. Enneads VI,2,

Stability, then, may also be taken as a single genus. Obviously distinct from Motion and perhaps even its contrary, that it is also distinct from Being may be shown by many considerations. We may especially observe that if Stability were identical with Being, so also would Motion be, with equal right. Why identity in the case of Stability and not in that of Motion, when Motion is virtually the very life and Act both of Substance and of Absolute Being? However, on the very same principle on which we separated Motion from Being with the understanding that it is the same and not the same – that they are two and yet one – we also separate Stability from Being, holding it, yet, inseparable; it is only a logical separation entailing the inclusion among the Existents of this other genus. To identify Stability with Being, with no difference between them, and to identify Being with Motion, would be to identify Stability with Motion through the mediation of Being, and so to make Motion and Stability one and the same thing. Enneads VI,2,

Admitted that not everything suffices to produce a genus, it may yet be urged that there is an Absolute or Primary Unity corresponding to the other primaries. But if Being and unity are identified, then since Being has already been included among the genera, it is but a name that is introduced in unity: if, however, they are both unity, some principle is implied: if there is anything in addition [to this principle], unity is predicated of this added thing; if there is nothing added, the reference is again to that unity predicated of nothing. If however the unity referred to is that which accompanies Being, we have already decided that it is not unity in the primary sense. Enneads VI,2,

Further, as the simplex must be the principle of the non-simplex, though not its genus – for then the non-simplex too would be simplex, – so it stands with unity; if unity is a Principle; it cannot be a genus to its subsequents, and therefore cannot be a genus of Being or of other things. If it is nevertheless to be a genus, everything of which it is a genus must be taken as a unit – a notion which implies the separation of unity from substance: it will not, therefore, be all-embracing. just as Being is not a genus of everything but only of species each of which is a being, so too unity will be a genus of species each of which is a unity. But that raises the question of what difference there is between one thing and another in so far as they are both units, corresponding to the difference between one being and another. Enneads VI,2,

Why are not beauty, goodness and the virtues, together with knowledge and intelligence, included among the primary genera? If by goodness we mean The First – what we call the Principle of Goodness, the Principle of which we can predicate nothing, giving it this name only because we have no other means of indicating it – then goodness, clearly, can be the genus of nothing: this principle is not affirmed of other things; if it were, each of these would be Goodness itself. The truth is that it is prior to Substance, not contained in it. If, on the contrary, we mean goodness as a quality, no quality can be ranked among the primaries. Enneads VI,2,

Being, thus, exhibits every shape and every quality; it is not seen as a thing determined by some one particular quality; there could not be one only, since the principle of Difference is there; and since Identity is equally there, it must be simultaneously one and many. And so Being is; such it always was: unity-with-plurality appears in all its species, as witness all the variations of magnitude, shape and quality. Clearly nothing may legitimately be excluded [from Being], for the whole must be complete in the higher sphere which, otherwise, would not be the whole. Enneads VI,2,

This intellect, then, to which we ascribe perception, though not divorced from the prior in which it originates, evolves plurality out of unity and has bound up with it the principle of Difference: it therefore takes the form of a plurality-in-unity. A plurality-in-unity, it produces the many intellects by the dictate of its very nature. Enneads VI,2,

We have now explained our conception of Reality [True Being] and considered how far it agrees with the teaching of Plato. We have still to investigate the opposed principle [the principle of Becoming]. Enneads VI,3,

We may be told that neither Time nor Place is present in a subject. But if the definition of Time as the measure of Motion be regarded as denoting something measured, the "measure" will be present in Motion as in a subject, while Motion will be present in the moved: if, on the contrary, it be supposed to signify a principle of measurement, the "measure" will be present in the measurer. Enneads VI,3,

Once we have classified bodies into the four species, we are ready to combine them on a different principle, at the same time intermingling their differences of place, form and constitution; the resultant combinations will be known as fiery or earthy on the basis of the excess or predominance of some one element. Enneads VI,3,

We may be told that we have distinguished between simple and composite bodies, even ranking them as opposites. But our distinction, we reply, was between material and organic bodies and raised no question of the composite. In fact, there exists no means of opposing the composite to the simple; it is necessary to determine the simples in the first stage of division, and then, combining them on the basis of a distinct underlying principle, to differentiate the composites in virtue of their places and shapes, distinguishing for example the heavenly from the earthly. Enneads VI,3,

The same principle gives rise to the numerical distinction between odd and even; and it holds good that if there are differentiae found in both contraries, they are either to be abandoned to the objects numbered, or else to be considered as differentiae of the abstract numbers, and not of the numbers manifested in the sensible objects. If the numbers are logically separable from the objects, that is no reason why we should not think of them as sharing the same differentiae. Enneads VI,3,

On this principle, the beauty in the germ, and still more the blackness and whiteness in it, will be included among Sensible Qualities. Enneads VI,3,

In the case of virtue and vice, whole must be compared with whole, and the differentiation conducted on this basis. As for the differentia being derived from the same genus as themselves, namely, Quality, and from no other genus, if we proceed on the principle that virtue is bound up with pleasure, vice with lust, virtue again with the acquisition of food, vice with idle extravagance, and accept these definitions as satisfactory, then clearly we have, here too, differentiae which are not qualities. Enneads VI,3,

Nonetheless, we must endeavour to find a meaning for the term "contrary." Can we accept the principle that when things have a certain similarity which is not generic nor in any sense due to admixture, but a similarity residing in their forms – if the term be permitted – they differ in degree but are not contraries; contraries being rather those things which have no specific identity? It would be necessary to stipulate that they belong to the same genus, Quality, in order to cover those immediate contraries which [apparently] have nothing conducing to similarity, inasmuch as there are no intermediates looking both ways, as it were, and having a mutual similarity to each other; some contraries are precluded by their isolation from similarity. Enneads VI,3,

If we are agreed that Quality and Quantity, though attributive, are real entities, and on the basis of this reality distinguishable as Quality and Quantity respectively: then, on the same principle, since Motion, though an attribute has a reality prior to its attribution, it is incumbent upon us to discover the intrinsic nature of this reality. We must never be content to regard as a relative something which exists prior to its attribution, but only that which is engendered by Relation and has no existence apart from the relation to which it owes its name: the double, strictly so called, takes birth and actuality in juxtaposition with a yard’s length, and by this very process of being juxtaposed with a correlative acquires the name and exhibits the fact of being double. Enneads VI,3,

Where, then, does Motion reside, when there is one thing that moves and another that passes from an inherent potentiality to actuality? In the mover? How then will the moved, the patient, participate in the motion? In the moved? Then why does not Motion remain in it, once having come? It would seem that Motion must neither be separated from the active principle nor allowed to reside in it; it must proceed from agent to patient without so inhering in the latter as to be severed from the former, passing from one to the other like a breath of wind. Enneads VI,3,

Now, when the potentiality of Motion consists in an ability to walk, it may be imagined as thrusting a man forward and causing him to be continually adopting a different position; when it lies in the capacity to heat, it heats; when the potentiality takes hold of Matter and builds up the organism, we have growth; and when another potentiality demolishes the structure, the result is decay, that which has the potentiality of demolition experiencing the decay. Where the birth-giving principle is active, we find birth; where it is impotent and the power to destroy prevails, destruction takes place – not the destruction of what already exists, but that which intervenes upon the road to existence. Enneads VI,3,

With regard to the relative, we have maintained that Relation belongs to one object as compared with another, that the two objects coexist simultaneously, and that Relation is found wherever a substance is in such a condition as to produce it; not that the substance is a relative, except in so far as it constitutes part of a whole – a hand, for example, or head or cause or principle or element. Enneads VI,3,

Now, in beings whose unity does not reproduce the entire nature of that principle, any presence is presence of an emanant power: even this, however, does not mean that the principle is less than integrally present; it is not sundered from the power which it has uttered; all is offered, but the recipient is able to take only so much. But in Beings in which the plenitude of these powers is manifested, there clearly the Authentic itself is present, though still as remaining distinct; it is distinct in that, becoming the informing principle of some definite thing, it would abdicate from its standing as the total and from its uttermost self-abiding and would belong, in some mode of accident, to another thing as well. Still it is not the property of what may seek to join with it; it chooses where it will and enters as the participant’s power may allow, but it does not become a chattel; it remains the quested and so in another sense never passes over. There is nothing disquieting in omnipresence after this mode where there is no appropriation: in the same accidental way, we may reasonably put it, soul concurs with body, but it is soul self-holding, not inbound with Matter, free even of the body which it has illuminated through and through. Enneads VI,4,

Soul too? Souls too. That principle distributed over material masses we hold to be in its own nature incapable of distribution; the magnitude belongs to the masses; when this soul-principle enters into them – or rather they into it – it is thought of as distributable only because, within the discrimination of the corporeal, the animating force is to be recognised at any and every point. For soul is not articulated, section of soul to section of body; there is integral omnipresence manifesting the unity of that principle, its veritable partlessness. Enneads VI,4,

Now as in soul unity does not debar variety, so with Being and the Beings; in that order multiplicity does not conflict with unity. Multiplicity. This is not due to the need of flooding the universe with life; nor is the extension of the corporeal the cause of the multiplicity of souls; before body existed, soul was one and many; the many souls fore-existed in the All not potentially but each effectively; that one collective soul is no bar to the variety; the variety does not abrogate the unity; the souls are apart without partition, present each to all as never having been set in opposition; they are no more hedged off by boundaries than are the multiple items of knowledge in one mind; the one soul so exists as to include all souls; the nature of such a principle must be utterly free of boundary. Enneads VI,4,

Herein lies its greatness, not in mass; mass is limited and may be whittled down to nothingness; in that order no such paring off is possible – nor, if it were, could there be any falling short. Where limitation is unthinkable, what fear can there be of absence at any point? Nowhere can that principle fail which is the unfailing, the everlasting, the undwindling; suppose it in flux and it must at some time flow to its end; since it is not in flux – and, besides [as the All], it has nowhere to flow to – it lies spread over the universe; in fact it is the universe, too great to be held by body, giving, therefore, to the material universe but little of itself, the little which that participant can take. Enneads VI,4,

We may not make this principle the lesser, or if in the sense of mass we do, we must not begin to mistrust the power of that less to stretch to the greater. Of course, we have in fact no right to affirm it less or to measure the thing of magnitude against that which has none; as well talk of a doctor’s skill being smaller than his body. This greatness is not to be thought of in terms of quantity; the greater and less of body have nothing to do with soul. Enneads VI,4,

Sensations no doubt differ from soul to soul but only as do the conditions and experiences; this is difference not in the judging principle but in the matters coming to judgement; the judge is one and the same soul pronouncing upon various events, and these not its own but belonging to a particular body; it is only as a man pronounces simultaneously upon a pleasant sensation in his finger and a pain in his head. Enneads VI,4,

But why is not the soul in one man aware, then, of the judgement passed by another? Because it is a judgement made, not a state set up; besides, the soul that has passed the judgement does not pronounce but simply judges: similarly a man’s sight does not report to his hearing, though both have passed judgement; it is the reason above both that reports, and this is a principle distinct from either. Often, as it happens, reason does become aware of a verdict formed in another reason and takes to itself an alien experience: but this has been dealt with elsewhere. Enneads VI,4,

The solution is in the reasons given for refusing to distribute that principle; we are not to parcel it out among the entities of the multiple; on the contrary, we bring the distributed multiples to the unity. The unity has not gone forth to them: from their dispersion we are led to think of it as broken up to meet them, but this is to distribute the controller and container equally over the material handled. Enneads VI,4,

The light of our world can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass of known position, but conceive an immaterial entity, independent of body as being of earlier nature than all body, a nature firmly self-based or, better, without need of base: such a principle, incorporeal, autonomous, having no source for its rising, coming from no place, attached to no material mass, this cannot be allotted part here and part there: that would be to give it both a previous position and a present attachment. Finally, anything participating in such a principle can participate only as entirety with entirety; there can be no allotment and no partition. Enneads VI,4,

A principle attached to body might be exposed, at least by way of accident, to such partition and so be definable as passive and partible in view of its close relationship with the body of which it is so to speak a state or a Form; but that which is not inbound with body, which on the contrary body must seek, will of necessity go utterly free of every bodily modification and especially of the very possibility of partition which is entirely a phenomenon of body, belonging to its very essence. As partibility goes with body, so impartibility with the bodiless: what partition is possible where there is no magnitude? If a thing of magnitude participates to any degree in what has no magnitude, it must be by a participation without division; divisibility implies magnitude. Enneads VI,4,

No doubt these illustrations are imperfect, but they carry a serviceable similitude: the soul belongs to that other Kind, and we must not conceive a part of it embodied and a part intact; it is at once a self-enclosed unity and a principle manifested in diversity. Enneads VI,4,

Further, any newcoming entity achieving soul receives mysteriously that same principle which was equally in the previously ensouled; for it is not in the dispensation that a given part of soul situate at some given point should enter here and there; what is thought of as entering was always a self-enclosed entire and, for all the seeming entry, so remains; no real entry is conceivable. If, then, the soul never entered and yet is now seen to be present – present without waiting upon the participant – clearly it is present, here too, without breach of its self-inclusion. This can mean only that the participant came to soul; it lay outside the veritable reality but advanced towards it and so established itself in the kosmos of life. But this kosmos of life is a self-gathered entire, not divisible into constituent masses but prior to mass; in other words, the participation is of entire in entire. Any newcomer into that kosmos of life will participate in it entire. Admitting, then, that this kosmos of life is present entire in the universe, it must be similarly entire in each several entity; an identity numerically one, it must be an undivided entire, omnipresent. Enneads VI,4,

But how account, at this, for its extension over all the heavens and all living beings? There is no such extension. Sense-perception, by insistence upon which we doubt, tells of Here and There; but reason certifies that the Here and There do not attach to that principle; the extended has participated in that kosmos of life which itself has no extension. Enneads VI,4,

This indivisibility must, of course, not be taken in any sense of littleness: littleness would be still divisible, could not cover the extension of the participant and could not maintain integral presence against that expansion. Nor is it the indivisibility of a geometric point: the participant mass is no single point but includes an infinity of points; so that on the theory this principle must be an infinity of points, not a simultaneous entire, and so, again, will fail to cover the participant. Enneads VI,4,

If, then, the participant mass in its entirety is to contain that principle entire, the universe must hold that one soul present at its every point. Enneads VI,4,

The integral omnipresence of a unity numerically identical is in fact universally received; for all men instinctively affirm the god in each of us to be one, the same in all. It would be taken as certain if no one asked How or sought to bring the conviction to the test of reasoning; with this effective in their thought, men would be at rest, finding their stay in that oneness and identity, so that nothing would wrench them from this unity. This principle, indeed, is the most solidly established of all, proclaimed by our very souls; we do not piece it up item by item, but find it within beforehand; it precedes even the principle by which we affirm unquestionably that all things seek their good; for this universal quest of good depends on the fact that all aim at unity and possess unity and that universally effort is towards unity. Enneads VI,5,

In every entity the essential nature is the governing principle and, as we are told, a sound definition brings to light many even of the concomitants: where the essential nature is the entire being, we must be all the more careful to keep to that, to look to that, to refer all to that. Enneads VI,5,

If this principle is the Authentic Existent and holds unchanging identity, does not go forth from itself, is untouched by any process of becoming or, as we have said, by any situation in place, then it must be always self-gathered, never in separation, not partly here and partly there, not giving forth from itself: any such instability would set it in thing after thing or at least in something other than itself: then it would no longer be self-gathered; nor would it be immune, for anything within which it were lodged would affect it; immune, it is not in anything. If, then, not standing away from itself, not distributed by part, not taking the slightest change, it is to be in many things while remaining a self-concentrated entire, there is some way in which it has multipresence; it is at once self-enclosed and not so: the only way is to recognise that while this principle itself is not lodged in anything, all other things participate in it – all that are apt and in the measure of their aptitude. Enneads VI,5,

We take it, then, that the Idea, say of Fire – for we had best deal with Matter as underlying the elements – is not in the Matter. The Ideal Fire, then, remaining apart, produces the form of fire throughout the entire enfired mass. Now let us suppose – and the same method will apply to all the so-called elements – that this Fire in its first material manifestation is a multiple mass. That single Fire is seen producing an image of itself in all the sensible fires; yet it is not spatially separate; it does not, then, produce that image in the manner of our visible light; for in that case all this sensible fire, supposing that it were a whole of parts [as the analogy would necessitate], must have generated spatial positions out of itself, since the Idea or Form remains in a non-spatial world; for a principle thus pluralized must first have departed from its own character in order to be present in that many and participate many times in the one same Form. Enneads VI,5,

The elements in their totality, as they stand produced, may be thought of as one spheric figure; this cannot be the piecemeal product of many makers each working from some one point on some one portion. There must be one cause; and this must operate as an entire, not by part executing part; otherwise we are brought back to a plurality of makers. The making must be referred to a partless unity, or, more precisely, the making principle must be a partless unity not permeating the sphere but holding it as one dependent thing. In this way the sphere is enveloped by one identical life in which it is inset; its entire content looks to the one life: thus all the souls are one, a one, however, which yet is infinite. Enneads VI,5,

It is in this understanding that the soul has been taken to be a numerical principle, while others think of it as in its nature a self-increasing number; this latter notion is probably designed to meet the consideration that the soul at no point fails but, retaining its distinctive character, is ample for all, so much so that were the kosmos vaster yet the virtue of soul would still compass it – or rather the kosmos still be sunk in soul entire. Enneads VI,5,

Now if this principle is to be a true unity – where the unity is of the essence – it must in some way be able to manifest itself as including the contrary nature, that of potential multiplicity, while by the fact that this multiplicity belongs to it not as from without but as from and by itself, it remains authentically one, possessing boundlessness and multiplicity within that unity; its nature must be such that it can appear as a whole at every point; this, as encircled by a single self-embracing Reason-Principle, which holds fast about that unity, never breaking with itself but over all the universe remaining what it must be. Enneads VI,5,

We have, of course, no slight aid to conviction, indeed the very strongest, in the exposition of the character of that principle. It is not like a stone, some vast block lying where it lies, covering the space of its own extension, held within its own limits, having a fixed quantity of mass and of assigned stone-power. It is a First Principle, measureless, not bounded within determined size – such measurement belongs to another order – and therefore it is all-power, nowhere under limit. Being so, it is outside of Time. Enneads VI,5,

Time in its ceaseless onward sliding produces parted interval; Eternity stands in identity, pre-eminent, vaster by unending power than Time with all the vastness of its seeming progress; Time is like a radial line running out apparently to infinity but dependent upon that, its centre, which is the pivot of all its movement; as it goes it tells of that centre, but the centre itself is the unmoving principle of all the movement. Enneads VI,5,

Time stands, thus, in analogy with the principle which holds fast in unchanging identity of essence: but that principle is infinite not only in duration but also in power: this infinity of power must also have its counterpart, a principle springing from that infinite power and dependent upon it; this counterpart will, after its own mode, run a course – corresponding to the course of Time – in keeping with that stationary power which is its greater as being its source: and in this too the source is present throughout the full extension of its lower correspondent. Enneads VI,5,

Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it. The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give; you will always be able to move with it – better, to be in its entirety – and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stands there before you. Enneads VI,5,

But how explain the unlimited? It would seem that either it is among beings and so is limited or, if unlimited, is not among beings but, at best, among things of process such as Time. To be brought to limit it must be unlimited; not the limited but the unlimited is the subject of limitation, since between the limited and the unlimited there is no intermediate to accept the principle of limitation. The unlimited recoils by very nature from the Idea of limit, though it may be caught and held by it from without: – the recoil, of course, is not from one place to another; the limitless can have nothing to do with place which arises only with the limiting of the unlimited. Hence what is known as the flux of the unlimited is not to be understood as local change; nor does any other sort of recognisable motion belong to it in itself; therefore the limitless cannot move: neither can it be at rest: in what, since all place is later? Its movement means little more than that it is not fixed in rest. Enneads VI,6,

As a beginning, what is the origin of the Ideas in general? It is not that the thinking principle thought of each Idea and by that act of thought procured their several existences; not because Justice and Movement were thus thought did they come to be; that would imply that while the thought is later than the thing – the concept of Justice must be later than Justice itself – yet the thought precedes what, as founded on the thinking, owes its existence to it. Besides, if justice is only a certain definite thought we have the absurdity that Justice is nothing more than a definition of Justice. Thinking of Justice or Movement is but grasping their nature; this would mean grasping the non-existent, an impossibility. Enneads VI,6,

Hence it is that the Forms have been described as Henads and Numbers. This is the authentic Number; the other, the "monadic" is its image. The Authentic is that made manifest in the Forms and helping to bring them to be; primally it is the Number in the Authentic Being, inherent to it and preceding the Beings, serving to them as root, fount, first principle. Enneads VI,6,

If the Beings preceded the number and this were discerned upon them at the stirring, to such and such a total, of the numbering principle, then the actual number of the Beings would be a chance not a choice; since that total is not a matter of chance, Number is a causing principle preceding that determined total. Enneads VI,6,

It may be suggested that the decad is nothing more than so many henads; admitting the one henad why should we reject the ten? As the one is a real existence why not the rest? We are certainly not compelled to attach that one henad to some one thing and so deprive all the rest of the means to unity: since every existent must be one thing, the unity is obviously common to all. This means one principle applying to many, the principle whose existence within itself we affirmed to be presupposed by its manifestation outside. Enneads VI,6,

Be it so; we begin by pointing out a distinction: You take one thing with another – for we must first deal with objects of sense – a dog and a man, or two men; or you take a group and affirm ten, a decad of men: in this case the number affirmed is not a Reality, even as Reality goes in the sphere of sense, but is purely Quantity: similarly when you resolve into units, breaking up the decad, those units are your principle of Quantity since the single individual is not a unity absolute. Enneads VI,6,

In the Intellectuals, all, if the Absolute Living-Form, there is a multiple – a triad, let us say – that Triad of the Living-Form is of the nature of essence: and the Triad prior to any living thing, Triad in the realm of Being, is a principle of essence. Enneads VI,6,

This does not define the principle of either. If we are to state with entire accuracy the Reason-Principles of the Forms in Matter and associated with Matter, we cannot pass over the generative Reason-Principle, in this case that of Man, especially since we hold that a complete definition must cover the essential manner of being. 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,

But failure There? What can defensive horns serve to There? To sufficiency as living form, to completeness. That principle must be complete as living form, complete as Intellect, complete as life, so that if it is not to be one thing it may be another. Its characteristic difference is in this power of being now this, now that, so that, summing all, it may be the completest life-form, Intelligence complete, life in greatest fulness with each of the particulars complete in its degree while yet, over all that multiplicity, unity reigns. Enneads VI,7,

But earth; how is there earth There: what is the being of earth and how are we to represent to ourselves the living earth of that realm? First, what is it, what the mode of its being? Earth, here and There alike, must possess shape and a Reason-Principle. Now in the case of the vegetal, the Reason-Principle of the plant here was found to be living in that higher realm: is there such a Reason-Principle in our earth? Take the most earthy of things found shaped in earth and they exhibit, even they, the indwelling earth-principle. The growing and shaping of stones, the internal moulding of mountains as they rise, reveal the working of an ensouled Reason-Principle fashioning them from within and bringing them to that shape: this, we must take it, is the creative earth-principle corresponding to what we call the specific principle of a tree; what we know as earth is like the wood of the tree; to cut out a stone is like lopping a twig from a tree, except of course that there is no hurt done, the stone remaining a member of the earth as the twig, uncut, of the tree. 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,

Giving need not comport possessing; in this order we are to think of a giver as a greater and of a gift as a lower; this is the meaning of origin among real Beings. First there must be an actualized thing; its laters must be potentially their own priors; a first must transcend its derivatives; the giver transcends the given, as a superior. If therefore there is a prior to actuality, that prior transcends Activity and so transcends Life. Our sphere containing life, there is a Giver of Life, a principle of greater good, of greater worth than Life; this possessed Life and had no need to look for it to any giver in possession of Life’s variety. 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,

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,

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,

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,

Every activity, state, and life, will be followed and as it were escorted by the over-dwelling consciousness; sometimes as these take their natural course they will be met by hindrance and by intrusion of the conflicting so that the life is the less self-guided; sometimes the natural activity is unmixed, wholly free, and then the life goes brilliantly; this last state is judged the pleasantest, the most to be chosen; so, for lack of an accurate expression, we hear of "Intellect in conjunction with pleasure." But this is no more than metaphor, like a hundred others drawn by the poets from our natural likings – "Drunk with nectar," "To banquet and feast," "The Father smiled." No: the veritably pleasant lies away in that other realm, the most to be loved and sought for, not something brought about and changing but the very principle of all the colour and radiance and brightness found here. This is why we read of "Truth introduced into the Mixture" and of the "measuring standard as a prior condition" and are told that the symmetry and beauty necessary to the Mixture come Thence into whatever has beauty; it is in this way that we have our share in Beauty; but in another way, also, we achieve the truly desirable, that is by leading our selves up to what is best within us; this best is what is symmetry, beauty, collective Idea, life clear, Intellective and good. 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,

No longer can we wonder that the principle evoking such longing should be utterly free from shape. The very soul, once it has conceived the straining love towards this, lays aside all the shape it has taken, even to the Intellectual shape that has informed it. There is no vision, no union, for those handling or acting by any thing other; the soul must see before it neither evil nor good nor anything else, that alone it may receive the Alone. 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,

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,

But do not we ourselves assert that the Beings There are essence and Act? The Beings, yes, but they are to us manifold and differentiated: the First we make a simplex; to us Intellection begins with the emanant in its seeking of its essence, of itself, of its author; bent inward for this vision and having a present thing to know, there is every reason why it should be a principle of Intellection; but that which, never coming into being, has no prior but is ever what it is, how could that have motive to Intellection? As Plato rightly says, it is above Intellect. Enneads VI,7,

Again, if the Supreme is to have intellection it cannot know only itself; that would not be intellection, for, if it did know itself, nothing could prevent it knowing all things; but this is impossible. With self-intellection it would no longer be simplex; any intellection, even in the Supreme, must be aware of something distinct; as we have been saying, the inability to see the self as external is the negation of intellection. That act requires a manifold-agent, object, movement and all the other conditions of a thinking principle. Further we must remember what has been indicated elsewhere that, since every intellectual act in order to be what it must be requires variety, every movement simple and the same throughout, though it may comport some form of contact, is devoid of the intellective. Enneads VI,7,

It must be borne in mind that all intellection rises in some principle and takes cognisance of an object. But a distinction is to be made: There is the intellection that remains within its place of origin; it has that source as substratum but becomes a sort of addition to it in that it is an activity of that source perfecting the potentiality there, not by producing anything but as being a completing power to the principle in which it inheres. There is also the intellection inbound with Being – Being’s very author – and this could not remain confined to the source since there it could produce nothing; it is a power to production; it produces therefore of its own motion and its act is Real-Being and there it has its dwelling. In this mode the intellection is identical with Being; even in its self-intellection no distinction is made save the logical distinction of thinker and thought with, as we have often observed, the implication of plurality. Enneads VI,7,

Anyone making the Good at once Thinker and Thought identifies it with Being and with the Intellection vested in Being so that it must perform that act of intellection: at once it becomes necessary to find another principle, one superior to that Good: for either this act, this intellection, is a completing power of some such principle, serving as its ground, or it points, by that duality, to a prior principle having intellection as a characteristic. It is because there is something before it that it has an object of intellection; even in its self-intellection, it may be said to know its content by its vision of that prior. 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,

"Know yourself" is a precept for those who, being manifold, have the task of appraising themselves so as to become aware of the number and nature of their constituents, some or all of which they ignore as they ignore their very principle and their manner of being. The First on the contrary if it have content must exist in a way too great to have any knowledge, intellection, perception of it. To itself it is nothing; accepting nothing, self-sufficing, it is not even a good to itself: to others it is good for they have need of it; but it could not lack itself: it would be absurd to suppose The Good standing in need of goodness. Enneads VI,7,

Where the appetites are dictated by the very nature they are the desires of the conjoint of soul and body and then soul lies under physical compulsions: if they spring in the soul as an independent, then much that we take to be voluntary is in reality outside of our free act. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meagre reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us masters in the ensuing act? Need, inexorably craving satisfaction, is not free in face of that to which it is forced: and how at all can a thing have efficiency of its own when it rises from an extern, has an extern for very principle, thence taking its Being as it stands? It lives by that extern, lives as it has been moulded: if this be freedom, there is freedom in even the soulless; fire acts in accordance with its characteristic being. Enneads VI,8,

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,

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,

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,

But if self-disposal is founded thus on the will aiming at the good, how can it possibly be denied to that principle permanently possessing the good, sole object of the aim? Any one scrupulous about setting self-disposal so high may find some loftier word. 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,

But it is not, in our view, as an attribute that this freedom is present in the First. In the light of free acts, from which we eliminate the contraries, we recognise There self-determination, self-directed and, failing more suitable terms, we apply to it the lesser terms brought over from lesser things and so tell it as best we may: no words could ever be adequate or even applicable to that from which all else – the noble, the august – is derived. For This is principle of all, or, more strictly, unrelated to all and, in this consideration, cannot be made to possess such laters as even freedom and self-disposal, which in fact indicate manifestation upon the extern – unhindered but implying the existence of other beings whose opposition proves ineffective. Enneads VI,8,

Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the nature of a thing, its quality, its cause or its essential being. In this case the being – in so far as we can use the word – is knowable only by its sequents: the question as to cause asks for a principle beyond, but the principle of all has no principle; the question as to quality would be looking for an attribute in that which has none: the question as to nature shows only that we must ask nothing about it but merely take it into the mind if we may, with the knowledge gained that nothing can be permissibly connected with it. Enneads VI,8,

Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being? The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered: In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we participate in reality, are in some degree real. This is a compound state, a mingling of Reality and Difference, not, therefore reality in the strictest sense, not reality pure. Thus far we are not masters of our being; in some sense the reality in us is one thing and we another. We are not masters of our being; the real in us is the master, since that is the principle establishing our characteristic difference; yet we are again in some sense that which is sovereign in us and so even on this level might in spite of all be described as self-disposing. Enneads VI,8,

But what can there be higher than that which is its own master? Where we speak of self-mastery there is a certain duality, Act against essence; from the exercise of the Act arises the conception of the mastering principle – though one identical with the essence – hence arises the separate idea of mastery, and the being concerned is said to possess self-mastery. Where there is no such duality joining to unity but solely a unity pure – either because the Act is the whole being or because there is no Act at all – then we cannot strictly say that the being has this mastery of self. Enneads VI,8,

It may be added that nothing else contains in its essence the principle of its own satisfaction; there will be inner discord: but this hypostasis of the Good must necessarily have self-option, the will towards the self; if it had not, it could not bring satisfaction to the beings whose contentment demands participation in it or imagination of it. Enneads VI,8,

Another approach: Everything to which existence may be attributed is either one with its essence or distinct from it. Thus any given man is distinct from essential man though belonging to the order Man: a soul and a soul’s essence are the same – that is, in case of soul pure and unmingled – Man as type is the same as man’s essence; where the thing, man, and the essence are different, the particular man may be considered as accidental; but man, the essence, cannot be so; the type, Man, has Real Being. Now if the essence of man is real, not chanced or accidental, how can we think That to be accidental which transcends the order man, author of the type, source of all being, a principle more nearly simplex than man’s being or being of any kind? As we approach the simplex, accident recedes; what is utterly simplex accident never touches at all. Enneads VI,8,

The Supreme is the Term of all; it is like the principle and ground of some vast tree of rational life; itself unchanging, it gives reasoned being to the growth into which it enters. 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,

Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a co-ordinate unity. Beauty appears when limbs and features are controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of a soul acting as a concordant total, brought to unity. 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,

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,

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,

Now a plurality thus concentrated like the Intellectual Kosmos is close upon The First – and reason certifies its existence as surely as that of soul – yet, though of higher sovereignty than soul, it is not The First since it is not a unity, not simplex as unity, principle over all multiplicity, must be. Enneads VI,8,

Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the things of Being: there must be a prior to this Principle which aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in unity’s likeness. From this highest it is not sundered; it too is self-present: so close to the unity, it cannot be articulated: and yet it is a principle which in some measure has dared secession. Enneads VI,8,

The sovranly self-sufficing principle will be Unity-Absolute, for only in this Unity is there a nature above all need, whether within itself or in regard to the rest of things. Unity seeks nothing towards its being or its well-being or its safehold upon existence; cause to all, how can it acquire its character outside of itself or know any good outside? The good of its being can be no borrowing: This is The Good. Nor has it station; it needs no standing ground as if inadequate to its own sustaining; what calls for such underpropping is the soulless, some material mass that must be based or fall. This is base to all, cause of universal existence and of ordered station. All that demands place is in need; a First cannot go in need of its sequents: all need is effort towards a first principle; the First, principle to all, must be utterly without need. If the Unity be seeking, it must inevitably be seeking to be something other than itself; it is seeking its own destroyer. Whatever may be said to be in need of a good is needing a preserver; nothing can be a good to The Unity, therefore. Enneads VI,8,

In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being, fount of Good, root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme lessening it as if it were a thing of mass. At that the emanants would be perishable; but they are eternal; they spring from an eternal principle, which produces them not by its fragmentation but in virtue of its intact identity: therefore they too hold firm; so long as the sun shines, so long there will be light. Enneads VI,8,

Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they will know their source and Principle since by principle they see principle and are linked with it, by like they have contact with like and so they grasp all of the divine that lies within the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still craving something, that which only the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have overpassed all, is the All-Transcending. Enneads VI,8,