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GREAT BOOKS
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ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS, EDITOR IN CHIEF

PLOTINUS

MORTIMER J. ADLER, "Associate Editor

Members of the Advisory 'Board: STRINGFELLQW BARR, SCOTT BUCHANAN, JOHN ERSKINE,-

CLARENCE H. FAUST, ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN, JOSEPH J. SCHWAB, MARK VAN DOREN*

Editorial Consultants: A. R B. CLARK, F. L. LUCAS, WALTER MURDOCH.

WALLACE BROCKWAY, Executive Editor

PLOTINUS
THE SIX ENNEADS

Translated by STEPHEN MACKENNA
and B. S. PAGE

WILLIAM BENTON, Publisher

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, INC.
CHICAGO LONDON TORONTO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The Great Books

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

and paid little attention to elementary hy-
gienic precautions. Much of his time was giv-
en to meditation. Porphyry declared that "his
end and aim was intimate union with the God
who is above all things" and testified that dur-
ing the time he knew him Plotinus "attained
this end four times/*

The school that Plotinus conducted in Rome
depended almost entirely upon him, and it
began to fail soon after the health of Plotinus

prevented him from giving it his usual atten-
tion.

Almost blind and suffering from a complica-
tion of disorders, Plotinus finally retired to the
estate of a friend and disciple in Campania,
where he died in 270. At the moment of death
he is reported to have declared to his friend:
"Now I shall endeavor to make that which is
divine in me rise up to that which is divine in
the universe."

CONTENTS 1

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE, V

FIRST ENNEAD

TRACTATE

I. The Animate and the Man i

II. On Virtue 6

III. On Dialectic [The Upward Way] 10

IV. On True Happiness 12
V. Happiness and Extension of Time 19

VI. Beauty 21

VII. On the Primal Good and Secondary
Forms of Good [Otherwise, "On Hap-
piness"] 2.6
VIII. On the Nature and Source of Evil 27
IX. "The Reasoned Dismissal" 34

SECOND ENNEAD

I. On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly Sys-
tem ^ 35
II. The Heavenly Circuit 40

III. Are the Stars Causes ? 42

IV. Matter in its Two Kinds 50

V. On Potentiality and Actuality 57
VI. Quality and Form-Idea 60

VII. On Complete Transfusion 62

VIII. Why Distant Objects Appear Small 64

IX. Against Those that Affirm the Creator

of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to

be Evil: [Generally Quoted as "Against

the Gnostics"] 65

THIRD ENNEAD

I. Fate 78

II. On Providence (i) 82

III. On Providence (2) 93

IV. Our Tutelary Spirit 97

V. On Love 100
VI. The Impassivity of the Unembodied 106

VII. Time and Eternity 119

VIII. Nature Contemplation and the One 129

IX. Detached Considerations 136

FOURTH ENNEAD
I. On the Essence of the Soul ( i ) 139

Stephen MacKenna translated Enneads I-V.
B. S. Page translated the first three tractates o
the Sixth Ennead and revised MacKenna's trans-
lation of the remaining tractates.

II. On the Essence of the Soul (2) 139

III. Problems of the Soul (i) 141

IV. Problems of the Soul (2) 159
V. Problems of the Soul (3) [Also entitled

"On Sight"] 183

VI. Perception and Memory 189

VII. The Immortality of the Soul 191

VIII. The Soul's Descent into Body 200

IX. Are All Souls One? 205

FIFTH ENNEAD

I. The Three Initial Hypostases 208

II. The Origin and Order of the Beings fol-
lowing on the First 214

III. The Knowing Hypostases and the Tran-
scendent 215

IV. How the Secondaries rise from The
First: and on The One 226

V. That the Intellectual Beings are not out-
side the Intellectual-Principle: and on
The Nature of The Good 228

VI. That the Principle transcending Being

has no Intellectual Act. What being has

intellection primally and what being has

it secondarily 235

VII. Is there an Ideal Archetype of Particular

Beings? 238

VIII. On the Intellectual Beauty 239

IX. The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and

the Authentic Existence 246

SIXTH ENNEAD

I. On the Kinds of Being (i) 252

II. On the Kinds of Being (2) 268

III. On the Kinds of Being (3) 281

IV. On the Integral Omnipresence of the Au-
thentic Existent (i) 297

V. On the Integral Omnipresence of the Au-
thentic Existent (2) 305

VI. On Numbers 310

VII. How the Multiplicity of Ideal-Forms
came into Being: and Upon the Good 321
VIII. On Free-Will and the Will of The

One 342

IX. On The Good, or The One 353

THE FIRST ENNEAD

FIRST TRACTATE
THE ANIMATE AND THE MAN

i. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, de-
sire and aversion, where have these affections
and experiences their seat?

Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul
as employing the body, or in some third entity
deriving from both. And for this third entity,
again, there are two possible modes: it might be
either a blend or a distinct form due to the
blending.

And what applies to the affections applies al-
so to whatsoever acts, physical or mental, spring
from them.

We have, therefore, to examine discursive-
reason and the ordinary mental action upon ob-
jects of sense, and enquire whether these have
the one seat with the affections and experiences,
or perhaps sometimes the one seat, sometimes
another.

And we must consider also our acts of Intel-
lection, their mode and their seat.

And this very examining principle, which in-
vestigates and decides in these matters, must be
brought to light.

Firstly, what is the seat of Sense-Perception?
This is the obvious beginning since the affec-
tions and experiences either are sensations of
some kind or at least never occur apart from
sensation.

2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at
the outset the nature of the Soul that is wheth-
er a distinction is to be made between Soul and
Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and
the Soul-Kind in itself]. 1

If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in
man] is some sort of a composite and at once we
may agree that it is a recipient and if only rea-
son allows that all the affections and experi-
ences really have their seat in the Soul, and with
the affections every state and mood, good and
bad alike.

1 All matter shown in brackets is added by the
translator for clearness' sake and, therefore, is not
canonical. S.M.

But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are
one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-
Form unreceptive of all those activities which it
imparts to another Kind but possessing within
itself that native Act of its own which Reason
manifests.

If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of
the Soul as an immortal if the immortal, the
imperishable, must be impassive, giving out
something of itself but itself taking nothing
from without except for what it receives from
the Existents prior to itself from which Exist-
ents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be
sundered.

Now what could bring fear to a nature thus
unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feel-
ing. Nor is there place for courage: courage im-
plies the presence of danger. And such desires
as are satisfied by the filling or voiding of the
body, must be proper to something very differ-
ent from the Soul, to that only which admits of
replenishment and voidance.

And how could the Soul lend itself to any
admixture? An essential is not mixed. Or of
the intrusion of anything alien? If it did, it
would be seeking the destruction of its own na-
ture. Pain must be equally far from it. And
Grief how or for what could it grieve? What-
ever possesses Existence is supremely free,
dwelling, unchangeable, within its own pecul-
iar nature. And can any increase bring joy,
where nothing, not even anything good, can
accrue? What such an Existent is, it is un-
changeably.

Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-
Reasoning and all our ordinary mentation are
foreign to the Soul : for sensation is a receiving
whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive
body and reasoning and all ordinary mental
action deal with sensation.

The question still remains to be examined in
the matter of the intellections whether these
are to be assigned to the Soul and as to Pure-
Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its
solitary state.

3. We may treat of the Soul as In the body^-

whether it be set above it or actually within it
since the association o the two constitutes
the one thing called the living organism, the
Animate.

Now from this relation, from the Soul using
the body as an instrument, it does not follow
that the Soul must share the body's experiences:
a man does not himself feel all the experiences
of the tools with which he is working.

It may be objected that the Soul must, how-
ever, have Sense-Perception since its use of its
instrument must acquaint it with the external
conditions, and such knowledge comes by way
of sense. Thus, it will be argued, the eyes are
the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring
distress to the soul: hence the Soul may feel sor-
row and pain and every other affection that be-
longs to the body; and from this again will
spring desire, the Soul seeking the mending of
its instrument.

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affec-
tions pass from body to Soul? Body may com-
municate qualities or conditions to another
body: but body to Soul? Something happens
to A; does that make it happen to B? As long
as we have agent and instrument, there are two
distinct entities; if the Soul uses the body it is
separate from it.

But apart from the philosophical separation
how does Soul stand to body?

Clearly there is a combination. And for this
several modes are possible. There might be a
complete coalescence: Soul might be interwoven
through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form
detached or an Ideal-Form in governing con-
tact like a pilot: or there might be part of the
Soul detached and another part in contact, the
disjoined part being the agent or user, the con-
joined part ranking with the instrument or
thing used.

In this last case it will be the double task of
philosophy to direct this lower Soul towards the
higher, the agent, and except in so far as the
conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the
agent from the instrument, the body, so that it
need not forever have its Act upon or through
this inferior.

4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a
coalescence.

Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is en-
nobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised
in the scale of being as made participant in life;
the Soul, as associated with death and unrea-
son, is brought lower. How can a lessening of
the life-quality produce an increase such as
Sense-Perception ?

PLOTINUS

No: the body has acquired life, it is the body
that will acquire, with life, sensation and the
affections coming by sensation. Desire, then,
will belong to the body, as the objects of desire
are to be enjoyed by the body. And fear, too,
will belong to the body alone; for it is the body's
doom to fail of its joys and to perish.

Then again we should have to examine how
such a coalescence could be conceived: we might
find it impossible: perhaps all this is like an-
nouncing the coalescence of things utterly in-
congruous in kind, let us say of a line and
whiteness.

Next for the suggestion that the Soul is inter-
woven through the body: such a relation would
not give woof and warp community of sensa-
tion: the interwoven element might very well
suffer no change: the permeating soul might re-
main entirely untouched by what affects the
body as light goes always free of all it floods
and all the more so, since, precisely, we are
asked to consider it as diffused throughout the
entire frame.

Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul
would not be subjected to the body's affections
and experiences: it would be present rather as
Ideal-Form in Matter.

Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as
Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if the first possi-
bility the Soul is an essence, a self-existent, it
can be present only as separable form and will
therefore all the more decidedly be the Using-
Principle [and therefore unaffected].

Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axe-
form on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all
important but it is still the axe, the complement
of iron and form, that effects whatever is ef-
fected by the iron thus modified: on this anal-
ogy, therefore, we are even more strictly com-
pelled to assign all the experiences of the com-
bination to the body: their natural seat is the
material member, the instrument, the potential
recipient of life.

Compare the passage where we read 1 that
"it is absurd to suppose that the Soul weaves";
equally absurd to think of it as desiring, griev-
ing. All this is rather in the province of some-
thing which we may call the Animate.

5. Now this Animate might be merely the
body as having life: it might be the Couplement
of Soul and body: it might be a third and differ-
ent entity formed from botb.

ie 'We read" translates "he says" of the text, and
always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name
does not appear in the translation except where it
was written by Plotinus. S.M.

FIRST ENNEAD I. 7

The Soul in turn apart from the nature of
the Animate must be either impassive, merely
causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or
sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have
identical experiences with its fellow or merely
correspondent experiences: desire for example
in the Animate may be something quite distinct
from the accompanying movement or state in
the desiring faculty.

The body, the live-body as we know it, we
will consider later.

Let us take first the Couplement of body and
Soul. How could suffering, for example, be
seated in this Couplement?

It may be suggested that some unwelcome
state of the body produces a distress which
reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn
merges into Soul. But this account still leaves
the origin of the sensation unexplained.

Another suggestion might be that all is due
to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems
to have befallen the man or his belongings and
this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the
body and in the entire Animate. But this ac-
count leaves still a question as to the source and
seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul
or to the Couplement? Besides, the judgement
that evil is present does not involve the feeling
of grief: the judgement might very well arise
and the grief by no means follow: one may
think oneself slighted and yet not be angry ; and
the appetite is not necessarily excited by the
thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer
than before to any warrant for assigning these
affections to the Couplement.

Is it any explanation to say that desire is
vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the
Irascible-Faculty and, collectively, that all tend-
ency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such
a statement of the facts does not help towards
making the affections common to the Couple-
ment; they might still be seated either in the
Soul alone or in the body alone. On the one
hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the
carnal passion, there must be a heating of the
blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the
body; on the other hand, the impulse towards
The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like
certain others too, it would belong necessarily
to the Soul alone.

Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all
the affections to the Couplement.

In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly
be the Man that desires, and yet, on the other
hand, there must be desire in the Desiring-Fac-
ulty as well. How can this be? Are we to sup-

pose that, when the man originates the desire,
the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order? How
could the Man have come to desire at all unless
through a prior activity in the Desiring-Faculty ?
Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that takes the
lead ? Yet how, unless the body be first in the
appropriate condition?

6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law
that when any powers are contained by a recipi-
ent, every action or state expressive of them
must be the action or state of that recipient,
they themselves remaining unaffected as merely
furnishing efficiency.

But if this were so, then, since the Animate
is the recipient of the Causing-Principle [i.e.,
the Soul] which brings life to the Couplement,
this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the
experiences and expressive activities of the life
being vested in the recipient, the Animate.

But this would mean that life itself belongs
not to the Soul but to the Couplement; or at
least the life of the Couplement would not be
the life of the Soul; Sense-Perception would be-
long not to the Sensitive-Faculty but to the con-
tainer of the faculty.

But if sensation is a movement traversing the
body and culminating in Soul, how can the soul
lack sensation? The very presence of the Sensi-
tive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul.

Once again, where is Sense-Perception seated ?

In the Couplement.

Yet how can the Couplement have sensation
independently of action in the Sensitive-Fac-
ulty, the Soul left out of count and the Soul-
Faculty?

7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the
Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul's
presence.

This, however, is not to say that the Soul
gives itself as it is in itself to form either the
Couplement or the body.

No; from the organized body and something
else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives
forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle,
the Animate; and in this Principle are vested
Sense-Perception and all the other experiences
found to belong to the Animate.

But the "We"? How have We Sense-Percep-
tion?

By the fact that We are not separate from the
Animate so constituted, even though certainly
other and nobler elements go to make up the
entire many-sided nature of Man.

The faculty of perception in the Soul can-
not act by the immediate grasping of sensible
objects, but only by the discerning of Impres-

PLOTINUS

sions printed upon the Animate by sensation:
these impressions are already Intelligibles while
the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the
other [of that in the Soul] which is nearer^ to
Authentic-Existence as being an impassive
reading of Ideal-Forms.

And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which
the Soul wields tingle lordship over the Ani-
mate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-
Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment
we have peculiarly the We: before this there
was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands
the WE [the authentic Human-Principle] lofti-
ly presiding over the Animate.

There is no reason why the entire compound
entity should not be described as the Animate
or Living-Being mingled in a lower phase,
but above that point the beginning of the veri-
table man, distinct from all that is kin to the
lion, all that is of the order of the multiple
brute. And since The Man, so understood, is
essentially the associate of the reasoning Soul,
in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons, in
that the use and act of reason is a characteristic
Act of the Soul.

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

This also we possess as the summit of our
being. And we have It either as common to all
or as our own immediate possession: or again
we may possess It in both degrees, that is in
common, since It is indivisible one, every-
where and always Its entire self and severally
in that each personality possesses It entire in the
First-Soul [i.e. in the Intellectual as distin-
guished from the lower phase of the Soul ].

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

And how do we possess the Divinity?

In that the Divinity is contained in the Intel-
lectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and
We come third in order after these two, for the
We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the
undivided Soul we read and that Soul which
is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we
inevitably think of the Soul, though one and un-
divided in the All, as being present to bodies in
division: in so far as any bodies are Animates,
the Soul has given itself to each of the separate
material masses; or rather it appears to be pres-
ent in the bodies by the fact that it shines into

them: it makes them living beings not by merg-
ing into body but by giving forth, without any
change in itself, images or likenesses of itself
like one face caught by many mirrors.

The first of these images is Sense-Perception
seated in the Couplement; and from this down-
wards all the successive images are to be recog-
nized as phases of the Soul in lessening succes-
sion from one another, until the series ends in
the faculties of generation and growth and of all
production of offspring offspring efficient in its
turn, in contradistinction to the engendering
Soul which [has no direct action within matter
but] produces by mere inclination towards
what it fashions.

9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature
stand apart from all that can cause any of the
evils which man does or suffers; for all such
evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Ani-
mate, the Couplement.

But there is a difficulty in understanding how
the Soul can go guiltless if our mentation and
reasoning are vested in it: for all this lower kind
of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of
much of what is evil.

When we have done evil it is because we have
been worsted by our baser side for a man is
many by desire or rage or some evil image: the
misnamed reasoning that takes up with the
false, in reality fancy, has not stayed for the
judgement of the Reasoning-Principle: we have
acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in mat-
ters of the sense-sphere we sometimes see false-
ly because we credit only the lower perception,
that of the Couplement, without applying the
tests of the Reasoning-Faculty.

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

Thus we have marked off what belongs to the
Couplement from what stands by itself: the one
group has the character of body and never ex-
ists apart from body, while all that has no need
of body for its manifestation belongs pecul-
iarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as pass-
ing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the
point of the vision of Ideal-Forms, seeing them
as it were with an answering sensation (i.e.,
with consciousness) this last is at any rate true
of the Under standing in the Veritable Soul. For
Understanding, the true, is the Act of the Intel-
lections : in many of its manifestations it is the

FIRST ENNEAD I. 12

assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the
inner.

Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to
itself and within itself: all the changes and all
the turmoil we experience are the issue of what
is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as we have
said, die states and experiences of this elusive
"Couplement."

10. It will be objected, that if the Soul consti-
tutes the We [the personality] and We are sub-
ject to these states then the Soul must be subject
to them, and similarly that what We do must be
done by the Soul.

But k has been observed that the Couplement,
too especially before our emancipation is a
member of this total We, and in fact what the
body experiences we say We experience. This
We then covers two distinct notions; sometimes
it includes the brute-part, sometimes it tran-
scends the brute. The body is brute touched to
life; the true man is the other, going pure of the
body, natively endowed with the virtues which
belong to the Intellectual- Activity, virtues whose
seat is the Separate Soul, the Soul which even
in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [This
Soul constitutes the human being] for when it
has wholly withdrawn, that other Soul which
is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws
also, drawn after it.

Those virtues, on the other hand, which
spring not from contemplative wisdom but
from custom or practical discipline belong to
the Couplement: to the Couplement, too, be-
long the vices; they are its repugnances, desires,
sympathies.

And Friendship?

This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower
part, sometimes to the interior man.

11. In childhood the main activity is in the
Couplement and there is but little irradiation
from the higher principles of our being: but
when these higher principles act but feebly or
rarely upon us their action is directed towards
the Supreme; they work upon us only when
they stand at the mid-point.

But does not the We include that phase of our
being which stands above the mid-point?

It does, but on condition that we lay hold of
it: our entire nature is not ours at all times but
only as we direct the mid-point upwards or
downwards, or lead some particular phase of
our nature from potentiality or native charac-
ter into act.

And the animals, in what way or degree do
they possess the Animate?

If there be in them, as the opinion goes, hu-

man Souls that have sinned, then the Animat-
ing-Principle in its separable phase does not en-
ter directly into the brute; it is there but not
there to them; they are aware only of the image
of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of that
only by being aware of the body organised and
determined by that image.

If there be no human Soul in them, the Ani-
mate is constituted for them by a radiation from
the All-Soul.

12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expia-
tions? Here surely is a contradiction; on the
one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the other,
we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation;
it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from
body to body.

We may take either view at will: they are
easily reconciled.

When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make
Soul and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is
the simple unbroken Unity.

By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a group-
ment, we include that other, that phase of the
Soul which knows all the states and passions:
the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive:
it falls under the conditions of the entire living
experience: this compound it is that sins; it is
this, and not the other, that pays penalty.

It is in this sense that we read of the Soul:
"We saw it as those others saw the sea-god
Glaukos." "And," reading on, "if we mean to
discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it
free of all that has gathered about it, must see
into the philosophy of it, examine with what
Existences it has touch and by kinship to what
Existences it is what it is."

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is an-
other and the Expiator yet another. The retreat
and sundering, then, must be not from this
body only, but from every alien accruement.
Such accruement takes place at birth; or rather
birth is the coming-into-being of that other
[lower] phase of the Soul. For the meaning of
birth has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought
about by a descent of the Soul, something be-
ing given off by the Soul other than that actual-
ly coming down in the declension.

Then the Soul has let this image fall? And
this declension is it not certainly sin?

If the declension is no more than the illumi-
nating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin:
the shadow is to be attributed not to the lumi-
nary but to the object illuminated; if the ob-
ject were not there, the light could cause no
shadow.

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline,

PLOTINUS

only in that the object it illuminates lives by its
life. And it lets the image fall only if there be
nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall,
not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases
to be: the image has no further being when the
whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.

The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems
to give this image separate existence; he puts the
shade of Hercules in the lower world and Her-
cules himself among the gods : treating the hero
as existing in the two realms at once, he gives
us a twofold Hercules.

It is not difficult to explain this distinction.
Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his
noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a
God. On the other hand, his merit was action
and not the Contemplation which would place
him unreservedly in the higher realm. There-
fore while he has place above, something of
him remains below.

13. And the principle that reasons out these
matters? Is it We or the Soul?

We, but by the Soul.

But how "by the Soul" ? Does this mean that
the Soul reasons by possession [by contact with
the matters of enquiry] ?

No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists
without movement; or any movement that can
be ascribed to it must be utterly distinct from
all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's
own life.

And Intellection in us is twofold: since the
Soul is intellective, and Intellection is the high-
est phase of life, we have Intellection both by
the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the
Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon us for
this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less
than the Soul, and towards it we are ever ris-
ing.

SECOND TRACTATE
ON VIRTUE

i. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by
necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to es-
cape from Evil, we must escape hence.

But what is this escape?

"In attaining Likeness to God,"weread. And
this is explained as "becoming just and holy,
living by wisdom," the entire nature grounded
in Virtue.

But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply
Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To
what Divine Being, then, would our Likeness
be? To the Being must we not think? in
Which, above all, such excellence seems to in-

here, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to
the Principle ruling within it, the Principle en-
dowed with a wisdom most wonderful. What
could be more fitting than that we, living in
this world, should become Like to its ruler ?

But, at the beginning, we are met by the
doubt whether even in this Divine-Being all
the virtues find place Moral-Balance [Sophro-
syne], for example; or Fortitude where there
can be no danger since nothing is alien; where
there can be nothing alluring whose lack could
induce the desire of possession.

If, indeed, that aspiration towards the Intel-
ligible which is in our nature exists also in this
Ruling-Power, then we need not look elsewhere
for the source of order and of the virtues in our-
selves.

But does this Power possess the Virtues?

We cannot expect to find There what are
called the Civic Virtues, the Prudence which
belongs to the reasoning faculty; the Fortitude
which conducts the emotional and passionate
nature; the Sophrosyne which consists in a cer-
tain pact, in a concord between the passionate
faculty and the reason; or Rectitude which is
the due application of all the other virtues as
each in turn should command or obey.

Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by
these virtues of the social order but by those
greater qualities known by the same general
name? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us
no help at all?

It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness
by these while admitting it by the greater: tra-
dition at least recognizes certain men of the civ-
ic excellence as divine, and we must believe
that these too had in some sort attained Like-
ness: on both levels there is virtue for us,
though not the same virtue.

Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is possi-
ble, though by a varying use of different virtues
and though the civic virtues do not suffice, there
is no reason why we should not, by virtues pe-
culiar to our state, attain Likeness to a model
in which virtue has no place.

But is that conceivable?

When warmth comes in to make anything
warm, must there needs be something to warm
the source of the warmth?

If a fire is to warm something else, must there
be a fire to warm that fire?

Against the first illustration it may be retort-
ed that the source of the warmth does already
contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an
essential phase of its nature, so that, if the anal-
ogy is to hold, the argument would make Vir-

FIRST ENNEAD II. 3

tue something communicated to the Soul but an
essential constituent of the Principle from which
the Soul attaining Likeness absorbs it.

Against the illustration drawn from the fire,
it may be urged that the analogy would make
that Principle identical with virtue, whereas we
hold it to be something higher.

The objection would be valid if what the soul
takes in were one and the same with the source,
but in fact virtue is one thing, the source of
virtue quite another. The material house is not
identical with the house conceived in the intel-
lect, and yet stands in its likeness: the material
house has distribution and order while the pure
idea is not constituted by any such elements; dis-
tribution, order, symmetry are not parts of an
idea.

So with us: it is from the Supreme that we de-
rive order and distribution and harmony, which
are virtues in this sphere: the Existences There,
having no need of harmony, order or distribu-
tion, have nothing to do with virtue; and, none
the less, it is by our possession of virtue that we
become like to Them.

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 demonstra-
tion: we must persuade as well as demonstrate.

2. First, then, let us examine those good qual-
ities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek
to establish what is this thing which, as we pos-
sess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Su-
preme possesses it, is in the nature of an exem-
plar or archetype and is not virtue.

We must first distinguish two modes of Like-
ness.

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 un-
derstood 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.

What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively
and in the particular? The clearer method will
be to begin with the particular, for so the com-
mon element by which all the forms hold the
general name will readily appear.

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 toour

desires and to our entire sensibility, and dispel-
ling 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.

And, further, these Civic Virtues measured
and ordered themselves and acting as a princi-
ple 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 out-
side of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form
produces some corresponding degree of Like-
ness to the formless Being There. And partici-
pation 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.

This is the way in which men of the Civic
Virtues attain Likeness.

3. We come now to that other mode of Like-
ness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier vir-
tues: discussing this we shall penetrate more
deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and
be able to define the nature of the higher kind
whose existence we shall establish beyond doubt.

To Plato, unmistakably, there are two dis-
tinct orders of virtue, and the civic does not suf-
fice for Likeness: "Likeness to God," he says,
"is a flight from this world's ways and things":
in dealing with the qualities of good citizenship
he does not use the simple term Virtue but adds
the distinguishing word civic: and elsewhere he
declares all the virtues without exception to be
purifications.

But in what sense can we call the virtues pu-
rifications, and how does purification issue in
Likeness ?

As the Soul is evil by being interfused with
the body, and by coming to share the body's
states and to think the body's thoughts, so it
would be good, it would be possessed of virtue,
if it threw off the body's moods and devoted it-
self to its own Act the state of Intellection and
Wisdom never allowed the passions of the
body to affect it the virtue of Sophrosyne
knew no fear at the parting from the body
the virtue of Fortitude and if reason and the
Intellectual-Principle ruled in which state is
Righteousness, Such a disposition in the Soul,
become thus intellective and immune to passion,
it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God;
for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine- Act
is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.

PLOTINUS

But would not this make virtue a state of the
Divine also?

No: the Divine has no states; the state is in
the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is
not the same as in the Divine: of things in the
Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its
own, some not at all.

Then yet again, the one word Intellection cov-
ers two distinct Acts ?

Rather there is primal Intellection and there
is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of
.other scope.

As speech is the echo of the thought in the
|Soul,so thought in the Soul is an echo from else-
where: that is to say, as the uttered thought is
an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought
images a thought above itself and is the inter-
preter of the higher sphere.

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

4. We come, so, to the question whether Puri-
fication is the whole of this human quality, vir-
tue, or merely the forerunner upon which vir-
tue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved
state of purification or does the mere process suf-
fice to it, Virtue being something of less per-
fection than the accomplished pureness which
is almost the Term?

To have been purified is to have cleansed
away everything alien: but Goodness is some-
thing more.

If before the impurity entered there was Good-
ness, the Goodness suffices; but even so, not the
act of cleansing but the cleansed thing that
emerges will be The Good. And it remains to
establish what this emergent is.

It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The
Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken
up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only
as something of the nature of good but paying
a double allegiance and unable to rest in the
Authentic Good.

The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the In-
tellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies
in frequenting strangers. There is no other way
for it than to purify itself and so enter into re-
lation with its own; the new phase begins by a
new orientation.

After the Purification, then, there is still this
orientation to be made? No: by the purification
the true alignment stands accomplished.

The SouPs virtue, then, is this alignment? No:
it is what the alignment brings about within.

And this is . . . ?

That it sees; that, like sight affected by the

thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven
upon it and working within it, of the vision it
has come to.

But was not the Soul possessed of all this al-
ways, or had it forgotten?

What is now sees, it certainly always possessed,
but as lying away in the dark, not as acting with-
in it: to dispel the darkness, and thus come to
knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust
towards the light.

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

5. So we come to the scope of the purifica-
tion: that understood, the nature of Likeness
becomes- clear. Liken ess to what Principle? Iden-
tity with what God?

The question is substantially this: how far
does purification dispel the two orders of passion
anger, desire and the like, with grief and its
kin and in what degree the disengagement
from the body is possible.

Disengagement means simply that the soul
withdraws to its own place.

It will hold itself above all passions and af-
fections. Necessary pleasures and all the activ-
ity of the senses it will employ only for medica-
mentand assuagement lestitswork be impeded.
Pain it may combat, but,, failing the cure, it will
bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it.
All passionate action it will check: the suppres-
sion will be complete if that be possible, but at
worst the Soul will never itself take fire but
will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled out-
side its own precincts and rare and weak at that.
The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt
the involuntary has some power here too: fear
therefore must cease, except so far as it is pure-
ly monitory. What desire there may be can nev-
er be for the vile; even the food and drink nec-
essary for restoration will lie outside of the
SouPs attention, and not less the sexual appetite:
or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon
the actual needs of the nature and be entirely
under control; or if any uncontrolled motion
takes place, it will reach no further than the
imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and
will be working to set the irrational part of the

FIRST ENNEAD II. 7
nature above all attack, or if that may not be, is self-standing, independent.

then at least to preserve it from violent assault,
so that any wound it takes may be slight and be
healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence,
just as a man living next door to a Sage would*
profit by the neighbourhood, either in becom-
ing wise and good himself or, for sheer shame,
never venturing any act which the nobler mind
would disapprove.

There will be no battling in the Soul: the
mere intervention of Reason is enough: the low-
er nature will stand in such awe of Reason that
for any slightest movement it has made it will
grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not
having kept low and still in the presence of its
lord.

6. In all this there is no sin there is only mat-
ter of discipline but our concern is not merely
to be sinless but to be God.

As long as there is any such involuntary ac-
tion, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God,
or rather God in association with a nature of a
lower power: when all the involuntary is sup-
pressed, there is God unmingled, a Divine Be-
ing of those that follow upon The First.

For, at this height, the man is the very being
that came from the Supreme. The primal ex-
cellence restored, theessential man is There: en-
tering this sphere, he has associated himself
with the reasoning phase of his nature and this
he will lead up into likeness with his highest
self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that il
possible it shall never be inclined to, and at the
least never adopt, any course displeasing to its
overlord.

What form, then, does virtue take in one so
lofty?

It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the
contemplation of all that exists in the Intellec-
tual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of
the Intellectual-Principle itself.

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

In the Supreme, then, what is it?

Its proper Act and Its Essence.

That Act and Essence of the Supreme, man-
ifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of
this sphere. For the Supreme is not self-existent
Justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue:
it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what
in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is depend-
ent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme

But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering
of faculty, does it not always imply the exist-
ence of diverse parts?

No: There is a Rectitude of Diversity appro-
priate to what has parts, but there is another,
not less Rectitude than the former though it re-
sides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-
Rectitude is the Act of a Unity upon itself, of a
Unity in which there is no this and that and the
other.

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of
the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the In-
tellectual-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 ac-
quire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state
arising in its less noble companion.

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

In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes
Knowledge and Wisdom; self-concentration is
Sophrosyne; Its proper Act is Its Dutifulness;
Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate
within Itself, is the equivalent of Fortitude.

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

And if the term of purification is the produc-
tion of a pure being, then the purification of the
Soul must produce all the virtues; if any are
lacking, then not one of them is perfect.

And to possess the greater is potentially to
possess the minor, though the minor need not
carry the greater with them.

Thus we have indicated the dominant note
in the life of the Sage; but whether his posses-
sion of the minor virtues be actual as well as po-
tential, whether even the greater are in Act in
him or yield to qualities higher still, must be
decided afresh in each several case.

Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom.
If other guides of conduct must be called in to
meet a given need, can this virtue hold its
ground even in mere potentiality?

And what happens when the virtues in their
very nature differ in scope and province ? Where,
for example, Sophrosyne would allow certain
acts or emotions under due restraint and anoth-

er virtue would cut them off altogether? And
is it not clear that all may have to yield, once
Contemplative-Wisdom cornes into action?

The solution is in understanding the virtues
and what each has to give: thus the man will
learn to work with this or that as every several
need demands. And as he reaches to loftier prin-
ciples and other standards these in turn will de-
fine his conduct: for example. Restraint in its
earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will
work for the final Disengagement; he will live,
no longer, the human life of the good man
such as Civic Virtue commends but, leaving
this heneath him, will take up instead another
life, that of the Gods.

For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our
Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon
good men is to produce an image of an image:
we have to fix our gaze above the image and at-
tain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.

THIRD TRACTATE
ON DIALECTIC [THE UPWARD WAY]

i. What art is there, what method, what disci-
pline to bring us there where we must go ?

The Term at which we must arrive we may
take as agreed: we have established elsewhere,
by many considerations, that our journey is to
the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed,
the very reasoning which discovered the Term
was itself something like an initiation.

But what order of beings will attain the Term ?

Surely, as we read, those that have already
seen all or most things, those who at their first
birth have entered into the life-germ from which
is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a
born lover, the metaphysician taking to the path
by instinct, the musician and the nature pecul-
iarly susceptible to love needing outside guid-
ance.

But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or
is there a distinct method for each class of tem-
perament?

For all thereare two stages of the path, as they
are making upwards or have already gained the
upper sphere.

The first degree is the conversion from the
lower life; the second held by those that have
already made their way to the sphere of the In-
telligibles, have set as it were a footprint there
but must still advance within the realm lasts
until they reach the extreme hold of the place,
the Term attained when the topmost peak of
the Intellectual realm is won.

But this highest degree must bide its time: let

PLOTINUS

us first try to speak of the initial process of con-
version.

We must begin by distinguishing the three
types. Let us take the musician first and indi-
cate his temperamental equipment for the task.

The musician we may think of as being ex-
ceedingly quick to beauty, drawn in a very rap-
ture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own im-
pulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus:
as the timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones
and the beauty they convey; all that offends
against unison or harmony in melodies and
rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and
shapely pattern.

This natural tendency must be made the
starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn
by the tone, rhythm and design in things of
sense: he must learn to distinguish the material
forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the
source of all these correspondences and of the
entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he
must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself
through these forms; he must be shown that
what ravished him was no other than the Har-
mony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty
in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty
but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and
the truths of philosophy must be implanted in
him to lead him to faith in that which, unknow-
ing it, he possesses within himself. What these
truths are we will show later.

2. The born lover, to whose degree the musi-
cian 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 be-
fore some, one embodied form; he must be led,
under a system of mental discipline, to beauty
everywhere and made to discern the One Prin-
ciple 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 point-
ed out to him a first training this in the love-
liness of the immaterial he must learn to rec-
ognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues;
then these severed and particular forms must
be brought under the one principle by the ex-
planation of their origin. From the virtues he is
to be led to the Intellectual-Principle, to the
Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads
the up ward way.

3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very

FIRST ENNEAD III. 6

character, winged already and not like those oth
ers, in need of disengagement, stirring of him-
self towards the supernal but doubting of the
way, needs only a guide. He must be shown,
then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by his
very temperament, all but self-directed.

Mathematics, which as a student by nature
he will take very easily, will be prescribed to
train him to abstract thought and to faith in the
unembodied; a moral being by native disposi-
tion, he must be led to make his virtue perfect;
after the Mathematics he must be put through
a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the
science.

4. But this science, this Dialectic essential to
all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it?

It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings
with it the power of pronouncing with final
truth upon the nature and relation of things
what each is, how it differs from others, what
common quality all have, to what Kind each be-
longs and in what rank each stands in its Kind
and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how
many Beings there are, and how many non-
Beings to be distinguished from Beings.

Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-
Good, and of the particulars that fall under each,
and of what is the Eternal and what the not-
Eternal and of these, it must be understood,
not by seeming-knowledge ["sense-knowl-
edge"] but with authentic science.

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring
of the realm of sense and settles down in the In-
tellectual Kosmos and there plies its own pe-
culiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of de-
ceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the
"Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic
division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms,
of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-
Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes,
in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in
all that issues from these Firsts, until it has tra-
versed the entire Intellectual Realm: then, re-
solving the unity into the particulars once more,
it returns to the point from which it starts.

Now it rests: instructed and satisfied as to the
Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about
many things: it has arrived at Unity and it con-
templates: it leaves to another science all that
coil of premisses and conclusions called the art
of reasoning, much as it leaves the art of writ-
ing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it
considers necessary to clear the ground but
it makes itself the judge, here as in everything
else; where it sees use, it uses; anything it finds
superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of

learning or practice may turn that matter to ac-
count.

5. But whence does this science derive its own
initial laws ?

The Intellectual-Principle furnishes stand-
ards, the most certain for any soul that is able to
apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic
puts together for itself, combining and dividing,
until it has reached perfect Intellection. "For,"
we read, "it is the purest [perfection] of Intel-
lection and Contemplative- Wisdom." And, be-
ing the noblest method and science that exists
it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence,
The Highest there is: as Contemplative- Wis-
dom [or true-knowing] it deals with Being, as
Intellection with what transcends Being.

What, then, is Philosophy?

Philosophy is the supremely precious.

Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?

It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must
not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphy-
sician: Dialectic does not consist of bare theories
and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are,
as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds
methodically towards Existences, and possesses
itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the
realities.

Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly,
not of its own nature, but merely as something
produced outside itself, something which it rec-
ognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in
itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives
a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic,
that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions
collections of words but it knows the truth
and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools
call their propositions: it knows above all, the
operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this
knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and
what is denied, whether the denial is of what
was asserted or of something else, and whether
propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted
to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-
perception and it leaves petty precisions of proc-
ess to what other science may care for such ex-
ercises.

6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialec-
tic is its precious part: in its study of the laws
of the universe, Philosophy draws on Dialectic
much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic,
though, of course, the alliance between Philoso-
phy and Dialectic is closer.

And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic :
by Dialectic it comes to contemplation, though it
originates of itself the moral state or rather the
discipline from which the moral state develops.

PLOTINUS

Our reasoning faculties employ the data of
Dialectic almost as their proper possession for
they are mainly concerned about Matter [whose
place and worth Dialectic establishes].

And while the other virtues bring the reason
to bear upon particular experiences and acts,
the virtue of Wisdom [i.e., the virtue peculiarly
induced by Dialectic] is a certain super-reason-
ing much closer to the Universal; for it deals
with correspondence and sequence, the choice
of time for action and inaction, the adoption of
this course, the rejection of that other: Wisdom
and Dialectic have the task of presenting all
things as Universals and stripped of matter for
treatment by the Understanding.

But can these inferior kinds of virtue exist
without Dialectic and philosophy?

Yes but imperfectly, inadequately.

And is it possible to be a Sage, a Master in Di-
alectic, without these lower virtues?

It would not happen: the lower will spring
either before or together with the higher. And
it is likely that everyone normally possesses the
natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps
in, the perfected virtue develops. After the nat-
ural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the perfect-
ing of the moral nature. Once the natural vir-
tues exist, both orders, the natural and the high-
er, ripen side by side to their final excellence: or
as the one advances it carries forward the other
towards perfection.

But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in
vision and in strength and to both orders of
virtue the essential matter is from what princi-
ples we derive them.

FOURTH TRACTATE
ON TRUE HAPPINESS

i. Are we to make True Happiness one and the
same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and
therefore within the reach of the other living
beings as well as ourselves ?

There is certainly no reason to deny well-
being to any of them as long as their lot allows
them to flourish unhindered after their kind.

Whether we make Welfare consist in pleas-
ant conditions of life, or in the accomplishment
of some appropriate task, by either account it
may fall to them as to us. For certainly they may
at once be pleasantly placed and engaged about
some function that lies in their nature: take for
an instance such living beings as have the gift
of music; finding themselves well-off in other
ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so
their day is pleasant to them.

And if, even, we set Happiness in some ulti-
mate Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on
this head, too, we must allow it to animals from
the moment of their attaining this Ultimate:
the nature in them comes to a halt, having ful-
filled its vital course from a beginning to an
end.

It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-
down of happiness so low as to the animal
world making it over, as then we must, even
to the vilest of them and not withholding it even
from the plants, living they too and having a
life unfolding to a Term.

But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to de-
ny that good of life to animals only because
they do not appear to man to be of great ac-
count. And as for plants, we need not necessa-
rily allow to them what we accord to the other
forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is
true people might be found to declare prosper-
ity possible to the very plants: they have life,
and life may bring good or evil; the plants may
thrive or wither, bear or be barren.

No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the
good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of
life to any order of living things; if the Term
be inner-peace, equally impossible; impossible,
too, if the good of life be to live in accordance
with the purpose of nature.

2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants
on the ground that they lack sensation are real-
ly denying it to all living things,

By sensation can be meant only perception of
state, and the state of well-being must be a Good
in itself quite apart from the perception: to be
a part of the natural plan is good whether know-
ingly or without knowledge: there is good in
the appropriate state even though there be no
recognition of its fitness or desirable quality
for it must be in itself desirable.

This Good exists, then; is present: that in
which it is present has well-being without more
ado: what need then to ask for sensation into
the bargain?

Perhaps, however, the theory is that the Good
of any state consists not in the condition itself
but in the knowledge and perception of it.

But at this rate the Good is nothing but the
mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient
life. And so it will be possessed by all that feel,
no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two
constituents are needed to make up the Good,
that there must be both feeling and a given state
felt: but ho wean it be maintained that the bring-
ing together of two neutrals can produce the
Good?

FIRST ENNEAD IV. 3

They will explain, possibly, that the state must
be a state of Good and that such a condition
constitutes well-being on the discernment of that
present good; but then they invite the question
whether the well-being comes by discerning the
presence of the Good that is there, or whether
there must further be the double recognition
that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable
state constitutes the Good.

If well-being demands this recognition, it de-
pends no longer upon sensation but upon an-
other, a higher faculty; and well-being is vested
not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one
competent to discern that pleasure is the Good.

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 abdi-
cate and declare nearer to good than itself some-
thing lying in a contrary order?

No: those denying the good of life to the veg-
etable 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.

Perhaps, then, those are in the right who
found happiness not on the bare living or even
on sensitive life but on the life of Reason?

But they must tell us why it should be thus re-
stricted and why precisely they make Reason
an essential to the happiness in a living being:

"When you insist on Reason, is it because
Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and com-
pass the primal needs of nature; or would you
demand it, even though it were powerless in that
domain?"

If you call it in as a provider, then the reason-
less, equally with the reasoning, may possess
happiness after their kind, as long as, without
any thought of theirs, nature supplies their
wants: Reason becomes a servant; there is no
longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in
that consummation of reason which, we hold,
is virtue.

If you say that reason is to be cherished for its
own sake and not as supplying these human
needs, you must tell us what other services it
renders, what is its proper nature and what
makes it the perfect thing it is.

For, on this admission, its perfection cannot
reside in any such planning and providing: its
perfection will be something quite different,

something of quite another class: Reason can-
not be itself one of those first needs of nature;
it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of
nature or at all belong to that order: it must be
nobler than any and all of such things: other-
wise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to
rate it so highly.

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 ac-
cessible.

What then is happiness? Let us try basing it
upon Life.

3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of
life, everything that lives will be capable of hap-
piness, and those will be effectively happy who
possess that one common gift of which every
living thing is by nature receptive. We could
not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it
to the rational. If happiness were inherent in
the bare being-alive, the common ground in
which the cause of happiness could always take
root would be simply life.

Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere
living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook
the fact that they are not really making it
depend upon life at all: they admit that this
reasoning faculty, round which they centre
happiness, is a property [not the subject of a
property]: the subject, to them, must be the
Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term
that they find the basis of the happiness : so that
they are making it consist not in life but in a
particular kind of life not, of course, a species
formally opposite but, in our terminology, stand-
ing as an "earlier" to a "later" in the one Kind.

Now in common use this word "Life" em-
braces many forms which shade down from
primal to secondary and so on, all massed un-
der the common term lif e of plant and life of
animal each phase brighter or dimmer than
its next: and so it evidently must be with the
Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of
thing, so every Good must always be the image
of a higher Good.

If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness de-
mands fulness of life, and exists, therefore,
where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to
the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in
a being that lives fully.

And such a one will possess not merely the
good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say,
in the realm of existents the Supreme Good can

PLOTINUS

be no other than the authentically living, no
other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in
which the good is present as something essen-
tial not as something brought in from without,
a life needing no foreign substance called in
from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.

For what could be added to the fullest life to
make it the best life? If anyone should answer,
"The nature of Good" [The Good, as a Divine
Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near
our thought, but we are not seeking the Cause
but the main constituent.

It has been said more than once that the per-
fect 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.

4. If, then, the perfect life is within human
reach, the man attaining it attains happiness:
if not, happiness must be made over to the gods,
for the perfect life is for them alone.

But since we hold that happiness is for hu-
man beings too, we must consider what this
perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus:

It has been shown elsewhere that man, when
he commands not merely the life of sensation
but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has
realised the perfect life.

But are we to picture this kind of life as some-
thing foreign imported into his nature?

No: there exists no single human being that
does not either potentially or effectively possess
this thing which we hold to constitute happi-
ness.

But are we to think of man as including this
form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a
partial constituent of his entire nature?

We say, rather, that while in some men it is
present as a mere portion of their total being
in those, namely, that have it potentially there
is, too, the man, already in possession of true
felicity, who is this perfection realized, who
has passed over into actual identification with
it. All else is now mere clothing about the
man, not to be called part of him since it lies
about him unsought, not his because not ap-
propriated to himself by any act of the will.

To the man in this state, what is the Good?

He himself by what he has and is.

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 hu-
man being after this other mode.

The sign that this state has been achieved is
that the man seeks nothing else.

What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly
none of the less worthy things; and the Best he
carries always within him.

He that has such a life as this has all he needs
in life.

Once the man is a Sage, the means of happi-
ness, the way to good, are within, for nothing
is good that lies outside him. Anything he de-
sires further than this he seeks as a necessity,
and not for himself but for a subordinate, for
the body bound to him, to which since it has
life he must minister the needs of life, not needs,
however, to the true man of this degree. He
knows himself to stand above all such things,
and what he gives to the lower he so gives as
to leave his true life undiminished.

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity:
the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death
strikes at his household or at his friends; he
knows what death is, as the victims, if they are
among the wise, know too. And if death taking
from him his familiars and intimates does bring
grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but
to that in him which stands apart from the Su-
preme, to that lower man in whose distress he
takes no part.

5. But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else
that inhibit the native activity?

What of the suspension of consciousness
which drugs or disease may bring about? Could
either welfare or happiness be present under
such conditions? And this is to say nothing of
misery and disgrace, which will certainly be
urged against us, with undoubtedly also those
never-failing "Miseries of Priam."

"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such
afflictions and even take them lightly but they
could never be his choice, and the happy life
must be one that would be chosen. The Sage,
that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage
soul, no count being taken of the bodily-princi-
ple in the total of the being: he will, no doubt,
take all bravely . . . until the body's appeals
come up before him, and longings and loath-
ings penetrate through the body to the inner
man. And since pleasure must be counted in to-
wards the happy life, how can one that, thus,
knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be hap-
py, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss
self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of
the less noble part subjoined in them, must
needs seek happiness throughout all their be-

FIRST ENNEAD IV. 7

ing and not merely in some one part; if the one
constituent be troubled, the other, answering to
its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hin-
drance in its own activity. There is nothing but
to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life
and so secure that self-contained unity essential
to happiness."

6. Now if happiness did indeed require free-
dom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster,
it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted
by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the
Authentic Good, why turn away from this
Term and look to means, imagining that to be
happy a man must need a variety of things none
of which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felic-
ity were made up by neaping together all that
is at once desirable and necessary we must bid
for these also. But if the Term must be one and
not many; if in other words our quest is of a
Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected
which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls
to the tenderest longings of the soul.

The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed
directly towards freedom from this sphere: the
reason which disciplines away our concern
about this life has no fundamental quarrel with
things of this order; it merely resents their in-
terference; sometimes, even, it must seek them;
essentially all the aspiration is not so much
away from evil as towards the Soul's own high-
est and noblest: this attained, all is won and
there is rest and this is the veritably willed
state of life.

There can be no such thing as "willing" the
acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be tak-
en in its strict sense, and not misapplied to the
mere recognition of need.

It is certain that we shrink from the unpleas-
ant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what
we should have willed; to have no occasion for
any such shrinking would be much nearer to
our taste; but the things we seek tell the story
as soon as they are ours. For instance, health
and freedom from pain; which of these has any
great charm? As long as we possess them, we
set no store upon them.

Anything which, present, has no charm and
adds nothing to happiness, which when lack-
ing is desired because of the presence of an an-
noying opposite, may reasonably be called a
necessity but not a Good.

Such things can never make part of our final
object: our Term must be such that though
these pleasanter conditions be absent and their
contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.

7. Then why are these conditions sought and

their contraries repelled by the man established
in happiness?

Here is our answer:

These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is
true, add any particle towards the Sage's felici-
ty: but they do serve towards the integrity of
his being, while the presence of the contraries
tends against his Being or complicates the Term :
it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived
of the Term achieved but simply that he that
holds the highest good desires to have that
alone, not something else at the same time,
something which, though it cannot banish
the Good by its incoming, does yet take place
by its side.

In any case if the man that has attained felici-
ty meets some turn of fortune that he would
not have chosen, there is not the slightest les-
sening of his happiness for that. If there were,
his felicity would be veering or falling from day
to day; the death of a child would bring him
down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No:
a thousand mischances and disappointments
may befall him and leave him still in the tran-
quil possession of the Term.

But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty
daily chances!

What human thing, then, is great, so as not
to be despised by one who has mounted above
all we know here, and is bound now no longer
to anything below?

If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, how-
ever momentous, to be no great matter king-
dom and the rule over cities and peoples, colo-
nisations and the founding of states, even though
all be his own handiwork how can he take
any great account of the vacillations of power
or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he
thought any such event a great disaster, or any
disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way
of thinking. One that sets great store by wood
and stones, or ... Zeus ... by mortality among
mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate
of death, we hold, must be that it is better than
life in the body.

But suppose that he himself is offered a vic-
tim in sacrifice?

Can he think it an evil to die beside the al-
tars?

But if he go unburied ?

Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth,
his body will always rot.

But if he has been hidden away, not with
costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not
counted worthy of a towering monument?

The littleness of it!

PLOTINUS

But if he falls into his enemies' hands, into
prison?

There is always the way towards escape, if
none towards well-heing.

But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons
and daughters dragged away to captivity?

What then, we ask, if he had died without
witnessing the wrong? Could he have quitted
the world in the calm conviction that nothing
of all this could happen? He must be very shal-
low. Can he fail to see that it is possible for such
calamities to overtake his household, and does
he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge
of what may occur? In the knowledge of the
possibility he may be at ease; so, too, when the
evil has come about.

He would reflect that the nature of this All is
such as brings these things to pass and man
must bow the head.

Besides in many cases captivity will certainly
prove an advantage; and those that surfer have
their freedom in their hands: if they stay, either
there is reason in their staying, and then they
have no real grievance, or they stay against rea-
son, when they should not, and then they have
themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of
his neighbours, however near, cannot plunge
the Sage into evil: his state cannot hang upon
the fortunes good or bad o any other men.

8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will
carry them off as well as he can; if they overpass
his endurance they will carry him off.

And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there
is always the radiance in the inner soul of the
man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when
fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of
wind and tempest.

But what if he be put beyond himself? What
if pain grow so intense and so torture him that
the agony all but kills? Well, when he is put to
torture he will plan what is to be done: he re-
tains his freedom of action.

Besides we must remember that the Sage sees
things very differently from the average man;
neither ordinary experiences nor pains and sor-
rows, whether touching himself or others, pierce
to the inner hold. To allow them any such pas-
sage would be a weakness in our soul.

And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should
think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die
before they come: this is not concern for others'
welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here
we see our imperfection: we must not indulge
it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble
over what perhaps may be.

Anyone that says that it is in human nature

to grieve over misfortune to our household must
learn that this is not so with all, and that, pre-
cisely, it is virtue's use to raise the general level
of nature towards the better and finer, above
the mass of men. And the finer is to set at
nought what terrifies the common mind.

We cannot be indolent: this is an arena for
the powerful combatant holding his ground
against the blows of fortune, and knowing that,
sore though they be to some natures, they are
litde to his, nothing dreadful, nursery terrors.

So, the Sage would have desired misfortune ?

It is precisely to meet the undesired when it
appears that he has the virtue which gives him,
to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable
soul.

9. But when he is out of himself, reason
quenched by sickness or by magic arts?

If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it
were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why
should he not equally remain happy? No one
rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep;
no one counts up that time and so denies that
he has been happy all his life.

If they say that, failing consciousness, he is
no longer the Sage, then they are no longer rea-
soning about the Sage: but we do suppose a
Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he
is the Sage, he is in the state of felicity.

"Well, a Sage let him remain," they say, "still,
having no sensation and not expressing his vir-
tue in act, how can he be happy?"

But a man unconscious of his health may be,
none the less, healthy: a man may not be aware
of his personal attraction, but he remains hand-
some none the less: if he has no sense of his wis-
dom, shall he be any the less wise?

It may perhaps be urged that sensation and
consciousness are essential to wisdom and that
happiness is only wisdom brought to act.

Now, this argument might have weight if
prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in
from outside: but this is not so: wisdom is, in
its essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or
rather is The Authentic-Existent and this Ex-
istent does not perish in one asleep or, to take
the particular case presented to us, in the man
out of his mind: the Act of this Existent is con-
tinuous within him; and is a sleepless activity:
the Sage, therefore, even unconscious, is still
the Sage in Act.

This activity is screened not from the man
entire >but merely from one part of him: we have
here a parallel to what happens in the activity
of the physical or vegetative life in us which is
not made known by the sensitive faculty to the

FIRST ENNEAD IV. 13

rest of the man: if our physical life really con-
stituted the "We," its Act would be our Act:
but, in the fact, this physical life is not the
"We"; the "We" is the activity of the Intellec-
tual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in
Act we are in Act.

i o. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity
remains unperceived is that it has no touch
whatever with things of sense. No doubt action
upon material things, or action dictated by
them, must proceed through the sensitive fac-
ulty which exists for that use: but why should
there not be an immediate activity of the Intel-
lectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it,
the soul that antedates sensation or any per-
ception? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Ex-
istence are identical, this "Earlier-than-percep-
tion" must be a thing having Act.

Let us explain the conditions under which we
become conscious of this Intellective- Act.

When the Intellect is in upward orientation
that [lower part of it] which contains [or, cor-
responds to] the life of the Soul, is, so to speak,
flung down again and becomes like the reflec-
tion resting on the smooth and shining surface
of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mir-
ror is in place the image appears but, though the
mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would
have acted and produced an image still exists;
so in the case of the Soul; when there is peace
in that within us which is capable of reflecting
the images of the Rational and Intellectual-
Principles these images appear. Then, side by
side with the primal knowledge of the activity
of the Rational and the Intellectual-Principles,
we have also as it were a sense-perception of
their operation.

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is
shattered through some disturbance of the har-
mony of the body, Reason and the Intellectual-
Principle act unpictured: intellection is unat-
tended by imagination.

In sum we may safely gather that while the
Intellective- Act may be attended by the Imag-
ing Principle, it is not to be confounded with it.

And even in our conscious life we can point
to many noble activities, of mind and of hand
alike, which at the time in no way compel our
consciousness. A reader will often be quite un-
conscious when he is most intent: in a feat of
courage there can be no sense either of the
brave action or of the fact that all that is done
conforms to the rules of courage. And so in cases
beyond number.

So that it would even seem that consciousness
tends to blunt the activities upon which it is ex-

ercised, and that in the degree in which these
pass unobserved they are purer and have more
effect, more vitality, and that, consequently, the
Sage arrived at this state has the truer fulness
of life, life not spilled out in sensation but gath-
ered closely within itself.

1 1 . We shall perhaps be told that in such a state
the man is no longer alive : we answer that these
people show themselves equally unable to un-
derstand his inner life and his happiness.

If this does not satisfy them, we must ask
them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under
these terms, to enquire whether the man is in
happiness: they must not whittle away his life
and then ask whether he has the happy life;
they must not take away the man and then look
for the happiness of a man: once they allow that
the Sage lives within, they must not seek him
among the outer activities, still less look to the
outer world for the object of his desires. To con-
sider the outer world to be a field to his desire,
to fancy the Sage desiring any good external,
would be to deny Substantial-Existence to hap-
piness; for the Sage would like to see all men
prosperous and no evil befalling anyone; but
though it prove otherwise, he is still content.

If it be admitted that such a desire would be
against reason, since evil cannot cease to be,
there is no escape from agreeing with us that
the Sage's will is set always and only inward.

12. The pleasure demanded for the Sage's life
cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or
in any gratifications of the body there is no
place for these, and they stifle happiness nor
in any violent emotions what could so move
the Sage? it can be only such pleasure as there
must be where Good is, pleasure that does not
rise from movement and is not a thing of proc-
ess, for all that is good is immediately present
to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself:
his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immov-
able.

Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life
ever untroubled: his state is fixedly happy and
nothing whatever of all that is known as evil
can set it awry given only that he is and re-
mains a Sage.

If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleas-
ure in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the
Sage he is looking for.

13. The characteristic activities are not hin-
dered by outer events but merely adapt them-
selves, 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

PLOTINUS

searching and thinking, but the one greatest
principle is ever present to him, like a part o
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 nev-
er be robbed of the vision of the All-Good.

14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not
the Couplement of soul and body: the proof is
that man can be disengaged from the body and
disdain its nominal goods.

It would be absurd to think that happiness be-
gins and ends with the living-body: happiness
is the possession of the good of life: it is centred
therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul and not
of all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not
characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of
growth; that would at once connect it with the
body.

A powerful frame, a healthy constitution,
even a happy balance of temperament, these
surely do not make felicity; in the excess of
these advantages there is, even, the danger that
the man be crushed down and forced more
and more within their power. There must be a
sort of counter-pressure in the other direction,
towards the noblest: the body must be les-
sened, reduced, that the veritable man may
show forth, the man behind the appearances.

Let the earth-bound man be handsome and
powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that
he may rule the entire human race: still there
can be no envying him, the fool of such lures.
Perhaps such splendours could not, from the
beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but
if it should happen so, he of his own action will
lower his state, if he has any care for his true
life; the tyranny of the body he will work down
or wear away by inattention to its claims; the
rulership he will lay aside. While he will safe-
guard his bodily health, he will not wish to be
wholly untried in sickness, still less never to
feel pain: if such troubles should not come to
him of themselves, he will wish to know them,
during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he
will desire neither pains nor pleasures to ham-
per him; he will desire nothing of this world,
pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to
know nothing of the body. If he should meet
with pain he will pit against it the powers he
holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and
ease of life will not mean any increase of hap-

piness to him nor will their contraries destroy
or lessen it.

When in the one subject, a positive can add
nothing, how can the negative take away?

15. But suppose two wise men, one of them
possessing all that is supposed to be naturally
welcome, while the other meets only with the
very reverse: do we assert that they have an
equal happiness?

We do, if they are equally wise.

What though the one be favoured in body
and in all else that does not help towards wis-
dom, still less towards virtue, towards the vi-
sion of the noblest, towards being the highest,
what does all that amount to? The man com-
manding all such practical advantages cannot
flatter himself that he is more truly happy than
the man without them: the utmost profusion of
such boons would not help even to make a
flute-player.

We discuss the happy man after our own
feebleness; we count alarming and grave what
his felicity takes lightly: he would be neither
wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not
quitted all trifling with such things and become
as it were another being, having confidence in
his own nature, faith that evil can never touch
him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through
and through; where there is dread, there is not
perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half-
thing.

As for any involuntary fear rising in him and
taking the judgement by surprise, while his
thoughts perhaps are elsewhere, the Sage will
attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak,
calm the refractory child within him, whether
by reason or by menace, but without passion, as
an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance
of severity.

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

1 6. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in
the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to
the accidental, dreading accident for him, have
substituted for the Sage we have in mind anoth-
er person altogether; they offer us a tolerable
sort of man and they assign to him a life of
mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy
to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such
a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be
called a life of happiness; it misses the Great,
both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integ-

FIRST ENNEAD V. 6

rity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a
thing o mixture. And Plato rightly taught that
he who is to be wise and to possess happiness
draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his
gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by
That.

He can care for no other Term than That: all
else he will attend to only as he might change
his residence, not in expectation of any increase
to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable
attention to the differing conditions surround-
ing him as he lives here or there.

He will give to the body all that he sees to be
useful and possible, but he himself remains a
member of another order, not prevented from
abandoning the body, and necessarily leaving it
at nature's hour, he himself always the master
to decide in its regard.

Thus some part of his life considers exclusive-
ly the Soul's satisfaction; the rest is not immedi-
ately for the Term's sake and not for his own
sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the
thing which he tends and bears with as the mu-
sician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve
him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it,
or will give up lyre and lyring, as having an-
other craft now, one that needs no lyre, and
then he will let it rest unregarded at his side
while he sings on without an instrument. But
it was not idly that the instrument was given
him in the beginning: he has found it useful
until now, many a time.

FIFTH TRACTATE
HAPPINESS AND EXTENSION OF TIME
i. Is it possible to think that Happiness increas-
es with Time, Happiness which is always taken
as a present thing?

The memory of former felicity may surely be
ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing
of words, but a definite condition which must
be actually present like the very fact and act of
life.

2. It may be objected that our will towards liv-
ing and towards expressive activity is constant,
and that each attainment of such expression is
an increase in Happiness.

But in the first place, by this reckoning every
to-morrow's well-being will be greater than to-
day's, every later instalment successively larger
that an earlier; at once time supplants moral
excellence as the measure of felicity.

Then again the Gods to-day must be happier
than of old: and their bliss, too, is not perfect,
will never be perfect. Further, when the will at-
tains what it was seeking, it attains something

present: the quest is always for something to be
actually present until a standing felicity is defi-
nitely achieved. The will to life which is will to
Existence aims at something present, since Ex-
istence must be a stably present thing. Even
when the act of the will is directed towards the
future, and the furthest future, its object is an
actually present having and being: there is no
concern about what is passed or to come: the
future state a man seeks is to be a now to him;
he does not care about the forever: he asks that
an actual present be actually present.

3. Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long
time, if that present spectacle has been a longer
time before the eyes?

If in the greater length of time the man has
seen more deeply, time has certainly done some-
thing for him, but if all the process has brought
him no further vision, then one glance would
give all he has had.

4. Still the one life has known pleasure longer
than the other?

But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in
with Happiness unless indeed by pleasure is
meant the unhindered Act [of the true man],
in which case this pleasure is simply our "Hap-
piness." And even pleasure, though it exist con-
tinuously, has never anything but the present;
its past is over and done with.

5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be ob-
jected, that if one man has been happy from
first to last, another only at the last, and a third,
beginning with happiness, has lost it, their
shares are equal?

This is straying from the question: we were
comparing the happy among themselves: now
we are asked to compare the not-happy at the
time when they are out of happiness with those
in actual possession of happiness. If these last
are better off, they are so as men in possession o
happiness against men without it and their ad-
vantage is always by something in the present.

6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not
increase of time bring an increase of his unhap-
piness? Do not all troubles long-lasting pains,
sorrows, and everything of that type yield a
greater sum of misery in the longer time? And
if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time
why should not time equally augment happi-
ness when all is well ?

In the matter of sorrows and pains there is,
no doubt, ground for saying that time brings in-
crease: for example, in a lingering malady the
evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on
the body is brought lower and lower. But if the
constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief

2,0

PLOTINUS

grew no worse, then, here too, there would be
no trouble but that of the present moment: we
cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness
except in the sense that it has gone to make up
an actually existing state in the sense that, the
evil in the sufferer's condition having been ex-
tended over a longer time, the mischief has
gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is
due to the aggravation of the malady not to the
extension of time.

It may be pointed out also that this greater
length of time is not a thing existent at any given
moment; and surely a "more" is not to be made
out by adding to something actually present
something that has passed away.

No: true happiness is not vague and fluid: it
is an unchanging state.

If there is in this matter any increase besides
that of mere time, it is in the sense that a great-
er happiness is the reward of a higher virtue:
this is not counting up to the credit of happiness
the years of its continuance; it is simply noting
the high-water mark once for all attained.

7. But if we are to consider only the present
and may not call in the past to make the total,
why do we not reckon so in the case of time itself,
where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past
to the present and call the total greater? Why
not suppose a quantity of happiness equivalent
to a quantity of time? This would be no more
than taking it lap by lap to correspond with
time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as
an indivisible, measurable only by the content
of a given instant.

There is no absurdity in taking count of time
which has ceased to be: we are merely counting
what is past and finished, as we might count
the dead: but to treat past happiness as actual-
ly existent and as outweighing present happi-
ness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must
be an achieved and existent state, whereas any
time over and apart from the present is non-
existent: all progress of time means the extinc-
tion of all the time that has been.

Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of
eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary
flight the permanence of its exemplar. Thus
whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what
stands permanent in eternity is annihilated
saved only in so far as in some degree it still be-
longs to eternity, but wholly destroyed if it be
unreservedly absorbed into time.

If Happiness demands the possession of the
good of life, it clearly has to do with the life of
Authentic-Existence for that life is the Best,
Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measur-

able not by time but by eternity; and eternity is
not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude
but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is time-
less Being.

We must not muddle together Being and
Non-Being, time and eternity, not even ever-
lasting time with the eternal; we cannot make
laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must
be taken together, wheresoever and howsoever
we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not
even as an undivided block of time but as the
Life of Eternity, a stretch not made up of pe-
riods but completely rounded, outside of all no-
tion of time.

8. It may be urged that the actual presence of
past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives
the advantage to the man of the longer felicity.

But, Memory of what sort of experiences?

Memory either of formerly attained wisdom
and virtue in which case we have a better man
and the argument from memory is given up
or memory of past pleasures, as if the man that
has arrived at felicity must roam far and wide
in search of gratifications and is not contented
by the bliss actually within him.

And what is there pleasant in the memory of
pleasure? What is it to recall yesterday's excel-
lent dinner? Still more ridiculous, one of ten
years ago. So, too, of last year's morality.

9. But is there not something to be said for
the memory of the various forms of beauty?

That is the resource of a man whose life is
without beauty in the present, so that, for lack
of it now, he grasps at the memory of what has
been.

10. But, it may be said, length of time pro-
duces an abundance of good actions missed by
the man whose attainment of the happy state is
recent if indeed we can think at all of a state
of happiness where good actions have been few.

Now to make multiplicity, whether in time
or in action, essential to Happiness is to put it
together by combining non-existents, represent-
ed by the past, with someone thing that actually
is. This consideration it was that led us at the
very beginning to place Happiness in the actual-
ly existent and on that basis to launch our en-
quiry as to whether the higher degree was de-
termined by the longer time. It might be thought
that the Happiness of longer date must surpass
the shorter by virtue of the greater number of
acts it included.

But, to begin with, men quite outside of the
active life may attain the state of felicity, and
not in a less but in a greater degree than men of
affairs.

FIRST ENNEAD VI. 2

Secondly, the good does not derive from the
act itself but from the inner disposition which
prompts the noble conduct: the wise and good
man in his very action harvests the good not by
what he does but by what he is.

A wicked man no less than a Sage may save
the country, and the good of the act is for all
alike, no matter whose was the saving hand.
The contentment of the Sage does not hang up-
on such actions and events: it is his own inner
habit that creates at once his felicity and what-
ever pleasure may accompany it.

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in
things that are outside virtue and outside the
Soul; for the Soul's expression is not in action
but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation
within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness.

SIXTH TRACTATE

BEAUTY

i. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but
there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in cer-
tain combinations of words and in all kinds of
music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful;
and minds that lift themselves above the realm
of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty
in the conduct of life, in actions, in character,
in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the
beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there
may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to ma-
terial forms and draws the ear to the sweetness
perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of
the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?

Is there some One Principle from which all
take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to
the embodied and another for the bodiless? Fi-
nally, one or many, what would such a Principle
be?

Consider that some things, material shapes
for instance, are gracious not by anything in-
herent but by something communicated, while
others are lovely of themselves, as, for example,
Virtue.

The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful,
sometimes not; so that there is a good deal be-
tween being body and being beautiful.

What, then, is this something that shows it-
self in certain material forms? This is the nat-
ural beginning of our enquiry.

What is it that attracts the eyes of those to
whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls
them, lures them, towards it, and fills them
with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of
this, we have at once a standpoint for the wider
survey.

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry
of parts towards each other and towards a whole,
with, besides, a certain charm of colour, consti-
tutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in
visible things, as indeed in all else, universally,
the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical,
patterned.

But think what this means.

Only a compound can be beautiful, never any-
thing devoid of parts; and only a whole; the
several parts will have beauty, not in themselves,
but only as working together to give a comely
total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beau-
ty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugli-
ness; its law must run throughout.

All the loveliness of colour and even the light
of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not
beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the
realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a
beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and
the stars, why are these so fair?

In sounds also the simple must be proscribed,
though of ten in a whole noble composition eack
several tone is delicious in itself.

Again since the one face, constant in sym-
metry, 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 gen-
erous artlessness chimes in the most perfect
harmony with the proposition that morality
means weakness of will; the accordance is
complete.

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of
the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these
others; but how does symmetry enter here?
The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but
still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size
or of number: what standard of measurement
could preside over the compromise or the coa-
lescence of the soul's faculties or purposes?

Finally, how by this theory would there be
beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially
the solitary?

2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and in-

dicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty
on material things.

Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is some-
thing that is perceived at the first glance, some-
thing which the soul names as from an ancient
knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, en-
ters into unison with it.

But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at
once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing,
turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it.

Our interpretation is that the soul by the
very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the
noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being
when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of
that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight,
takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the
sense of its nature and of all its affinity.

But, is there any such likeness between the
loveliness of this world and the splendours in
the Supreme? Such a likeness in the particu-
lars would make the two orders alike: but what
is there in common between beauty here and
beauty There?

We hold that all the loveliness of this world
comes by communion in Ideal-Form.

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pat-
tern and form, as long as it remains outside of
Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation
from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Ab-
solute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has
not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is
by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points
and in all respects to Ideal-Form.

But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has
grouped and coordinated what from a diversity
of parts was to become a unity : it has rallied con-
fusion into co-operation: it has made the sum
one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a
unity and what it moulds must come to unity
as far as multiplicity may.

And on what has thus been compacted to
unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the
parts as to the sum: when it lights on some nat-
ural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives it-
self to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there
is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all
a house with all its parts, and the beauty which
some natural quality may give to a single stone.

This, then, is how the material thing becomes
beautiful by communicating in the thought
that flows from the Divine.

3. And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly
addressed to Beauty one incomparably sure in
the appreciation of its own, never in doubt
whenever any lovely thing presents itself for
judgement.

PLOTINUS

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately,
affirming the Beautiful where it finds some-
thing accordant with the Ideal-Form within it-
self, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in
its decision.

But what accordance is there between the ma-
terial and that which antedates all Matter?

On what principle does the architect, when
he finds the house standing before him corre-
spondent with his inner ideal of a house, pro-
nounce it beautiful ? Is it not that the house be-
fore 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 na-
ture to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the
common shapes some shape excellent above the
common, it gathers into unity what still re-
mains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it
within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents
it to the Ideal-Principle as something concord-
ant 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.

The beauty of colour is also the outcome of
a unification: it derives from shape, from the
conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by
the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which
is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond
all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-
Principle to the other elements, making ever up-
wards, the subtlest and sprightliestof all bodies,
as very near to the unembodied; itself alone ad-
mitting no other, all the others penetrated by it:
for they take warmth but this is never cold; it
has colour primally; they receive the Form of
colour from it: hence the splendour of its light,
the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all
that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by
its light remains outside of beauty, as not hav-
ing absorbed the plenitude of the Form of col-
our.

And harmonies unheard in sound create the
harmonies we hear and wake the soul to the con-
sciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence
in another kind: for the measures of our sensi-
ble music are not arbitrary but are determined
by the Principle whose labour is to dominate;
Matter and bring pattern into being.

Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense,
images and shadow-pictures, fugitives that have

FIRST ENNEAD VL 5

entered into Matter to adorn, and to ravish,
where they are seen.

4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties than
these. In the sense-bound life we are no longer
granted to know them, but the soul, taking no
help from the organs, sees and proclaims them.
To the vision of these we must mount, leaving
sense to its own low place.

As it is not for those to speak of the graceful
forms of the material world who have never
seen them or known their grace men born
blind, let us suppose in the same way those
must be silent upon the beauty of noble conduct
and of learning and all that order who have
never cared for such things, nor may those tell o
the splendour of virtue who have never known
the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beauti-
ful beyond the beauty of Evening and of Dawn.

Such vision is for those only who see with the
Soul's sight and at the vision, they will re-
joice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble
deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now
they are moving in the realm of Truth.

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce,
wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing
and love and a trembling that is all delight.
For the unseen all this may be felt as for the
seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in
some degree, but those the more deeply that are
the more truly apt to this higher love just as
all take delight in the beauty of the body but all
are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel
the keener wound are known as Lovers.

5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty
outside of sense, must be made to declare them-
selves.

What doyou feel in presence of the grace you
discern in actions, in manners, in sound moral-
ity, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the
beauty of souls? When you see that you your-
selves are beautiful within, what do you feel?
What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills
through your being, this straining upwards of
all your Soul, this longing to break away from
the body and live sunken within the veritable
self?

These are no other than the emotions of Souls
under the spell of love.

But what is it that awakens all this passion?
No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is
for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon
no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul en-
shrines and all the other hueless splendour of
the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or ad-
mire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteous-
ness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the

majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fear-
less and tranquil and passionless; and, shining
down upon all, the light of god-like Intellection.

All these noble qualities are to be reverenced
and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to
be called beautiful?

They exist: they manifest themselves to us:
any one that sees them must admit that they have
reality of Being; and is not Real-Being, really
beautiful ?

But we have not yet shown by what property
in them they have wrought the Soul to loveli-
ness: what is this grace, this splendour as of
Light, resting upon all the virtues?

Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the
Soul, and set that against its beauty: to under-
stand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it
comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open
our way before us.

Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute,
unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by
internal discord; beset by the fears of its cow-
ardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking,
in the little thought it has, only of the perish-
able and the base; perverse in all its impulses;
the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life
of abandonment to bodily sensation and delight-
ing in its deformity.

What must we think but that all this shame
is something that has gathered about the Soul,
some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so
that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude,
it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sen-
sation, but commands only a life smoulder-
ing dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in
manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul
should see, may no longer rest in its own being,
dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the
lower, the dark?

An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering
hither and thither at the call of objects of sense,
deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied
always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into it-
self; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has
trafficked away for an alien nature its own es-
sential Idea.

If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed
with mud his native comeliness disappears and
all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him:
his ugly condition is due to alien matter that
has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his
grace it must be his business to scour and puri-
fy himself and make himself what he was.

So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly
by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself
into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, inr

24 PLOTINUS

to Matter The dishonour of the Soul is in its Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul

ceasing; to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower

when ft is mixed with earthy particles; if these order actions and pursuits for instances-comes

be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, by operation of the shaping Soul which is also

isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold the author of the beauty found in the world of

alone And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment

the desires that come by its too intimate con- as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beauti-

- - - - * < " * - ful to the fulness of their capacity all things

verse with the body, emancipated from all the
passions, purged of all that embodiment has
thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself
again i n that moment the ugliness that came
only from the alien is stripped away.

6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-
discipline and courage and every virtue, not
even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purifica-
tion.

Hence the Mysteries with good reason adum-
brate the immersion of the unpurified in filth,
even in the Nether-World, since the unclean
loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul
of body find their joy in foulness.

What elseis Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but
to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to
breakaway from them as unclean and unworthy
of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fear-
less of the death which is but the parting of the
Soul from the body, an event which no one cant
dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self.
And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure
of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of
the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the
lower places and leading the Soul to the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Rea-
son, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of
that divine order from which the wellspring of
Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.

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

Wemay even say that Beauty *>the Authentic-
Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary
to Existence: and the Ugly is also the primal evil;
therefore its contrary is at once good and beau-
tiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one
method will discover to us the Beauty-Good
and the Ugliness-Evil.

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The
Good, must be posed as The First: directly de-
riving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle
which is pre-eminently the manifestation of

whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.

7. Therefore we must ascend again towards
the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone
that has seen This, knows what I intend when
I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is
to be desired as a Good. To attain it is for those
that will take the upward path, who will set all
their forces towards it, who will divest them-
selves of all that we have put on in our descent:
so, to those that approach the Holy Celebra-
tions of the Mysteries, there are appointed puri-
fications and the laying aside of the garments
worn before, and the entry in nakedness until,
passing, on the upward way, all that is other
than the God, each in the solitude of himself
shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the
Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from
Which all things depend, for Which all look
and live and act and know, the Source of Life
and of Intellection and of Being.

And one that shall know this vision with
what passion of love shall he not be seized, with
what pang of desire, what longing to be molten
into one with This, what wondering delight!
If he that has never seen this Being must hunger
for It as for all his welfare, he that has known
must love and reverence It as the very Beauty;
he will be flooded with awe and gladness, strick-
en by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable
love, with sharp desire; all other loves than this
he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed
fair.

This, indeed, is the mood even of those who,
having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or
Supernals, can never again feel the old delight
in the comeliness of material forms: what then
are we to think of one that contemplates Abso-
lute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumu-
lation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth
or in the heavens so perfect Its purity far
above all such things in that they are non-essen-
tial, composite, not primal but descending from
This?

Beholding this Being the Choragos of all
Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth
and never takes resting, rapt, in the vision and
possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to
Its likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack?

For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and
the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and
makes them also worthy of love.

And for This, the sternest and the uttermost
combat is set before the Souls; all our labour is
for This, lest we be left without part in this
noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed
in the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail
utterly.

For not he that has failed of the joy that is in
colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed
of power or of honours or of kingdom has
failed, but only he that has failed of only This,
for Whose winning he should renounce king-
doms and command over earth and ocean and
sky, if only, spurning the world of sense from
beneath his feet, and straining to This, he may
see.

8. But what must we do? How lies the path?
How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty,
dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart
from the common ways where all may see, even
the profane?

He that has the strength, let him arise and
withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is
known by the eyes, turning away for ever from
the material beauty that once made his joy.
When he perceives those shapes of grace that
show in body, let him not pursue: he must
know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and
hasten away towards That they tell of. For if
anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape
playing over water is there not a myth telling
in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the
depths of the current and was swept away to
nothingness? So too, one that is held by materi-
al beauty and will not break free shall be pre-
cipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the
dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being,
where, blind even in the Lower- World, he shall
have commerce only with shadows, there as
here.

"Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland":
this is the soundest counsel. But what is this
flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For
Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he com-
mands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or
Calypso not content to linger for all the pleas-
ure offered to his eyes and all the delight of
sense filling his days.

The Fatherland to us is There whence we
have come, and There is The Father.

What then is our course, what the manner of
our flight? This is not a journey for the feet;
the feet bring us only from land to land; nor
need you think of coach or ship to carry you

FIRST ENNEAD VI. 9

away; all this order of things you must set aside
and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and
call instead upon another vision which is to be
waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of
all, which few turn to use.

9. And this inner vision, what is its operation ?

Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear
the ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must
be trained to the habit of remarking, first, all
noble pursuits, then the works of beauty pro-
duced not by the labour of the arts but by the vir-
tue of men kncwn for their goodness: lastly,
you must search the souls of those that have
shaped these beautiful forms.

But how are you to see into a virtuous soul
and know its loveliness?

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you
do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does
the creator of a statue that is to be made beauti-
ful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he
makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a
lovely face has grown upon his work. So do
you also: cut away all that is excessive, straight-
en all that is crooked, bring light to all that is
overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty
and never cease chiselling your statue, until
there shall shine out on you from it the godlike
splendour of virtue, until you shall see the per-
fect goodness surely established in the stainless
shrine.

When you know that you have become this
perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the
purity of your being, nothing now remaining
that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from
without clinging to the authentic man, when
you find yourself wholly true to your essential
nature, wholly that only veritable Light which
is not measured by space, not narrowed to any
circumscribed form nor again diffused as a
thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as
something greater than all measure and more
than all quantity when you perceive that you
have grown to this, you are now become very
vision: now call up all your confidence, strike
forward yet a step you need a guide no longer
strain, and see.

This is the only eye that sees the mighty
Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be
dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable
in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost
brightness, then it sees nothing even though an-
other point to what lies plain to sight before it.
To any vision must be brought an eye adapted
to what is to be seen, and having some likeness
to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had
first become sunlike, and never can the soul

PLOTINUS

have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be
beautiful.

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

SEVENTH TRACTATE
ON THE PRIMAL GOOD AND SECONDARY FORMS OF

GOOD [OTHERWISE, "ON HAPPINESS"]
i. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity
the Good can be other than the natural Act ex-
pressing its life-force, or in the case of an entity
made up of parts the Act, appropriate, natural
and complete, expressive of that in it which is
best.

For the Soul, then, the Good is its own nat-
ural Act.

But the Soul itself is natively a "Best"; if,
further, its Act be directed towards the Best, the
achievement is not merely the "Soul's good'*
but "The Good" without qualification.

Now, given an Existent which as being it-
self the best of existences and even transcending
the existences directs its Act towards no oth-
er, but is the object to which the Act of all else
is directed, it is clear that this must be at once
the Good and the means through which all else
may participate in Good.

This Absolute Good other entities may pos-
sess in two ways by becoming like to It and
by directing the Act of their being towards It.

Now, if all aspiration and Act whatsoever are
directed towards the Good, it follows that the
Essential-Good neither need nor can look out-
side itself or aspire to anything other than it-
self: it can but remain unmoved, as being, in
the constitution of things, the wellspring and
firstcause of all Act : whatsoever in other entities
is of the nature of Good cannot be due to any
Act of the Essential-Good upon them; it is for
them on the contrary to act towards their source

and cause. The Good must, then, be the Good
not by any Act, not even by virtue of its Intel-
lection, but by its very rest within Itself.

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

For, again, that only can be named the Good
to which all is bound and itself to none: for on-
ly thus is it veritably the object of all aspiration.
It must be unmoved, while all circles around it,
as a circumference around a centre from which
all the radii proceed. Another example would
be the sun, central to the light which streams
from it and is yet linked to it, or at least is al-
ways about it, irremoveably; try all you will to
separate the light from the sun, or the sun from
its light, for ever the light is in the sun.

2. But the Universe outside; how is it
aligned towards the Good?

The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul
towards the Good itself, through the Intellec-
tual-Principle.

Everything has something of the Good, by
virtue of possessing a certain degree of unity
and a certain degree of Existence and by par-
ticipation in Ideal-Form: to the extent of the
Unity, Being, and Form which are present, there
is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and
Existence in which there is participation are no
more than images of the Ideal-Form.

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

In sum, then, life is the Good to the living,
and the Intellectual-Principle to what is intel-
lective; so that where there is life with intellec-
tion there is a double contact with the Good.

3. But if life is a good, is there good for all that
lives?

No: in the vile, life limps: it is like the eye to
the dim-sighted; it fails of its task.

But if the mingled strand of life is to us,
though entwined with evil, still in the total a
good, must not death be an evil?

Evil to What? There must be a subject for
the evil: but if the possible subject is no longer
among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid
of life . . . why, a stone is not more immune.

If, on the contrary, after death life and soul
continue, then death will be no evil but a good;
Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own
Act.

FIRST ENNEAD VTIL 2

If it be taken into the All-Soul what evil
can reach it There? And as the Gods are
possessed of Good and untouched by evil so,
certainly is the Soul that has preserved its es-
sential character. And if it should lose its purity,
the evil it experiences is not in its death but in
its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in
the lower world, even there the evil thing is its
life and not its death; the misfortune is still life,
a life of a definite character.

Life is a partnership of a Soul and body;
death is the dissolution; in either life or death,
then, the Soul will feel itself at home.

But, again, if life is good, how can death be
anything but evil?

Remember that the good of life, where it has
any good at all, is not due to anything in the
partnership but to the repelling of evil by vir-
tue; death, then, must be the greater good.

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil
but the Soul enters its Good through Virtue,
not living the life of the Couplement but hold-
ing itself apart, even here.

EIGHTH TRACTATE
ON THE NATURE AND SOURCE OF EVIL

i. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into
beings, or rather into a certain order of beings,
would be making the best beginning if they es-
tablished, first of all, what precisely Evil is,
what constitutes its Nature. At once we should
know whence it comes, where it has its native
seat and where it is present merely as an acci-
dent; and there would be no further question
as to whether it has Authentic-Existence.

But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us
could we possibly know Evil?

All knowing comes by likeness. The Intellec-
tual-Principle and the Soul, being Ideal-Forms,
would know Ideal-Forms and would have a
natural tendency towards them; but who could
imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it
manifests itself as the very absence of Good?

If the solution is that the one act of knowing
covers contraries, and that as Evil is the con-
trary to Good the one act would grasp Good
and Evil together, then to know Evil theremust
be first a clear perception and understanding of
Good, since the nobler existences precede the
baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good
hold no such standing, are nearer to Non-
Being.

No doubt there is a question in what precise
way Good is contrary to Evil whether it is as
First-Principle to last of things or as Ideal-

Form to utter Lack: but this subject we post-
pone.

2. For the moment let us define the Nature of
the Good as far as the immediate purpose de-
mands.

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

All until The Good is reached is beautiful;
The Good is beyond-beautiful, beyond the High-
est, holding kingly state in the Intellectual-
Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle
wholly unlike what is known as Intelligence in
us. Our intelligence is nourished on the propo-
sitions of logic, is skilled in following discus-
sions, works by reasonings, examines links of
demonstration, and comes to know the world
of Being also by the steps of logical process,
having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining
empty, all Intelligence though it be, until it has
put itself to school.

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

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

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

Such is the untroubled, the blissful, life of di-
vine beings, and Evil has no place in it; if this
were all, there would be no Evil but Good only,
the first, the second and the third Good. All,
thus far, is with the King of All, unfailing
Cause of Good and Beauty and controller of
all; and what is Good in the second degree de-
pends upon the Second-Principle and tertiary
Good upon the Third.

PLOTINUS

3. If such be the Nature of Beings and of
That which transcends all the realm of Being,
Evil cannot have place among Beings or in the
Beyond-Being; these are good.

There remains, only, if Evil exist at all, that
it be situate in the realm of Non-Being, that it
be some mode, as it were, of the Non-Being,
that it have its seat in something in touch with
Non-Being or to a certain degree communicate
in Non-Being.

By this Non-Being, of course, we are not to
understand something that simply does not
exist, but only something of an utterly different
order from Authentic-Being: there is no ques-
tion here of movement or position with regard
to Being; the Non-Being we are thinking of is,
rather, an image of Being or perhaps something
still further removed than even an image.

Now this [the required faint image of Be-
ing] might be the sensible universe with all the
impressions it engenders, or it might be some-
thing of even later derivation, accidental to the
realm of sense, or again, it might be the source
of the sense-world or something of the same or-
der entering into it to -complete it.

Some conception of it would be reacted by
thinking of measurelessness as opposed to meas-
ure, of the unbounded against bound, the un-
shaped against a principle of shape, the ever-
needy against the self-sufficing: think of the
ever-undefined, the never at rest, the all-accept-
ing but never sated, utter dearth; and make all
this character not mere accident in it but its
equivalent for essential-being, so that, what-
soever 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.

In what substantial-form [hypostasis] then
is all this to be found not as accident but as
the very substance itself?

For if Evil can enter into other things, it
must have in a certain sense a prior existence,
even though it may not be an essence. As there
is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the
quality, so, together with the derived evil en-
tering into something not itself, there must be
the Absolute Evil.

But how? Can there be Unmeasure apart
from an unmeasured object?

Does not Measure exist apart from unmeas-
ured things? Precisely as there is Measure
apart from anything measured, so there is Un-
measure apart from the unmeasured. If Un-
measure could not exist independendy, it must

exist either in an unmeasured object or in some-
thing measured; but the unmeasured could not
need Unmeasure and the measured could not
contain it.

There must, then, be some Undetermination-
Absolute, some Absolute Formlessness; all the
qualities cited as characterizing the Nature of
Evil must be summed under an Absolute Evil;
and every evil thing outside of this must either
contain this Absolute by saturation Or have tak-
en the character of evil and become a cause of
evil by consecration to this Absolute.

What will this be?

That Kind whose place is below all the pat-
terns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits,
that which has no trace of good by any title of
its own, but [at best] takes order and grace
from some Principle outside itself, a mere im-
age as regards Absolute-Being but the Authen-
tic Essence of Evil in so far as Evil can have
Authentic Being. In such a Kind, Reason rec-
ognizes the Primal Evil, Evil Absolute.

4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Mat-
ter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is
an untrue form: they are without life: by their
own natural disorderly movement they make
away with each other; they are hindrances to
the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux
they are always slipping away from Being.

Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul
is evil, is not an evil Kind.

What, then, is the evil Soul?

It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into
the service of that in which soul-evil is implant-
ed by nature, in whose service the unreasoning
phase of the Soul accepts evil unmeasure, ex-
cess and shortcoming, which bring forth licen-
tiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the
Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature,
which set up false judgements, so that the Soul
comes to name things good or evil not by their
true value but by the mere test of like and dis-
like.

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 Form-
ing-Idea that orders and brings to measure,
and this because it is merged into a body made
of Matter.

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

FIRST ENNEAD VIII. 6

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.

For, wholly without part in Good, the nega-
tion of Good, unmingled Lack, this Matter-
Kind makes over to its own likeness whatso-
ever comes in touch with it.

The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed
towards the Intellectual-Principle, is steadfast-
ly pure: it has turned away from Matter; all
that is undetermined, that is outside of meas-
ure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near;
it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, de-
termined by the Intellectual-Principle.

The Soul that breaks away from this source
of its reality to the non-perfect and non-primal
is, as it were, a secondary, an image, to the loy-
al Soul. By its falling-away and to the extent
of the fall it is stripped of Determination, be-
comes wholly indeterminate, sees darkness.
Looking to what repels vision, as we look when
we are said to see darkness, it has taken Matter
into itself.

5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and
frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of
good, the Soul's evil has its source in that very
lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary
cause and at once the Principle of Evil is re-
moved from Matter, is made anterior to Mat-
ter.

No: Evil is not in any and every lack; it is in
absolute lack. What falls in some degree short
of the Good is not Evil; considered in its own
kind it might even be perfect, but where there
is utter dearth, there we have Essential Evil,
void of all share in Good; this is the case with
Matter.

Matter has not even existence whereby to
have some part in Good: Being is attributed to
it by an accident of words: the truth would be
that it has Non-Being.

Mere lack brings merely Not-Goodness:
Evil demands the absolute lack though, of
course, any very considerable shortcoming
makes the ultimate fall possible and is already,
in itself, an evil.

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 dis-
tinct from any of the particular forms in which,
by the addition af 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 oper-
ate and by the nature of their operation, wheth-
er seeing, acting, or merely admitting impres-
sion.

But supposing things external to the Soul
are to be counted Evil sickness, poverty and
so forth how can they be referred to the prin-
ciple we have described?

Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body,
which as a material organism rebels against or-
der and measure; ugliness is but matter not
mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in
our need and lack of .goods made accessary to
us by our association with Matter whose very
nature is to be one long want.

If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves,
the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves;
Evil was before we came to be; the Evil which
holds men down binds them against their will;
and for those that have the strength not found
in all men, it is true there is a deliverance
from the evils that have found lodgement in
the soul.

In a word since Matter belongs only to the
sensible world, vice in men is not the Absolute
Evil; not all men are vicious; some overcome
vice, some, the better sort, are never -attacked
by it; and those who master it win by means of
that in them which is not material.

6. If this be so, how do we explain the teach-
ing that evils can never pass away but "exist of
necessity," that "while evil has no place in the
divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this
place for ever"?

Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil,
ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the
appointed path, no injustice There or any flaw,
no wrong done by any power to any other but
all true to the settled plan, while injustice and
disorder prevail on earth, designated as* x *the
Mortal Kind and this Place"?

Not quite so: for the precept to "flee hence"
does not refer to earth and earthly life. The
flight we read of consists not in quitting earth
but in living our earth-life "with justice and pi-
ety in the light of philosophy"; it is vice we are
to flee, so that clearly to the writer Evil is sim-
ply vice with the sequels of vice. And when
the disputant in that dialogue says that, if men
could be convinced of the doctrine advanced,
there would be an end of Evil, he is answered,
"That can never be: Evil is of necessity, for
tfeere must be axontrary to^good."

Still we may reasonably ask how can vice in
man be a contrary to The Good in the Super-
nal: for vice is the contrary to virtue and virtue

PLOTINUS

is not The Good but merely the good thing
by which Matter is brought to order.

How can there be any contrary to the Abso-
lute Good, when the absolute has no quality?

Besides, is there any universal necessity that
the existence of one of two contraries should
entail the existence of the other? Admit that
the existence of one is often accompanied by the
existence of the other sickness and health, for
example yet there is no universal compulsion.

Perhaps, however, our author did not mean
that this was universally true; he is speaking
only of The Good.

But then, if The Good is an essence, and
still more, if It is that which transcends all ex-
istence, how can It have any contrary?

That there is nothing contrary to essence is
certain in the case of particular existences es-
tablished by practical proof but not in the
quite different case of the Universal.

But of what nature would this contrary be,
the contrary to universal existence and in gen-
eral 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 con-
trariety more violent than any existing between
secondary things.

For these last are opposed as members of one
species or of one genus, and, within that com-
mon ground, they participate in somfe common
quality.

- In the case of the Primals or Universals there
is such complete separation that what is the ex-
act negation of one group constitutes the very
nature of the other; we have diametric con-
trariety if by contrariety we mean the extreme
of remoteness.

Now to the content of the divine order, the
fixed quality, the measuredness and so forth
there is opposed the content of the evil princi-
ple, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so
forth: total is opposed to total. The existence
of the one genus is a falsity, primarily, essen-
tially, a falseness: the other genus has Essence-
Authentic: the opposition is of truth to lie; es-
sence is opposed to essence.

Thus we see that it is not universally true
that an Essence can have no contrary.

In the case of fire and water we would ad-
mit contrariety if it were not for their common
element, the Matter, about which are gathered

the warmth and dryness of one and the damp-
ness and cold of the other: if there were only
present what constitutes their distinct kinds,
the common ground being absent, there would
be, here also, essence contrary to essence.

In sum, things iltterly sundered, having
nothing in common, standing at the remotest
poles, are opposites in nature: the contrariety
does not depend upon quality or upon the ex-
istence of a distinct genus of beings, but upon
the utmost difference, clash in content, clash
in effect.

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

But, since the expression "this place" must
be taken to mean the All, how explain the
words "mortal nature"?

The answer is in the passage [in which the
Father of Gods addresses the Divinities of the
lower sphere] , "Since you possess' only a deriv-
ative being, you are not immortals . . . but by
my power you shall escape dissolution."

The escape, we read, is not a matter of place,
but of acquiring virtue, of disengaging the self
from the body; this is the escape from Matter.
Plato 'explains somewhere how a man frees
himself and how he remains bound; and the
phrase "to live among the gods" means to live
among the Intelligible-Existents, for these are
the Immortals.

There is another consideration establishing
the necessary existence of EviL

Given that The Good is not the only existent
thing, it is inevitable that, by the outgoing from
it or, if the phrase be preferred, the continu-
ous down-going or away-going from it, there
should be produced a Last, something after
which nothing more can be produced: this
will be Evil.

As necessarily as there is Something after
the First, so necessarily there is a Last: this
Last is Matter, the thing which has no residue
of good' in it: here is the necessity of Evil.

8. But'tlfere will still be some to deny that it
is through this Matter that' we ourselves be-
come evil.

FIRST ENNEAD VIII. 9

They will say that neither ignorance nor
wicked desires arise in Matter. Even if they
admit that the unhappy condition within us is
due to the pravity inherent in body, they will
urge that still the blame lies not in the Matter
itself but with the Form present in it such
Form as heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all
other conditions perceptible to sense, or again
such states as being full or void not in the
concrete signification but in the presence or
absence of just such forms. In a word, they will
argue, all particularity in desires and even in
perverted judgements upon things, can be re-
ferred to such causes, so that Evil lies in this
Form much more than in the mere Matter.

Yet, even with all this, they can be compelled
to admit that Matter is the Evil.

For, the quality [form] that has entered in-
to Matter does not act as an entity apart from
the Matter, any more than axe-shape will cut
apart from iron. Further, Forms lodged in
Matter are not the same as they would be if
they remained within themselves; they are
Reason-Principles Materialized, they are cor-
rupted in the Matter, they have absorbed its na-
ture: essential fire does not burn, nor do any of
the essential entities effect, of themselves alone,
the operation which, once they have entered
into Matter, is traced to their action.

Matter becomes mistress of what is mani-
fested through it: it corrupts and destroys the
incomer, it substitutes its own opposite char-
acter and kind, not in the sense of opposing,
for example, concrete cold to concrete warmth,
but by setting its own formlessness against the
Form of heat, shapelessness to shape, excess
and defect to the duly ordered. Thus, in sum,
what enters into Matter ceases to belong to it-
self, comes to belong to Matter, just as, in the
nourishment of living beings, what is taken in
does not remain as it came, but is turned into,
say, dog's blood and all that goes to make a
dog, becomes, in fact, any of the humours of
any recipient.

No, if body is the cause of Evil, then there is
no escape; the cause of Evil is Matter.

Still, it will be urged, the incoming Idea
should have been able to conquer the Matter.

The difficulty is that Matter's master cannot
remain pure itself except by avoidance of Mat-
ter.

Besides, the constitution determines both the
desires and their violence so that there are bod-
ies in which the incoming idea cannot hold
sway: there is a vicious constitution which
chills and clogs the activity and inhibits choice;

a contrary bodily habit produces frivolity,
lack of balance. The same fact is indicated by
our successive variations of mood: in times of
stress, we are not the same either in desires
or in ideas as when we are at peace, and we
differ again with every several object that
brings us satisfaction.

To resume: the Measureless is evil primarily;
whatever, either by resemblance or participa-
tion, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil
secondarily, by force of its dealing with the
Primal primarily, the darkness; secondarily,
the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance
and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondar-
ily evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is
not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The
Good, or participation in it.

9. But what approach have we to the know-
ing of Good and Evil?

And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may
know by the Intellectual-Principle and by
means of the philosophic habit; but Vice?

A a ruler marks off straight from crooked,
so Vice is known by its divergence from the
line of Virtue.

But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision
we can have of it, or is there some other way
of knowing it?

Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vi-
sion, for it is utterly outside of bound and
measure; this thing which is nowhere can be
seized only by abstraction; but any degree of
evil falling short of The Absolute is knowable
by the extent of that falling short.

We see partial wrong; from what is before
us we divine that which is lacking to the entire
form [or Kind] thus indicated; we see that the
completed Kind would be the Indeterminate;
by this process we are able to identify and af-
firm Evil. In the same way when we observe
what we feel to be an ugly appearance in Mat-
ter lef t there because the Reason-Principle has
not become so completely the master as to cover
over the unseemliness we recognise Ugliness
by the falling-short from Ideal-Form.

But how can we identify what has never had
any touch of Form?

We utterly eliminate every kind of Form;
and the object in which there is none whatever
we call Matter: if we are to see Matter we must
so completely abolish Form that we take shape-
lessness into our very selves.

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

To see darkness the eye withdraws from the

PLOTINUS

light; it is striving to cease from seeing, there-
fore it ^abandons the light which would make
the darkness invisible; away from the light its
power is rather that of not-seeing than of see-
ing and this not-seeing is its nearest approach
to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Princi-
ple, in order to see its contrary [Matter], must
leave its own light locked up within itself, and
as it were go forth from itself into an outside
realrn, it must ignore its native brightness and
submit itself to the very contradition of its be-
ing.

10. But if Matter is devoid of quality how
can it be evil?

It is' described as being devoid of quality in
the sense only that it does not essentially possess
any of the qualities which it admits and which
enter into it as into a substratum. No one says
that it has no nature; and if it has any nature
at all, why may not that nature be evil though
not in the sense of quality?

Quality qualifies something not itself: it is
therefore an accidental; it resides in some other
object. Matter does not exist in some other ob-
ject but is the substratum in which the acci-
dental resides. Matter, then, is said to be de-
void of Quality in that it does not in itself
possess this thing which is by nature an acci-
dental. If, moreover, Quality itself be devoid of
Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqual-
ified, be said to have it?

Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that
Matter is without Quality and that it is evil: it
is Evil not in the sense of having Quality but,
precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and
in its very Evil it would almost be a Form,
whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to
Form.

"But," it may be said, "the Kind opposed to
all Form is Privation or Negation, and this
necessarily refers to something other than it-
self, it is no Substantial-Existence: therefore if
Evil is Privation or Negation it must be lodged
in some Negation of Form: there will be no
Self -Existent Evil."

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 any-
thing 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, recog-
nising 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 Na-
ture, 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.

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

Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should
be described not as an entire, but as a partial,
negation of good.

But if this were so, part of the Soul must
possess The Good, part be without it; the Soul
will have a mingled nature and the Evil with-
in it will not be unblended: we have not yet
lighted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil. The
Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the
Evil as an Accidental.

Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the
Soul like something affecting the eye and so
hindering sight.

But such an evil in the eyes is no more than
an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is some-
thing quite different. If then Vice is an impedi-
ment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but
not Evil- Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute
Good, but a co-operator with it; and if Virtue
is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the
Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beau-
ty or the Absolute Good; neither, therefore, is
Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential
Evil.

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute
Good and Beauty, because we know that
These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it,
and that it is good and beautiful by some par-
ticipation in them. Now as, going upward
from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to
the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we
reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-
point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such
vision is possible, and we become evil to the ex-
tent of our participation in it. We are become
dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where,
fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine,
we lie in gloom and mud: for if the Soul
abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of
viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul mere-
ly, for mere vice is still human, still carries
some trace of good: it has taken to itself an-
other nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can
die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold:

FIRST ENNEAD VIII. 12

while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter
and drench itself with it; when it has left the
body, to lie in the other world until, somehow,
it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud:
and this is our "going down to Hades and
slumbering there."

n. It may be suggested that Vice is feeble-
ness in the Soul.

We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul
is unstable, swept along from every ill to every
other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to
anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at
once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact,
as the weakest thing made by man or nature,
blown about by every breeze, burned away by
every heat.

Still the question must be faced what con-
stitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it
comes.

For weakness in the body is not like that in
the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the
incapacity for work and the lack of resistance
in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by
analogy unless, indeed, in the one case as in
the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.

But we must go more thoroughly into the
source of this weakness, as we call it, in the
Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the
result of any density or rarity, or by any thick-
ening or thinning or anything like a disease,
like a fever.

Now this weakness must be seated either in
Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to
Matter or in both.

It cannot exist in those apart from Matter,
for all these are pure and, as we read, winged
and perfect and unimpeded in their task: there
remains only that the weakness be in the fallen
Souls, neither cleansed nor clean; and in them
the weakness will be, not in any privation but
in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm
or bile in the organs of the body.

If we form an acute and accurate notion of
the cause of the fall we shall understand the
weakness that conies by it.

Matter exists; Soul exists; and they occupy,
so to speak, one place. There is not one place
for Matter and another for Soul Matter, for
instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air: the
soul's "separate place" is simply its not being
in Matter; that is, its not being united with-it;
that is that there be no compound unit consist-
ing of Soul and Matter; that is that Soul be
not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this is
the Soul's apartness.

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and

it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its
final fringe. Matter appears, importunes, raises
disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all
the ground -is holy, nothing there without part
in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and takes
light: but the source of its illumination it can-
not attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this
foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes
it invisible. On the contrary the illumination,
the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is
weakened, as it mixes with Matter which of-
fers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by
which it enters into generation, impossible to
it if no recipient were at hand.

This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into
Matter: thence its weakness: not all the facul-
ties of its being retain free play, for Matter
hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon
the S.ouTs territory and* as it were, crushes the
Soul back; and it turns to evil all that it has
stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance
again.

Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of
Soul and of all its evil is Matter.

The evil of Matter precedes the weakness,
the vice; it is Primal Evil. Even though the
Soul itself submits to Matter and engenders to
it; if it becomes evil within itself by its com-
merce with Matter, the cause is still the pres-
ence of Matter: the Soul would never have
approached Matter but that the presence of
Matter is the occasion of its earth-life.

12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the
necessity of this Principle must be demon-
strated from the treatises "On Matter" where
the question is copiously treated.

To deny Evil a place among realities is nec-
essarily to do away with the Good as well, and
even to deny the existence of anything desir-
able; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all in-
tellectual act; for desire has Good for its object,
aversion looks to Evil; all intellectual act, all
Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is it-
self one of the things that are good.

There must then be The Good good un-
mixed and the Mingled Good and Bad, and
the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending
with the Utterly Bad we have been seeking,
just as that in which Evil constitutes the lesser
part tends, by that lessening, towards the Good.

What, then, must Evil be to the Soul?

What Soul could contain Evil unless by con-
tact with the lower Kind? There could be no
desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear: fear
touches the compounded dreading its dissolu-
tion; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments

PLOTINUS

of the dissolution; desires spring from some-
thing troubling the grouped being or are a pro-
vision against trouble threatened; all impres-
sion is the stroke of something unreasonable
outside the Soul, accepted only because the
Soul is not devoid of parts or phases; the Soul
takes up false notions through having gone
outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely
itself.

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

Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of
Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only:
it appears, necessarily, bound around with
bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in
fetters of gold; and beneath these it is hidden
so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen
by the gods, and that men need not always
have evil before their eyes, but that when it
comes before them they may still be not desti-
tute of Images of the Good and Beautiful for
their Remembrance.

NINTH TRACTATE
"THE REASONED DISMISSAL"
"You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go
forth . ." [taking something with it] .

For wheresoever it go, it will be in some def-
inite condition, and its going forth is to some

new place. The Soul will wait for the body to
be completely severed from it; then it makes
no departure; it simply finds itself free.

But how does the body come to be sepa-
rated ?

The separation takes place when nothing of
Soul remains bound up with it: the harmony
within the body, by virtue of which the Soul
was retained, is broken and it can no longer
hold its guest.

But when a man contrives the dissolution of
the body, it is, he that has used violence and
torn himself away, not the body that has let
the Soul slip from it. And in loosing the bond
he has not been without passion; there has
been revolt or grief or anger, movements
which it is unlawful to indulge.

But if a man feel himself to be losing his
reason?

That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should
occur, it must be classed with the inevitable,
to be welcome at the bidding of the fact
though not for its own sake. To call upon
drugs to the release of the Soul seems a strange
way of assisting its purposes.

And if there be a period allotted to all by
fate, to anticipate the hour could not be a
happy act, unless, as we have indicated, under
stern necessity.

If everyone is to hold in the other world a
standing determined by the state in which he
quitted this, there must be no withdrawal as
long as there is any hope of progress.

THE SECOND ENNEAD

FIRST TRACTATE

ON THE KOSMOS OR ON THE HEAVENLY SYSTEM

i.We hold that the ordered universe, in its
material mass, has existed for ever and will for
ever endure: but simply to refer this perdur-
ance to the Will of God, however true an ex-
planation, is utterly inadequate.

The elements of this sphere change; the liv-
ing beings of earth pass away; only the Ideal-
form [the species] persists: possibly a similar
process obtains in the AIL

The Will of God is able to cope with the
ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by cease-
lessly reintroducing the known forms in new
substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the
particular item but to the unity of idea: now,
seeing that objects of this realm possess no
more than duration of form, why should celes-
tial objects, and the celestial system itself, be
distinguished by duration of the particular
entity?

Let us suppose this persistence to be the re-
sult of the all-inclusiveness of the celestial and
universal with its consequence, the absence
of any outlying matter into which change
could take place or which could break in and
destroy.

This explanation would, no doubt, safe-
guard the integrity of the Whole, of the All;
but our sun and the individual being of the
other heavenly bodies would not on these
terms be secured in perpetuity: they are parts;
no one of them is in itself the whole, the all; it
would still be probable that theirs is no more
than that duration in form which belongs to
fire and such entities.

This would apply even to the entire ordered
universe itself. For it is very possible that this
too, though not in process of destruction from
outside, might have only formal duration; its
parts may be so wearing each other down as to
keep it in a continuous decay while, amid the
ceaseless flux of the Kind constituting its base,
an outside power ceaselessly restores the form:
in this way the living All may lie under the

same conditions as man and horse and the rest
man and horse persisting but not the indi-
vidual of the type.

With this, we would have no longer the dis-
tinction of one order, the heavenly system, stable
for ever, and another, the earthly, in process
of decay: all would be alike except in the point
of time; the celestial would merely be longer
lasting. If, then, we accepted this duration of
type alone as a true account of the All equally
with its partial members, our difficulties would
be eased or indeed we should have no further
problem once the Will of God were shown
to be capable, under these conditions and by
such communication, of sustaining the Uni-
verse.

But if we are obliged to allow individual
persistence to any definite entity within the
Kosmos then, firstly, we must show that the
Divine Will is adequate to make it so; second-
ly, we have to face the question, What ac-
counts for some things having individual per-
sistence and others only the persistence of
type? and, thirdly, we ask how the partial en-
tities of the celestial system hold a real duration
which would thus appear possible to all partial
things.

2. Supposing we accept this view and hold
that, while things below the moon's orb have
merely type-persistence, the celestial realm and
all its several members possess individual eter-
nity; it remains to show how this strict perma-
nence of the individual identity the actual
item eternally unchangeable can belong to
what is certainly corporeal, seeing that bodily
substance is characteristically a thing of flux.

The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no
less than by the other philosophers who have
dealt with physical matters, and is applied not
only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of
the heavenly sphere.

"How," he asks, "can these corporeal and
visible entities continue eternally unchanged
in identity?" evidently agreeing, in this mat-
ter also, with Herakleitos, who maintained
that even the sun is perpetually coming anew

PLOTINUS

into being. To Aristotle there would be no
problem; it is only accepting his theories of a
fifth-substance.

But to those who reject Aristotle's Quintes-
sence and hold the material mass of the heav-
ens to consist of the elements underlying the
living things of this sphere, how is individual
permanence possible? And the difficulty is still
greater for the parts, for the sun and the heav-
enly bodies.

Every living thing is a combination of soul
and body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore,
if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity
must be so in virtue either of both these con-
stituents or of one of them, by the combina-
tion of soul and body or by soul only or by
body only.

Of course anyone that holds body to be in-
corruptible secures the desired permanence at
once; no need, then, to call on a soul or on any
perdurable conjunction to account for the con-
tinued maintenance of a living being.

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.

3. We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this
entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physi-
cal mass of the universe, could serve towards
the immortality of the Kosmos.

And our answer is "Because the flux is not
outgoing": where there is motion within but
not outwards and the total remains unchanged,
there is neither growth nor decline, and thus
the Kosmos never ages.

We have a parallel in our earth, constant
from eternity to pattern and to mass; the air,
too, never fails; and there is always water: all
the changes of these elements leave unchanged
the Principle of the total living thing, our
world. In our own constitution, again, there
is a ceaseless shifting of particles and that
with outgoing loss and yet the individual
persists for a long time: where there is no
question of an outside region, the body-
principle cannot clash with soul as against the
identity and endless duration of the living
thing.

Of these material elements for example

fire, the keen and swift, co-operates by its up-
ward tendency as earth by its lingering below;
for we must not imagine that the fire, once it
finds itself at the point where its ascent must
stop, settles down as in its appropriate place,
no longer seeking, like all the rest, to expand
in both directions. No: but higher is not possi-
ble; lower is repugnant to its Kind; all that re-
mains for it is to be tractable and, answering
to a need of its nature, to be drawn by the Soul
to the activity of life, and so to move to move
in a glorious place, in the Soul. Anyone that
dreads its falling may take heart; the circuit
of the Soul provides against any declination,
embracing, sustaining; and since fire has of it-
self no downward tendency it accepts that
guiding without resistance. The partial ele-
ments constituting our persons do not suffice
for their own cohesion; once they are brought
to human shape, they must borrow elsewhere
if the organism is to be maintained : but in the
upper spheres since there can be no loss by
flux no such replenishment is needed.

Suppose such loss, suppose fire extinguished
there, then a new fire must be kindled; so also
if such loss by flux could occur in some of the
superiors from which the celestial fire de-
pends, that too must be replaced: but with
such transmutations, while there might be
something continuously similar, there would
be, no longer, a Living All abidingly self-
identical.

4. But matters are involved here which de-
mand 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 res-
toration 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 Prin-
ciple?

Our doctrine of the immortality of the heav-
enly system rests on the firmest foundation
once we have cited the sovereign agent, the
soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar ex-
cellence 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;

SECOND ENNEAD I. 6

but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile
to the purposes of the stars.

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

And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to
sustain for a certain space of time, could not
so sustain for ever? This would be to assume
that it holds things together by violence; that
there is a "natural course" at variance with
what actually exists in the nature of the uni-
verse and in these exquisitely ordered beings;
and that there is some power able to storm the
established system and destroy its ordered co-
herence, some kingdom or dominion that may
shatter the order founded by the Soul.

Further: The Kosmos has had no begin-
ning the impossibility has been shown else-
where and this is warrant for its continued
existence. Why should there be in the future
a change that has not yet occurred? The ele-
ments there are not worn away like beams and
rafters: they hold sound for ever, and so the
All holds sound. And even supposing these
elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet
the All persists: the ground of all the change
must itself be changeless.

As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul
we have already shown the emptiness of that
fancy: the administration of the universe en-
tails neither labour nor loss; and, even suppos-
ing the possibility of annihilating all that is
material, the Soul would be no whit the better
or the worse.

5. But how explain the permanence There,
while the content of this sphere its elements
and its living things alike are passing?

The reason is given by Plato: the celestial
order is from God, the living things of earth
from the gods sprung from God; and it is law
that the offspring of God endures.

In other words, the celestial' soul and our
souls with it springs directly next from the
Creator, while the animal life of this earth is
produced by an image which goes forth from
that celestial soul and may be said to flow
downwards from it.

A soul, then, of the minor degree repro-
ducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but
lacking in power inasmuch as it must exercise
its creative act upon inferior stuff in an in-

ferior region the substances taken up into
the fabric being of themselves repugnant to
duration; with such an origin the living things
of this realm cannot be of strength to last for
ever; the material constituents are not as firm-
ly held and controlled as if they were ruled
immediately by a Principle of higher potency.

The heavens, on the contrary, must have
persistence as a whole, and this entails the per-
sistence of the parts, of the stars they contain:
we could not imagine that whole to endure
with the parts in flux though, of course, we
must distinguish things sub-celestial from the
heavens themselves whose region does not in
fact extend so low as to the moon.

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.

6. We may now consider the question
whether fire is the sole element existing in
that celestial realm and whether there is any
outgoing thence with the consequent need of
renewal.

Timaeus pronounced the material frame of
the All to consist primarily of earth and fire
fire for visibility, earth for solidity and de-
duced that the stars must be mainly composed
of fire, but not solely since there is no doubt
they are solid.

And this is probably a true account. Plato
accepts it as indicated by all the appearances.
And, in fact, to all our perception as we see
them and derive from them the impression of
illumination the stars appear to be mostly, if
not exclusively, fire: but on reasoning into the
matter we judge that since solidity cannot
exist apart from earth-matter,, ttep must con-
tain earth as well.

But what place could there be for the other
elements? It is impossible to imagine water
amid so vast a conflagration; and if air were
present it would be continually changing into
fire.

Admitting [with Timaeus; as a logical
truth] that two self-contained entities, stand-
ing as extremes to each other need for their

PLOTINUS

coherence two intermediaries;, we may still
question whether this holds good with regard
to physical bodies. Certainly water and earth
can be mixed without any such intermediate.
It might seem valid to object that the inter-
mediates are already present in the earth and
the water; but a possible answer would be,
"Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is nec-
essary to the coherence of those extremes."

None the less we will take it that the co-
herence of extremes is produced by virtue of
each possessing all the intermediates. It is still
not proven that fire is necessary to the visibil-
ity of earth and earth to the solidarity of fire.

On this principle, nothing possesses an es-
sential-nature of its very own; every several
thing is a blend, and its name is merely an in-
dication of the dominant constituent.

Thus we are told that earth cannot have
concrete existence without the help of some
moist element the moisture in water being
the necessary adhesive but admitting that we
so find it, there is still a contradiction in pre-
tending that any one element has a being of its
own and in the same breath denying its self-
coherence, making its subsistence depend up-
on others, and so, in reality, reducing the
specific element to nothing. How can we talk
of the existence of the definite Kind, earth
earth essential if there exists no single par-
ticle of earth which actually is earth without
any need of water to secure its self-cohesion?
What has such an adhesive to act upon if there
is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth
to which it may bind particle after particle in
its business of producing the continuous mass?
If there is any such given magnitude, large or
small, of pure earth, then earth can exist in its
own nature, independently of water: if there is
no such primary particle of pure earth, then
there is nothing whatever for the water to
bind. As for air air unchanged, retaining its
distinctive quality how could it conduce to
the subsistence of a dense material like earth?

Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks
of it as necessary not to the existence but to the
visibility of earth and the other elements; and
certainly light is essential to all visibility we
cannot say that we see darkness, which implies,
precisely, that nothing is seen, as silence rneans
nothing being heard.

But all this does not assure us that the earth
to be visible must contain fire: light is suffi-
cient: snow, for example, and other extremely
cold substances gleam without the presence of
fire though of course it might be said that

fire was once there and communicated colour
before disappearing.

As to the composition of water, we must
leave it an open question whether there can be
such a thing as water without a certain propor-
tion of earth.

But how can air, the yielding element, con-
tain earth?

Fire, again: is earth perhaps necessary there
since fire is by its own nature devoid of con-
tinuity and not a thing of three dimensions?

Supposing it does not possess the solidity of
the three dimensions, it has that of its thrust;
now, cannot this belong to it by the mere right
and fact of its being one of the corporeal en-
tities in nature? Hardness is another matter, a
property confined to earth-stuff. Remember
that gold which is water becomes dense by
the accession not of earth but of denseness or
consolidation: in the same way fire, with Soul
present within it, may consolidate itself upon
the power of the Soul; and there are living be-
ings of fire among the Celestials.

But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching
that all the elements enter into the composi-
tion of every living thing?

For this sphere, no; but to lift clay into the
heavens is against nature, contrary to the laws
of her ordaining: it is difficult, too, to think of
that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly
bodies in its course nor could such material
conduce to the splendour and white glint of
the celestial fire.

7. We can scarcely do better, in fine, than
follow Plato.

Thus:

In the universe as a whole there must nec-
essarily be such a degree of solidity, that is to
say, of resistance, as will ensure that the earth,
set in the centre, be a sure footing and support
to the living beings moving over it, and inevi-
tably communicate something of its own den-
sity to them: the earth will possess coherence by
its own unaided quality, but visibility by the
presence of fire: it will contain water against
the dryness which would prevent the cohesion
of its particles; it will hold air to lighten its
bulky matters; it will be in contact with the
celestial fire not as being a member of the
sidereal system but by the simple fact that the
fire there and our earth both belong to the or-
dered universe so that something of the earth
is taken up by the fire as something of the fire
by the earth and something of everything by
everything else. 4

This borrowing, however, does not meaa

SECOND ENNEAD I. 8

that the one thing taking-up from the other
enters into a composition, becoming an ele-
ment in a total of both: it is simply a conse-
quence of the kosmic fellowship; the partici-
pant retains its own being and takes over not
the thing itself but some property of the thing,
not air but air's yielding softness, not fire
but fire's incandescence: mixing is another
process, a complete surrender with a result-
ant compound not, as in this case, earth
remaining earth, the solidity and density we
know with something of fire's qualities
superadded.

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 be-
ing only modestly warm: this light is a cor-
poreal 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.

Fire of this order, giving forth this purest
light, belongs to the upper realm, and there its
seat is fixed by nature; but we must not, on
that account, suppose the flame of earth to
be associated with the beings of that higher
sphere.

No: the' flame of this world, once it has at-
tained a certain height, is extinguished by the
currents of air opposed to it. Moreover, as it
carries an earthy element on its upward path,
it is weighed downwards and cannot reach
those loftier regions. It comes to a stand some-
where below the moon making the air at
that point subtler and its flame, if any flame
can persist, is subdued and softened, and no
longer retains its first intensity, but gives out
only what radiance it reflects from the light
above.

And it is that loftier light falling variously
upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion
that gives them their characteristic differ-
ences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just
such light constitutes also the still higher heav-
enly bodies which, however, like clear air, are
invisible because of the subtle texture and un-

resisting transparency of their material sub-
stance and also by their very distance.

8. Now: given a light of this degree, remain-
ing in the upper sphere at its appointed sta-
tion, pure light in purest place, what mode of
outflow from it can be conceived possible?

Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow
downwards of its own accord; and there ex-
ists in those regions no power to force it
down. Again, body in contact with soul must
always be very different from body left to
itself; the bodily substance of the heavens
has that contact and will show that differ-
ence.

Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to
the heavens would be air or fire: air has no de-
structive quality; fire would be powerless there
since it could not enter into effective contact:
in its very rush it would change before its at-
tack could be felt; and, apart from that, it is of
the lesser order, no match for what it would be
opposing in those higher regions.

Again, fire acts by imparting heat: now it
cannot be the source of heat to what is already
hot by nature; and anything it is to destroy
must as a first condition be heated by it, must
be brought to a pitch of heat fatal to the nature
concerned.

In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to
the heavens to ensure their permanence or to
produce their circular movement, for it has
never been shown that their natural path
would be the straight line; on the contrary the
heavens, by their nature, will either be motion-
less or move by circle; all other movement in-
dicates outside compulsion. We cannot think,
therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in
need of replenishment; we must not argue
from earthly frames to those of the celestial
system whose sustaining soul is not the same,
whose space is not the same, whose conditions
are not those which make restoration necessary
in this realm of composite bodies always in
flux: we must recognise that the changes that
take place in bodies here represent a slipping-
away from the being [a phenomenon not in-
cident to the celestial sphere] and take place at
the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the
higher regions, one not powerful enough to
ensure the permanence of the existences in
which it is exhibited, one which in its coming
into being and in its generative act is but an
imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we
have shown, cannot at every point possess the
unchangeable identity of the Intellectual
Realm.

SECOND TRACTATE

THE HEAVENLY CIRCUIT
I, But whence that circular movement?

In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle.

And does this movement belong to the ma-
terial part or to the Soul? Can we account for
it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once
for centre and for the goal to which it must be
ceaselessly moving; or that, being self-centred
it is not of unlimited extension [and conse-
quently must move ceaselessly to be omnipres-
ent], and that its revolution carries the ma-
terial mass with it?

If the Soul had been the moving power [by
any such semi-physical action] it would be so
no longer; it would have accomplished the act
of moving and have brought the universe to
rest; there would be an end of this endless
revolution.

In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least
cannot have spatial movement; how then, hav-
ing itself a movement of quite another order,
could it communicate spatial movement?

But perhaps the circular movement [of the
Kosmos as soul and body] is not spatial or is
spatial not primarily but only incidentally.

What, by this explanation, would be the es-
sential movement of the kosmic soul?

A movement towards itself, the movement
of self -awareness, of self-intellection, of the liv-
ing of its life, the movement of its reaching to
all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it,
nothing anywhere but within its scope.

The dominant in a living thing is what com*
passes it entirely and makes it a unity.

If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it
would not vitally compass the Kosmos nor
would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its
content alive, for the life of body is movement.

Any spatial motion there is will be limited;
it will be not that of Soul untrammelled but
that of a material frame ensouled, an animated
organism; the movement will be partly of
body, partly of Soul, the body tending to the
straight Ifeie which its nature imposes, the Soul
restraining it; the resultant will be the com-
promise movement of a thing at once carried
forward and at rest

But supposing that the circular movement
is to be attributed to the body, how is it to be
explained, since all body, including fire [which
constitutes the heavens] has straightforward
motion?

The answer is that forthright movement is
maintained only pending arrival at the place

PLOTINUS

for which the moving thing is destined: where
a thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its
nature, to come for its rest; its motion is its
tendence to its appointed place.

Then, since the fire of the sidereal system
has attained its goal, why does it not stay at
rest?

Evidently because the very nature of fire is
to be mobile: if it did not take the curve, its
straight line would finally fling it outside the
universe: the circular course, then, is impera-

tive.

But this would imply an act of providence?

Not quite: rather its own act under provi-
dence; attaining to that realm, it must still take
the circular course by its indwelling nature;
for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds
no further space and is driven back so that it
recoils on the only course left to it: there is
nothing beyond; it has reached the ultimate; it
runs its course in the regions it occupies, itself
its own sphere, not destined to come to rest
there, existing to move.

Further, the centre of a circle [and therefore
of the Kosmos] is distinctively a point of rest:
if the circumference outside were not in mo-
tion, the universe would be no more than one
vast centre. And movement around the centre
is all the more to be expected in the case of a
living thing whose nature binds it within a
body. Such motion alone can constitute its im-
pulse towards its centre: it cannot coincide with
the centre, for then there would be no circle;
since this may not be, it whirls about it; so only
can it indulge its tendence.

If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is
due to the Soul, we are not to think of a pain-
ful driving [wearing it down at last] ; the soul
does not use violence or in any way thwart na-
ture, for "Nature" is no other than the custom
the All-Soul has established. Omnipresent in
its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of
the universe communicates that quality of uni-
versal presence to the heavens, too, in their de-
gree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universal-
ity and advancing towards it.

If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kos-
mos, too, brought so far, would halt: but the
Soul encompasses all, and so the Kosmos
moves, seeking everything.

Yet never to attain?

On the contrary this very motion is its eter-
nal attainment.

Or, better; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the
Kosmos towards itself: the continuous attrac-
tion communicates a continuous movement

SECOND ENNEAD II. 3

not to some outside space but towards the Soul
and in the one sphere with it, not in the
straight line [which would ultimately bring
the moving body outside and below the Soul],
but in the curving course in which the moving
body at every stage possesses the Soul that is
attracting it and bestowing itself upon it.

If the soul were stationary, that is if [instead
of presiding over a Kosmos] it dwelt wholly
and solely in the realm in which every mem-
ber is at rest, motion would be unknown; but,
since the Soul is not fixed in some one station
There, the Kosmos must travel to every point
in quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle,
therefore.

2. And what of lower things? [Why have
they not this motion?]

[Their case is very different] : the single
thing here is not an all but a part and limited
to a given segment of space; that other realm
is all, is space, so to speak, and is subject to no
hindrance or control, for in itself it is all that is.

And men?

As a self, each is a personal whole, no doubt;
but as member of the universe, each is a partial
thing.

But if, wherever the circling body be, it
possesses the Soul, what need of the circling?

Because everywhere it finds something else
besides the Soul [which it desires to possess
alone].

The circular movement would be explained,
too, if the Soul's power may be taken as resi-
dent at its centre.

Here, however, we must distinguish be-
tween a centre in reference to the two different
natures, body and Soul.

In body, centre is a point of place; in Soul it
is a source, the source of some other nature.
The word, which without qualification would
mean the midpoint of a spheric mass, may
serve in the double reference; and, as in a ma-
terial mass so in the Soul, there must be a cen-
tre, that around which the object, Soul or
material mass, revolves.

The Soul exists in revolution around God
to whom it clings in love, holding itself to the
utmost of its power near to Him as the Being
on which all depends; and since it cannot coin-
cide with God it circles about Him.

Why then do not all souls [i.e., the lower,
also, as those of men and animals] thus circle
about the Godhead?

Every Soul does in its own rank and place.

And why not our very bodies, also?

Because the forward path is characteristic of

4 1

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.

And it may very well be that even in us the
Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus
circle about the divinity. For since God is
omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union
must take the circular course: God is not sta-
tioned.

Similarly Plato attributes to the stars not
only the spheric movement belonging to the
universe as a whole but also to each a revolu-
tion around their common centre; each not
by way of thought but by links of natural
necessity has in its own place taken hold of
God and exults.

3. The truth may be resumed in this way:

There is a lowest power of the Soul, a near-
est to earth, and this is interwoven throughout
the entire universe: another phase possesses
sensation, while yet another includes the Rea-
son which is concerned with the objects of
sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the
spheres, poised towards the Above but hover-
ing over the lesser Soul and giving forth to it
an effluence which makes it more intensely
vital.

The lower Soul is moved by the higher
which, besides encircling and supporting it,
actually resides in whatsoever part of it has
thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The
lower then, ringed round by the higher and
answering its call, turns and tends towards it;
and this upward tension communicates mo-
tion to the material frame in which it is in-
volved: for if a single point in a spheric mass
is in any degree moved, without being drawn
away from the rest, it moves the whole, and
the sphere is set in motion. Something of the
same kind happens in the case of our bodies:
the unspatial movement of the Soul in happi-
ness, for instance, or at the idea of some pleas-
ant event sets up a spatial movement in the
body: the Soul, attaining in its own region
some good which increases its sense of life,
moves towards what pleases it; and so, by force
of the union established in the order of nature,
it moves the body, in the body's region, that is
in space.

As for that phase of the Soul in which sensa-
tion is vested, it, too, takes its good from the
Supreme above itself and moves, rejoicingly,

PLOTINUS

in quest of it: and since the object of its desire
is everywhere, it too ranges always through the
entire scope of the universe.

The Intellectual-Principle has no such prog-
ress in any region; its movement is a station-
ary act, for it turns upon itself.

And this is why the All, circling as it does,
is at the same time at rest.

THIRD TRACTATE
ARE THE STARS CAUSES?

i. That the circuit of the stars indicates defi-
nite events to come but without being the
cause direct of all that happens, has been else-
where affirmed, and proved by some modicum
of argument: but the subject demands more
precise and detailed investigation for to take
the one view rather than the other is of no
small moment.

The belief is that the planets in their courses
actually produce not merely such conditions
as poverty, wealth, health and sickness but
even ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all,
vices and virtue and the very acts that spring
from these qualities, the definite doings of each
moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose
the stars to be annoyed with men and upon
matters in which men, moulded to what they
are by the stars themselves, can surely do them
no wrong.

They will be distributing what pass for their
good gifts, not out of kindness towards the re-
cipients but as they themselves are affected
pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points
of their course; so that they must be supposed
to change their plans as they stand at their
zeniths or are declining.

More absurdly still, some of them are sup-
posed to be malicious and others to be helpful,
and yet the evil stars will bestow favours and
the benevolent act harshly: further,, their ac-
tion alters as they see each other or not, so that,
after all, they possess no definite nature but
vary according to their angles of aspect; a star
is kindly when it sees one of its fellows but
changes at sight of another: and there is even
a distinction to be made in the seeing as it oc-
curs in this figure or in that. Lastly, all acting
together, the fused influence is different again
from that of each single star, just as the blend-
ing of distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike
any of them.

Since these opinions and others of the same
order are prevalent, it will be well to examine

them carefully one by one, beginning with the
fundamental question:

2. Are these planets to be thought of as soul-
less or unsouled?

Suppose them, first, to be without Soul.

In that case they can purvey only heat or
cold if cold from the stars can be thought of
that is to say, any communication from them
will affect only our bodily nature, since all
they have to communicate to us is merely
corporeal. This implies that no considerable
change can be caused in the bodies affected
since emanations merely corporeal cannot dif-
fer greatly from star to star, and must, more-
over, blend upon earth into one collective re-
sultant: at most the differences would be such
as depend upon local position, upon nearness
or farness with regard to the centre of influ-
ence. This reasoning, of course, is as valid of
any cold emanation there may be as of the
warm.

Now, what is there in such corporeal action
to account for the various classes and kinds of
men, learned and illiterate, scholars as against
orators, musicians as against people of other
professions? Can a power merely physical
make rich or poor? Can it bring about such
conditions as in no sense depend upon the in-
teraction of corporeal elements? Could it, for
example, bring a man such and such a brother,
father, son, or wife, give him a stroke of good
fortune at a particular moment, or make him
generalissimo or king?

Next, suppose the stars to have life and
mind and to be effective by deliberate purpose.

In that case, what have they suffered from
us that they should, in free will, do us hurt,
they who are established in a divine place,
themselves divine? There is nothing in their
nature of what makes men base, nor can our
weal or woe bring them the slightest good or
ill.

3. Possibly, however, they act not by choice
but under stress of their several positions and
collective figures?

But if position and figure determined their
action each several one would necessarily cause
identical effects with every other on entering
any given place or pattern.

And that raises the question what effect for
good or bad can be produced upon any one of
them by its transit in the parallel of this or that
section of the Zodiac circle f or they are not in
the Zodiacal figure itself but considerably be-
neath it especially since, whatever point they
touch, they are always in the heavens.

SECOND ENNEAD III. 5

It is absurd to think that the particular
grouping under which a star passes can modify
either its character or its earthward influences.
And can we imagine it altered by its own pro-
gression as it rises, stands at centre, declines?
Exultant when at centre; dejected or enfeebled
in declension; some raging as they rise and
growing benignant as they set, while declen-
sion brings out the best in one among them;
surely this cannot be?

We must not forget that invariably every
star, considered in itself, is at centre with re-
gard to some one given group and in decline
with regard to another and vice versa; and,
very certainly, it is not at once happy and sad,
angry and kindly. There is no reasonable es-
cape in representing some of them as glad in
their setting, others in their rising: they would
still be grieving and glad at one and the same
time.

Further, why should any distress o theirs
work harm to us?

No: we cannot think of them as grieving at
all or as being cheerful upon occasions: they
must be continuously serene, happy in the good
they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each
lives its own free life; each finds its Good in its
own Act; and this Act is not directed towards
us.

Like the birds of augury, the living beings
of the heavens, having no lot or part with us,
may serve incidentally to foreshow the future,
but they have absolutely no main function in
our regard.

4. It is again not in reason that a particular
star should be gladdened by seeing this or that
other while, in a second couple, such an aspect
is distressing: what enmities can affect such
beings? what causes of enmity can there be
among them?

And why should there be any difference as
a given star sees certain others from the corner
of a triangle or in opposition or at the angle of
a square?

Why, again, should it see its fellow from
some one given position and yet, in the next
Zodiacal figure, not see it, though the two are
actually nearer?

And, the cardinal question; by what con-
ceivable process could they affect what is at-
tributed to them? How explain either the ac-
tion of any single star independendy or, still
more perplexing, the effect of their combined
intentions?

We cannot think of them entering into com-
promises, each renouncing something of its ef-

ficiency and their final action in our regard
amounting to a concerted plan.

No one star would suppress the contribution
of another, nor would star yield to star and
shape its conduct under suasion.

As for the fancy that while one is glad when
it enters another's region, the second is vexed
when in its turn it occupies the place of the
first, surely this is like starting with the sup-
position of two friends and then going on to
talk of one being attracted to the other who,
however, abhors the first.

5. When they tell us that a certain cold star
is more benevolent to us in proportion as it is
further away, they clearly make its harmful in-
fluence depend upon the coldness of its nature;
and yet it ought to be beneficent to us when it
is in the opposed Zodiacal figures.

When the cold planet, we are told, is in op-
position to the cold, both become meanacing:
but the natural effect would be a compromise.
And we are asked to believe that one of them
is happy by day and grows kindly under the
warmth, while another, of a fiery nature, is
most cheerful by night as if it were not al-
ways day to them, light to them, and as if the
first one could be darkened by night at that
great distance above the earth's shadow.

Then there is the notion that the moon, in
conjunction with a certain star, is softened at
her full but is malignant in the same conjunc-
tion when her light has waned; yet, if anything
of this order could be admitted, the very op-
posite would be the case. For when she is full
to us .she must be dark on the further hemi-
sphere, that is to that star which stands above
her; and when dark to us she is full to that
other star, upon which only then, on the con-
trary, does she look with her light. To the
moon itself, in fact, it can make no difference
in what aspect she stands, for she is always lit
on the upper or on the under half: to the other
star, the warmth from the moon, of which
they speak, might make a difference; but that
warmth would reach it precisely when the
moon is without light to us; at its darkest to us
it is full to that other, and therefore beneficent.
The darkness of the moon to us is of moment
to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet
above. That planet, it is alleged, can give no
help on account of its remoteness and there-
fore seems less well disposed; but the moon at
its full suffices to the lower realm so that the
distance of the other is of no importance. When
the moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with
the Fiery Star she is held to be favourable: the

reason alleged is that the force of Mars is all-
sufficient since it contains more fire than it
needs.

The truth is that while the material emana-
tions from the living beings of the heavenly
system are of various degrees of warmth
planet differing from planet in this respect
no cold comes from them: the nature of the
space in which they have their being is voucher
for that.

The star known as Jupiter includes a due
measure of fire [and warmth] , in this resem-
bling the Morning-star and therefore seeming
to be in alliance with it. In aspect with what is
known as the Fiery Star, Jupiter is beneficent
by virtue of the mixing of influences: in aspect
with Saturn unfriendly by dint of distance.
Mercury, it would seem, is indifferent what-
ever stars it be in aspect with; for it adopts any
and every character.

But all the stars are serviceable to the Uni-
verse, and therefore can stand to each other
only as the service of the Universe demands, in
a harmony like that observed in the members
of any one animal form. They exist essentially
for the purpose of the Universe, just as the gall
exists for the purposes of the body as a whole
not less than for its own immediate function:
it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits but
without allowing the entire organism and its
own especial region to run riot. Some such bal-
ance of function was indispensable in the All
bitter with sweet. There must be differentia-
tion eyes and so forth but all the members
will be in sympathy with the entire animal
frame to which they belong. Only so can there
be a unity and a total harmony.

And in such a total, analogy will make every
part a Sign.

6. But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in
certain aspects should cause adulteries as if
they could thus, through the agency of human
incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires
is not such a notion the height of unreason?
And who could accept the fancy that their
happiness comes from their seeing each other
in this or that relative position and not from
their own settled nature?

Again: countless myriads of living beings
are born and continue to be: to minister con-
tinuously to every separate one of these; to
make them famous, rich, poor, lascivious; to
shape the active tendencies of every single one
what kind of life is this for the stars, how
could they possibly handle a task so huge?

They are to watch, we must suppose, the

PLOTINUS

rising of each several constellation and upon
that signal to act; such a one, they see, has
risen by so many degrees, representing so many
of the periods of its upward path; they reckon
on their fingers at what moment they must
take the action which, executed prematurely,
would be out of order: and in the sum, there
is no One Being controlling the entire scheme;
all is made over to the stars singly, as if there
were no Sovereign Unity, standing as source of
all the forms of Being in subordinate associa-
tion with it, and delegating to the separate
members, in their appropriate Kinds, the task
of accomplishing its purposes and bringing its
latent potentiality into act.

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.

7. But, if the stars announce the future as
we hold of many other things also what ex-
planation of the cause have we to offer? What
explains the purposeful arrangement thus im-
plied? Obviously, unless the particular is in-
cluded under some general principle of order,
there can be no signification.

We may think of the stars as letters perpet-
ually being inscribed on the heavens or in-
scribed once for all and yet moving as they
pursue the other tasks allotted to theln: upon
these main tasks will follow the quality of sig-
nifying, just as the one principle underlying
any living unit enables us to reason from mem-
ber to member, so that for example we may
judge of character and even of perils and safe-
guards 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.

All teems with symbol; the wise man is the
man who in any one thing can read another, a
process familiar to all of us in not a few ex-
amples of everyday experience.

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 con-
cerns.

All things must be enchained; and the sym-
pathy and correspondence obtaining in any one
closely knit organism must exist, first, and most
intensely, in the All. There must be one prin-
ciple constituting this unit of many forms of
life and enclosing the several members within
the unity, while at the same time, precisely as

SECOND ENNEAD III. 9

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.

Thus each entity takes its origin from one
Principle and, therefore, while executing its
own function, works in with every other mem-
ber of that All from which its distinct task has
by no means cut it off: each performs its act,
each receives something from the others, every
one at its own moment bringing its touch of
sweet or bitter. And there is nothing unde-
signed, nothing of chance, in all the process:
all is one scheme of differentiation, starting
from the Firsts and working itself out in a con-
tinuous progression of Kinds.

8. Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon
a task of its own; alike in its direct course and
in its divagation it is the cause of all by its pos-
session of the Thought of the First Principle:
thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists
in the Universe which, otherwise, would be
dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire
fabric is guided as much by the orderliness as
by the power of the controlling force. And in
this order the stars, as being no minor mem-
bers of the heavenly system, are co-operators
contributing at once to its stately beauty and
to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power
extends to the entire realm of sense, their effi-
cacy only to what they patently do.

For our part, nature keeps us upon the work
of the Soul as long as we are not wrecked in
the multiplicity of the Universe: once thus
sunk and held we pay the penalty, which con-
sists both in the fall itself and in the lower rank
thus entailed upon us: riches and poverty are
caused by the combinations of external fact.

And what of virtue and vice?

That question has been amply discussed else-
where: in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient
staple of the Soul; vice is due to the commerce
of a Soul with the outer world.

9. This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun
according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato
the Spindle represents the co-operation of the
moving and the stable elements of the kosmic
circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of
the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of
every being, so that all comes into existence
through Necessity.

In the Timceus, the creating God bestows
the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities
moving in the kosmos [the stars] that infuse

the powerful affections holding from Necessity
our impulse and our desire, our sense of
pleasure and of pain and that lower phase of
the Soul in which such experiences originate.
By this statement our personality is bound up
with the stars, whence our Soul [as total of
Principle and affections] takes shape; and we
are set under necessity at our very entrance into
the world: our temperament will be of the stars*
ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which
derive from temperament, and all the experi-
ences of a nature shaped to impressions.

What, after all this, remains to stand for the
"We"?

The "We" is the actual resultant of a Being
whose nature includes, with certain sensibil-
ities, the power of governing them. Cut off as
we are by the nature of the body, God has yet
given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the
unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tran-
quil safety but everything where its absence
would be peril of fall.

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation
from this sphere, severing ourselves from all
that has gathered about us; the total man is to
be something better than a body ensouled the
bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul
running through it and a resultant life-course
mainly of the body for in such a combination
all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life,
emancipated, whose quality is progression to-
wards the higher realm, towards the good and
divine, towards that Principle which no one
possesses except by deliberate usage but so may
appropriate, becoming, each personally, the
higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living,
remote, in and by It unless one choose to go
bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to
live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by
the significance of the sidereal system but be-
coming as it were a part sunken in it and
dragged along with the whole thus adopted.

For every human Being is of twofold charac-
ter; there is that compromise-total and there
is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the
Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a con-
junction of body with a certain form of the
Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it
is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself
embodied but flashes down its rays into the
embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality
belongs to the Sun and the other members of
the heavenly system.

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars
communicate no baseness. In their efficacy up-
on the [material] All, they act as parts of it, as

PLOTINUS

ensouled bodies within it; and they act only up-
on what is partial; body is the agent while, at
the same time, it becomes the vehicle through
which is transmitted something of the star's
will and o that authentic Soul in it which
is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.
But [with every allowance to the lower
forces] all follows either upon that Highest or
rather upon the Beings about It we may think
of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth
pervades the Universe or upon whatsoever is
transmitted by the one Soul [the divine first
Soul] to the other, its Kin [the Soul of any
particular being]. All that is graceless is ad-
mixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing
of blend, and if we separate from it that sepa-
rable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a
God when the divine Soul is counted in with
it; "the rest/' we read, "is a mighty spirit and
its ways are subdivine."

10. If all this be true, we must at once admit
signification, though, neither singly nor col-
lectively, can we ascribe to the stars any efficacy
except in what concerns the [material] All and
in what is of their own function.

We must admit that the Soul before entering
into birth presents itself bearing with it some-
thing of its own, for it could never touch body
except under stress of a powerful inner im-
pulse; we must admit some element of chance
around it from its very entry, since the mo-
ment and conditions are determined by the
kosmic circuit: and we must admit some effec-
tive power in that circuit itself; it is do-opera-
tive, and completes of its own act the task that
belongs to the All of which everything in the
circuit takes the rank and function of a part.

11. And we must remember that what comes
from the supernals does not enter into the re-
cipients as it left the source; fire, for instance,
will be duller; the loving instinct will degen-
erate and issue in ugly forms of the passion;
the* vital energy in a subject not so balanced as
to display the mean of manly courage, will
come out as either ferocity or faint-heartedness;
and ambition ... in love . . .; and the instinct
towards good sets up the pursuit of semblant
beauty; intellectual power at its lowest pro-
duces the extreme of wickedness, for wicked-
ness is a miscalculating effort towards Intelli-
gence.

Any such quality, modified at best from its
supreme form, deteriorates again within itself:
things of any kind that approach from above,
altered by merely leaving their source change
further still by their blending with bodies, with

Matter, with each other.

12. 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 qual-
ity. 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 or-
igin in the Human-Principle. Outer things
have their effect, sometimes to hurt and some-
times to help; like a father, they often con-
tribute 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 prin-
ciple takes the second place so that there is a
failure to achieve perfection; the Ideal has been
attenuated.

13. Of phenomena of this sphere some de-
rive from the Kosmic Circuit and some not:
we must take them singly and mark them off,
assigning to each its origin.

The gist of the whole matter lies in the con-
sideration that Soul governs this All by the
plan contained in the Reason-Principle and
plays in the All exactly the part of the particu-
lar principle which in every living-thing forms
the members of the organism and adjusts them
to the unity of which they are portions; the en-
tire force of the Soul is represented in the All,
but, in the parts, Soul is present only in propor-
tion 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 some-
times 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 con-
tributing by its own native tendency to the en-
tire life-history of the Universe.

The soulless parts of the All are merely in-
struments; -all their action is effected, so to
speak, under a compulsion from outside them-
selves.

The ensouled fall into two classes. The one
kind has a motion of its own, but haphazard
like that of horses between the shafts but be-
fore their driver sets the course; they are set
right by the whip. In the Living-Being pos-
sessed of Reason, the nature-principle includes
the driver; where the driver is intelligent, it
takes in the main a straight path to a set end.
But both classes are members of the All and
co-operate towards the general purpose.

SECOND ENNEAD III. 15

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 inter-
mediate order whose members contain within
themselves a principle of productivity and ac-
tivity and make themselves very effective in
many spheres or ways and yet serve also by
their passivity.

Thus the All stands as one all-complete Life,
whose members, to the measure in which each
contains within itself the Highest, effect all that
is high and noble: and the entire scheme must
be subordinate to its Dirigeant as an army to
its general, "following upon Zeus" it has
been said "as he proceeds towards the Intelli-
gible Kind."

Secondary in the All are those of its parts
which possess a less exalted nature just as in us
the members rank lower than the Soul; and so
all through, there is a general analogy between
the things of the All and our own members
none of quite equal rank.

All living things, then all in the heavens
and all elsewhere fall under the general Rea-
son-Principle of the All they have been made
parts with a view to the whole: not one of these
parts, however exalted, has power to effect any
alteration of these Reason-Principles or of
things shaped by them and to them; some
modification one part may work upon another,
whether for better or for worse; but there is no
power that can wrest anything outside of its
distinct nature.

The part effecting such a modification for
the worse may act in several ways.

It may set up some weakness restricted to
the material frame. Or it may carry the weak-
ness through to the sympathetic Soul which by
the medium of the material frame, become a
power to debasement, has been delivered over,
though never in its essence, to the inferior or-
der of being. Or, in the case of a material frame
ill-organized, it may check all such action [of
the Soul] upon the material frame as demands
a certain collaboration in the part acted upon:
thus a lyre may be so ill-strung as to be inca-
pable of the melodic exactitude necessary to
musical effect.

14. What of poverty and riches, glory and
power?

In the case of inherited fortune, the stars
merely announce a rich man, exactly as they
announce the high social standing of the child

born to a distinguished house.

Wealth may be due to personal activity: in
this case if the body has contributed, part of the
effect is due to whatever has contributed to-
wards the physical powers, first the parents
and then, if place has had its influence, sky and
earth; if the body has borne no part of the bur-
den, then the success, and all the splendid ac-
companiments added by the Recompensers,
must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If for-
tune has come by gift from the good, then the
source of the wealth is, again, virtue: if by gift
from the evil, but to a meritorious recipient,
then the credit must be given to the action of
the best in them: if the recipient is himself un-
principled, the wealth must be attributed pri-
marily to the very wickedness and to whatso-
ever is responsible for the wickedness, while
the givers bear an equal share in the wrong.

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 unde-
served, and then must be attributed to the in-
justice of those making the award. And the
same principle holds as regards power for
this also may be rightly or unrighdy placed
it depends either upon the merit of the dis-
pensers 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 circum-
stance. And births are determined by mar-
riages: 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.

15. According to Plato, lots and choice play
a part [in the determination of human con-
ditions] before the Spindle of Necessity is
turned; that once done, only the Spindle-
destiny is valid; it fixes the chosen conditions
irretrievably since the elected guardian-spirit
becomes accessory to their accomplishment.

But what is the significance of the Lots?

PLOTINUS

By the Lots we are to understand birth into
the conditions actually existent in the All at
the particular moment of each entry into body,
birth into such and such a physical frame, from
such and such parents, in this or that place, and
generally all that in our phraseology is the Ex-
ternal.

For Particulars and Universals alike it is es-
tablished that to the first of those known as the
Fates, to Clotho the Spinner, must be due the
unity and as it were interweaving of all that
exists: Lachesis presides over the Lots: to
Atropos must necessarily belong the conduct
of mundane events.

Of men, some enter into life as fragments of
the All, bound to that which is external to
themselves: they are victims of a sort of fasci-
nation, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves:
but others mastering all this straining, so to
speak, by the head towards the Higher, to what
is outside even the Soul preserve still the no-
bility and the ancient privilege of the Soul's
essential being.

For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as
a thing whose nature is just a sum of impres-
sions from outside as if it, alone, of all that
exists, had no native character.

No: much more than all else, the Soul, pos-
sessing the Idea which belongs to a Principle,
must have as its native wealth many powers
serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an
Essential-Existent and with .this Existence
must go desire and act and the tendency to-
wards some good.

While body and soul stand one combined
thing, there is a joint nature, a definite entity
having definite functions and employments;
but as soon as any Soul is detached, its em-
ployments are kept apart, its very own: it
ceases to take the body's concerns to itself: it
has vision now: body and soul stand widely
apart.

1 6. The question arises what phase of the
Soul enters into the union for the period of
embodiment and what phase remains distinct,
what is separable and what necessarily inter-
linked, and in general what the Living-Being
is.

On all this there has been a conflict of teach-
ing: the matter must be examined later on
from quite other considerations than occupy
us here. For the present let us explain in what
sense we have described the-All as the expressed
idea of the Governing Soul.

One theory might be that the Soul creates
the particular entities in succession man fol-

lowed by horse and other animals domestic or
wild: fire and earth, though, first of all that
it watches these creations acting upon each
other whether to help or to harm, observes,
and no more, the tangled web formed of all
these strands, and their unfailing sequences;
and that it makes no concern of the result be-
yond securing the reproduction of the primal
living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act
upon each other according to their definite
natures.

Another view makes the soul answerable for
all that thus comes about, since its first crea-
tions have set up the entire enchainment.

No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed
by the Soul] covers all the action and experi-
ence of this realm: nothing happens, even here,
by any form of haphazard; all follows a neces-
sary order.

Is everything, then, to be attributed to the
act of the Reason-Principles ?

To their existence, no doubt, but not to their
effective action; they exist and they know; or
better, the Soul, which contains the engender-
ing Reason-Principle, knows the results of all
it has brought to pass. For whensoever similar
factors meet and act in relation to each other,
similar consequences must inevitably ensue:
the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given
conditions accomplishes the due outcome and
links all into a total.

All, then,, is antecedent and resultant, each
sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once
it has taken its place among things. And per-
haps this is a cause of progressive deterioration:
men, for instance, are not as they were of old;
by dint of interval and of the inevitable law,
the Reason-Principles have ceded something to
the characteristics of the Matter.

But:

The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing
universe and follows all the fate of all its
works: this is its life, and it knows no respite
from this care, but is ever labouring to bring
about perfection, planning to lead all to an un-
ending state of excellence like a farmer, first
sowing and planting and then constantly set-
ting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts
and high gales have played havoc.

If such a conception of Soul be rejected as
untenable, we are obliged to think that the
Reason-Principles themselves foreknew or even
contained -the ruin and all the consequences of
flaw.

But then we would be imputing the creation
of evil to the Reason-Principles, though the

SECOND ENNEAD III. 18-

arts and their guiding principle do not include
blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the de-
struction of the work of art.

And here it will be objected that in All there
Is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.

Still, by the side of the better there exists also
what is less good.

Well, perhaps even the less good has its
contributory value in the All. Perhaps there
is no need that everything be good. Contraries
may co-operate; and without opposites there
could be no ordered Universe: all living-
beings of the partial realm include contraries.
The better elements are compelled into exis-
tence and moulded to their function by the
Reason-Principle directly; the less good are
potentially present in the Reason-Principles,
actually present in the phenomena themselves;
the Soul's power had reached its limit, and
failed to bring the Reason-Principles into com-
plete actuality since, amid the clash of these
antecedent Principles, Matter had already from
its own stock produced the less good.

Yet, with all this. Matter is continuously
overruled towards the better; so that out of
the total: of things modified by Soul on the
one hand and by Matter on the other hand,
and on neither hand as sound as in the
Reason-Principles there is, in the end, a
Unity.

17. But these Reason-Principles, contained
in the Soul, are they Thoughts?

And if so, by what process does the Soul
create in accordance with these Thoughts?

It is upon Matter that this act of the Reason
is exercised; and what acts physically is not an
intellectual operation or a vision, but a power
modifying matter, not conscious of it but
merely acting upon it: the Reason-Principle,
in other words, acts much like a force produc-
ing a figure or pattern upon water that of a
circle, suppose, where the formation of the
ring is conditioned by something distinct from
that force itself.

If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul
[that which conveys the Reason-Principles]
must act by manipulating the other Soul, that
which is united with Matter and has the gen-
erative function.

But is this handling the result o calcula-
tion?

Calculation implies reference. Reference,
then, to something outside or to something
contained within itself? If to its own content,
there is no need of reasoning, which could not
itself perform the act of creation; creation is

the operation of that phase of the Soul which
contains Ideal-Principles; for that is its strong-
er puissance, its creative part.

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

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

It has a creative power, derived; it is stored
with Reason-Principles not the very originals:
therefore it creates, but not in full accordance
with the Principles from which it has been en-
dowed: something enters from itself; and,
plainly, this is inferior. The issue then is some-
thing living, yes; but imperfect, hindering its
own life, something very poor and reluctant
and crude, formed in a Matter that is the fallen
sediment of the Higher Order, bitter and em-
bittering. This is die Soul's contribution to
the All.

1 8. Are the evils in the Universe necessary
because it is of later origin than the Higher
Sphere?

Perhaps rather because without evil the All
would be incomplete. For most or even all
forms of evil serve the Universe much as the
poisonous snake has its use though in most
cases their function is unknown. Vice itself
has many useful sides: it brings about much
that is beautiful, in artistic creations for ex-
ample, and it stirs us to thoughtful living, not
allowing us to~ Browse in security.

If all this is so, then [the secret of creation
is that] the Soul of the All abides in contem-
plation of the Highest and Best, ceaselessly
striving towards the Intelligible Kind and to-
wards God: but, thus absorbing and filled full,
it overflows so to speak and the image it
gives forth, its last utterance towards the low-
er, will be the creative puissance.

This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker,
secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is
primarily saturated from the Divine Intelli-
gence. But the Creator above all is the Intel-
lectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that fol-
lows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the
Third Kind.

Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described
as an image continuously being imaged, the
First and the Second Principles immobile, the

5 o

Third, too, immobile essentially, but, acci-
dentally and in Matter, having motion.

For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist,
the divine Thought-Forms will pour forth in-
to that phase of the Soul: as long as there is a
sun, all that streams from it will be some form
of Light.

FOURTH TRACTATE
MATTER IN ITS Two KINDS
i. By common agreement of all that have ar-
rived at the conception of such a Kind, what
is known as Matter is understood to be a cer-
tain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far
all go the same way. But departure ^ begins
with the attempt to establish what this basic
Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and
of what.

To a certain school, body-forms exclusively
are the Real Beings; existence is limited to
bodies; there is one only Matter, the stuff un-
derlying the primal-constituents of the Uni-
verse: existence is nothing but this Matter:
everything is some modification of this; the
elements of the Universe are simply this Mat-
ter in a certain condition.

The school has even the audacity to foist
Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally,
God himself becomes a mode of Matter and
this though they make it corporeal, describing
it as a body void of quality, but a* magnitude.

Another school makes it incorporeal: among
these, not all hold the theory of one only Mat-
ter; some of them while they maintain the one
Matter, in which the first school believes, the
foundation of bodily forms, admit another, a
prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base of
the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.

2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start,
both to establish the existence of this other
Kind and to examine its nature and the mode
of its Being.

Now if Matter must characteristically be un-
determined, void of shape, while in that sphere
of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks
determination, nothing shapeless, there can
be no Matter there. Further, if all that order
is simplex, there can be no need of Matter,
whose function is to join with some other ele-
ment to form a compound: it will be found of
necessity in things of derived existence and
shifting nature the signs which lead us to the
notion of Matter but it is unnecessary to the
primal.

And again, where could it have come from?
whence did it take its being? If it is derived,

PLOTINUS

it has a source: if it is eternal, then the Primal-
Principles are more numerous than we
thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Last-
ly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea,
the union constitutes a body; and, so, there is
Body in the Supreme.

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.

Further, a compound in the Intellectual
order is not to be confounded with a com-
pound in the realm of Matter; the Divine Rea-
sons are compounds and their Act is to
produce a compound, namely that [lower]
Nature which works towards Idea. And there
is not only a difference of function; 1 there is
a still more notable difference of source. Then,
too, the Matter of the realm of process cease-
lessly changes its form: in the eternal, Matter
is immutably one and the same, so that the two
are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this
realm is all things in turn, a new entity in
every separate case, so that nothing is perma-
nent and one thing ceaselessly pushes another
out of being: Matter has no identity here. In
the Intellectual it is all things at once: and
therefore has nothing to change into: it al-
ready and ever contains all. This means that
not even in its own Sphere is the Matter there
at any moment shapeless: no doubt that is true
of the Matter here as well; but shape is held
by a very different right in the two orders of
Matter.

As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing
o process, this will be clear when we are sure
o its precise nature.

4. The present existence of the Ideal-Forms
has been demonstrated elsewhere: we take up
our argument from that point.

If, then, there is more than one of such
forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some
character common to all and equally some pe-
culiar character in each keeping them distinct.

This peculiar characteristic, this distinguish-
ing difference, is the individual shape. But if
shape, then there is the shaped, that in which
the difference is lodged.

There is, therefore, a Matter accepting the
shape, a permanent substratum.

SECOND ENNEAD IV. 6

Further, admitting that there is an Intelli-
gible Realm beyond, of which this world is
an image, then, since this world-compound is
based on Matter, there must be Matter there
also.

And how can you predicate an ordered sys-
tem without thinking of form, and how think
of form apart from the notion of something in
which the form is lodged?

No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact,
utterly without parts, but in some sense there
is part there too. And in so far as these parts are
really separate from each other, any such divi-
sion and difference can be no other than a con-
dition of Matter, of a something divided and
differentiated: in so far as that realm, though
without parts, yet consists of a variety of enti-
ties, these diverse entities, residing in a unity
of which they are variations, reside in a Mats-
ter; for this unity, since it is also a diversity,
must be conceived of as varied and multiform;
it must have been shapeless before it took the
form in which variation occurs. For if we ab-
stract from the Intellectual-Principle the varie-
ty and the particular shapes, the Reason-Prin-
ciples and the Thoughts, what precedes these
was something shapeless and undetermined,
nothing of what is actually present there.

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

But that argument would equally cancel
the Matter present in the bodily forms of this
realm: body without shape has never existed,
always body achieved and yet always the two
constituents. We discover these two Matter
and Idea by sheer force of our reasoning
which distinguishes continually in pursuit of
the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until
it can go no further, towards the ultimate in
the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of ev-
ery partial-thing is its Matter, which, there-
fore, must be all darkness since light is a Rea-
son-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-
Principle, sees only in each particular object
the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything
lying below that it declares to lie below the
light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just
as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and
colours which are modes of light, and dismisses
all that is below the colours and hidden by
them, as belonging to the order of the darkness,
which is the order of Matter.

The dark element in the Intelligible, how-
ever, differs from that in the sense-world: so

therefore does the Matter as much as the
forming-Idea presiding in each of the two
realms. The Divine Matter, though it is the
object of determination has, of its own nature,
a life defined and intellectual; the Matter of
this sphere while it does accept determination
is not living or intellective, but a dead thing
decorated: any shape it takes is an image, ex-
actly as the Base is an image. There on the con-
trary the shape is a real-existent as is the Base.
Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must
be admitted to be right as long as they keep
to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm: for the
Base there is Being, or even, taken as an en-
tirety with the higher that accompanies it, is
illuminated Being.

But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm,
possess eternal existence?

The solution of that question is the same as
for the Ideas.

Both are engendered, in the sense that they
have had a beginning, but unengendered in
that this beginning is not in Time: they have
a derived being but by an eternal derivation:
they are not, like the Kosmos, always in proc-
ess but, in the character of the Supernal, have
their Being permanently. For that differentia-
tion within the Intelligible which produces
Matter has always existed and it is this cleav-
age which produces the Matter there: it is the
first movement; and movement and differen-
tiation are convertible terms since the two
things arose as one: this motion, this cleavage,
away from the first is indetermination [==
Matter], needing The First to its determina-
tion which it achieves by its Return, remain-
ing, until then, an Alienism, still lacking
good; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Di-
vine that all light comes, and, until this be ab-
sorbed, no light in any recipient of light can
be authentic; any light from elsewhere is of
another order than the true.

6. We are led thus to the question of re-
ceptivity in tilings of body.

An additional proof that bodies must have
some substratum different from themselves is
found in the changing of the basic-constitu-
ents into one another. Notice that the destruc-
tion of the elements passing over is not com-
plete if it were we would have a Principle
of Being wrecked in Non-being nor does an
engendered thing pass from utter non-being
into Being: what happens is that a new form
takes the place of an old. There is, then, a
stable element, that which puts off one form
to receive the form of the incoming entity.

PLOTINUS

The same fact is clearly established by de-
cay, a process implying a compound object;
where there is decay there is a distinction be-
tween Matter and Form.

And the reasoning which shows the destruct-
ible to be a compound is borne out by practical
examples of reduction: a drinking vessel is
reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid; analogy
forces us to believe that the liquid too is re-
ducible.

The basic-constituents of things must be
either their Form-Idea or that Primal Matter
[of the Intelligible] or a compound of the
Form and Matter.

Form-Idea, pure and simple, they cannot
be: for without Matter how could things stand
in their mass and magnitude?

Neither can they be that Primal Matter, for
they are not indestructible.

They must, therefore, consist of Matter and
Form-Idea Form for quality and shape, Mat-
ter for the base, indeterminate as being other
than Idea.

7. Empedokles in identifying his "elements"
with Matter is refuted by their decay.

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

As for the notion that all is in all, this clear-
ly is impossible.

Those who make the base to be "the infi-
nite" must define the term.

If this "infinite" means "of endless exten-
sion" there is no infinite among beings; there
is neither an infinity-in-itself [Infinity Ab-
stract] nor an infinity as an attribute to some
body; for in the first case every part of that
infinity would be infinite and in the second
an object in which the infinity was present as
an attribute could not be infinite apart from

that attribute, could not be simplex, could not
therefore be Matter.

Atoms again cannot meet the need of a base.

There are no atoms; all body is divisible end-
lessly: besides neither the continuity nor the
ductility of corporeal things is explicable apart
from Mind, or apart from the Soul which can-
not be made up of atoms; and, again, out of at-
oms creation could produce nothing but atoms:
a creative power could produce nothing from
a material devoid of continuity. Any number
of reasons might be brought, and have been
brought, against this hypothesis and it need
detain us no longer.

8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, de-
scribed as one stuff, continuous and without
quality ?

Clearly since it is without quality it is in-
corporeal; bodiliness would be quality.

It must be the basic stuff of all the entities
of the sense-world and not merely base to some
while being to others achieved form.

Clay, for example, is matter to the potter
but is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of
this sort is our object: we are seeking the stuff
which underlies all alike. We must therefore
refuse to it all that we find in things of sense
not merely such attributes as colour, heat or
cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness
or thinness, shape and therefore magnitude;
though notice that to be present within magni-
tude and shape is very different from possess-
ing these qualities.

It cannot be a compound, it must be a sim-
plex, one distinct thing in its nature; only so
can it be void of all quality. The Principle
which gives it form gives this as something
alien: so with magnitude and all really-ex-
istent things bestowed upon it. If, for example,
it possessed a magnitude of its own, the Prin-
ciple giving it form would be at the mercy of
that magnitude and must produce not at will,
but only within the limit of the Matter's ca-
pacity: to imagine that Will keeping step with
its material is fantastic.

The Matter must be of later origin than the
forming-power, and therefore must be at its
disposition throughout, ready to become any-
thing, ready therefore to any bulk; besides, if
it possessed magnitude, it would necessarily
possess shape also: it would be doubly induc-
tile.

No: all that ever appears upon it is brought
in by the Idea: the Idea alone possesses: to it
belongs the magnitude and all else that goes
with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it.

SECOND ENNEAD IV. n

Quantity is given with the Ideal-Form in all
the particular species man, bird, and par-
ticular kind o bird.

The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by
an outside power is not more surprising than
the imaging of Quality; Quality is no doubt
a Reason-Principle, but Quantity also being
measure, number is equally so.

9. But how can we conceive a thing having
existence without having magnitude?

We have only to think of things whose
identity does not depend on their quantity
for certainly magnitude can be distinguished
from existence as can many other forms and
attributes.

In a word, every unembodied Kind must
be classed as without quantity, and Matter is
unembodied.

Besides quantitativeness itself [the Absolute-
Principle] does not possess quantity, which
belongs only to things participating in it,
a consideration which shows that Quantita-
tiveness is an Idea-Principle. A white object
becomes white by the presence of whiteness;
what makes an organism white or of any other
variety of colour is not itself a specific colour
but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle:
in the same way what gives an organism a
certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude
but is Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute,
or the Reason-Principle.

This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and
beats the Matter out into Magnitude?

Not at all: the Matter was not previously
shrunken small: there was no littleness or big-
ness: the Idea gives Magnitude exactly as it
gives every quality not previously present.

10. But how can I form the conception of
the sizelessness of Matter?

How do you form the concept of any ab-
sence of quality? What is the Act of the Intel-
lect, what is the mental approach, in such a
case?

The secret is Indetermination.

Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate
knows the indeterminate. Around this indefi-
nite a definite conception will be realized, but
the way lies through indefiniteness.

All knowledge comes by Reason and the In-
tellectual Act; in this case Reason conveys in-
formation in any account it gives, but the act
which aims at being intellectual is, here, not
intellection but rather its failure: therefore the
representation of Matter must be spurious, un-
real, something sprung of the Alien, of the un-
real, and bound up with the alien reason*

This is Plato's meaning where he says that
Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious
reasoning.

What, then, is this indetermination in the
Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of
Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had with-
drawn ?

No: the indeterminate has some footing in
the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of
darkness as a base capable of receiving any
colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind,
putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense
all that corresponds to light comes upon a
residuum which it cannot bring under determi-
nation: it is thus in the state of the eye which,
when directed towards darkness, has become
in some way identical with the object of its
spurious vision.

There is vision, then, in this approach of the
Mind towards Matter?

Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colour-
lessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the size-
less. More than this would mean that the Soul
is already bestowing Form.

But is not such a void precisely what the
Soul experiences when it has no intellection
whatever?

No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather
has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it
has an experience, what may be described as
the impact of the shapeless; for in its very con-
sciousness of objects that have taken shape and
size it knows them as compounds [i.e., as pos-
sessing with these forms a formless base] for
they appear as things that have accepted colour
and other quality.

It knows, therefore, a whole which includes
two components; it has a clear Knowledge or
perception of the overlie [the Ideas] but only
a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless
which is not an Ideal-Principle.

With what is perceptible to it there is pre-
sented something else: what it can directly ap-
prehend it sets on one side as its own; but the
something else which Reason rejects, this, the
dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows
darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing.

And just as even Matter itself is not stably
shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the
Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-
form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite,
dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not
endure to linger about Non-Being.

n. "But, given Magnitude and the proper-
ties we know, what else can be necessary to the
existence of body?"

Some base to be the container of all the rest.

"A certain mass then; and if mass, then
Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no
Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant.
And suppose it sizeless; then, what end does it
serve? It never helped Idea or quality; now it
ceases to account for differentiation or for
magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it re-
sides, seems to find its way into embodied en-
tities by way of Matter."

"Or, taking a larger view, observe that ac-
tions, productive operations, periods of time,
movements, none of these have any such sub-
stratum and yet are real things; in the same
way the most elementary body has no need of
Matter; things may be, all, what they are, each
after its own kind, in their great variety, deriv-
ing the coherence of their being from the
blending of the various Ideal-Forms, This Mat-
ter with its sizelessness seems, then, to be a
name without a content."

Now, to begin with: extension is not an im-
perative condition of being a recipient; it is
necessary only where it happens to be a proper-
ty inherent to the recipient's peculiar mode of
being. The Soul, for example, contains all
things but holds them all in an unextended
unity; if magnitude were one of its attributes
it would contain things in extension. Matter
does actually contain in spatial extension what
it takes in; but this is because itself is a po-
tential recipient of spatial extension: animals
and plants, in the same way, as they increase in
size, take quality in parallel development with
quantity, and they lose In the one as the other
lessens.

No doubt in the case of things as we know
them there is a certain mass lying ready before-
hand to the shaping power: but that is no rea-
son for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so
called; for in such cases Matter is not the ab-
solute; it is that of some definite object; the
Absolute Matter must take its magnitude, as
every other property, from outside itself.

A thing then need not have magnitude in
order to receive form: it may receive mass with
everything else that comes to it at the moment
of becoming what it is to be: a phantasm" of
mass is enough, a primary aptness for exten-
sion, a magnitude of no content whence the
identification that has been made of Matter
with The Void.

But I prefer to use the word phantasm as
hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul
spills itself when it seeks to communicate with
Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it,

PLOTINUS

neither encompassing it nor able to penetrate
to any fixed point of it, either of which achieve-
ments would be an act of delimitation.

In other words, we have something which is
to be described not as small or great but as the
great-and-small: for it is at once a mass and a
thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is
the Matter on which Mass is based and that, as
it changes from great to small and small to
great, it traverses magnitude. Its very undeter-
minateness is a mass in the same sense that
of being a recipient of Magnitude though of
course only in the visible object.

In the order of things without Mass, all that
is Ideal-Principle possesses delimitation, each
entity for itself, so that the conception of Mass
has no place in them: Matter, not delimited,
having in its own nature no stability, swept in-
to any or every form by turns, ready to go here,
there and everywhere, becomes a thing of mul-
tiplicity: driven into all shapes, becoming all
things, it has that much of the character of
mass.

12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands
magnitude: the Ideal-Forms of body are Ideas
installed in Mass.

But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude it-
self but into some subject that has been brought
to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering
into Magnitude and not into Matter is to
represent them as being either withqut Magni-
tude and without Real-Existence [and there-
fore undistinguishable from the Matter] or not
Ideal-Forms [apt to body] but Reason-Princi-
ples [utterly removed] whose sphere could
only be Soul; at this, there would be no such
thing as body [i.e., instead of Ideal-Forms
shaping Matter and so producing body, there
would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling
remote in Soul.]

The multiplicity here must be based upon
some unity which, since it has been brought to
Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from Mag-
nitude. Matter is the base of Identity to all that
is composite: once each of the constituents
comes bringing its own Matter with it, there
is no need of any other base. No doubt there
must be a container, as it were a place, to re-
ceive what is to enter, but Matter and even
body precede place and space; the primal
necessity, in order to the existence of body, is
Matter.

There is no force in the suggestion that, since
production and act are immaterial, corporeal
entities also must be immaterial.

Bodies are compound, actions not. Further,

SECOND ENNEAD IV. 13

Matter does in some sense underlie action; it
supplies the substratum to the doer: it is per-
manently within him though it does not enter
as a constituent into the act where, indeed, it
would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does
not change into another as would be the case
if there were a specific Matter of actions but
the doer directs himself from one act to an-
other so that he is the Matter, himself, to his
varying actions.

Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to
quantity, and, therefore, to body.

It is, thus, no name void of content; we know
there is such a base, invisible and without bulk
though it be.

If we reject it, we must by the same reason-
ing reject qualities and mass: for quality, or
mass, or any such entity, taken by itself apart,
might be said not to exist. But these do exist,
though in an obscure existence: there is much
less ground for rejecting Matter, however it
lurk, discerned by none of the senses.

It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of
colour: it is not heard, for it is no sound: it is
no flavour or savour for nostrils or palate: can
it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither
is it corporeal; and touch deals with body,
which is known by being solid, fragile, soft,
hard, moist, dry all properties utterly lacking
in Matter.

It is grasped only by a mental process, though
that not an act of the intellective mind but a
reasoning that finds no subject; and so it stands
revealed as the spurious thing it has been
called. No bodiliness belongs to it; bodiliness is
itself a phase of Reason-Principle and so is
something different from Matter, as Matter,
therefore, from it: bodiliness already operative
and so to speak made concrete would be body
manifest and not Matter unelaborated.

13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum
some attribute or quality present to all the ele-
ments in common?

Then, first, we must be told what precise at-
tribute this is and, next, how an attribute can
be a substratum.

The elements are sizeless, and how conceive
an attribute where there is neither base nor
bulk?

Again, if the quality possesses determina-
tion, it is not Matter the undetermined; and
anything without determination is not a qual-
ity but is the substratum the very Matter we
are seeking.

It may be suggested that perhaps this Ab-
sence of quality means simply that, of its own

nature, it has no participation in any of the set
and familiar properties, but takes quality by
this very non-participation, holding thus an ab-
solutely individual character, marked off from
everything else, being as it were the negation
of those others. Deprivation, we will be told,
comports quality: a blind man has the quality
of his lack of sight. If then it will be urged
Matter exhibits such a negation, surely it has a
quality, all the more so, assuming any depriva-
tion to be a quality, in that here the depriva-
tion is all comprehensive.

But this notion reduces all existence to quali-
fied things or qualities: Quantity itself becomes
a Quality and so does even Existence. Now this
cannot be: if such things as Quantity and Ex-
istence are qualified, they are, by that very fact,
not qualities: Quality is an addition to them;
we must not commit the absurdity of giving
the name Quality to something distinguishable
from Quality, something therefore that is not
Quality.

Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a
quality in Matter?

If this Alienism is difference-absolute [the
abstract entity] it possesses no Quality: abso-
lute Quality cannot be itself a qualified thing.

If the Alienism is to be understood as mean-
ing 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 Identical-
ness [the Absolute principle of Identity] .

An absence is neither a Quality nor a quali-
fied entity; it is the negation of a Quality or of
something else, as noiselessness is the negation
of noise and so on. A lack is negative; Quality
demands something positive. The distinctive
character of Matter is unshape, the lack of
qualification and of form; surely then it is ab-
surd to pretend that it has Quality in not being
qualified; that is like saying that sizelessness
constitutes a certain size.

The distinctive character of Matter, then, is
simply its manner of being not something
definite inserted in it but, rather a relation to-
wards other things, the relation of being dis-
tinct from them.

Other things possess something besides this
relation of Alienism: their form makes each an
entity. Matter may with propriety be described
as merely alien; perhaps, even, we might de-
scribe it as "The Aliens," for the singular sug-
gests a certain definiteness while the plural
would indicate the absence of any determina-
tion.

5 6 PLOTINUS

14. But is Absence this privation itself, or it so under two principles?

. - - . . . t 1 1 >

something in which this Privation is lodged?

Anyone maintaining that Matter and Priva-
tion 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.

There are three possibilities: Matter is not in
Privation and Privation is not in Matter; or
each is in each; or each is in itself alone. ^

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

If their relation to each other is that of a
snubnose to snubness, here also there is a
double concept; we have two things.

If they stand to each other as fire to heat
heat in fire, but fire not included in the con-
cept of heat if Matter is Privation in the way
in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a
form under which Matter appears but there
remains a base distinct from the Privation and
this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they
are not one thing.

Perhaps the identity in substance with differ-
entiation in reason will be defended on the
ground that Privation does not point to some-
thing present but precisely to an absence, to
something absent, to the negation or lack of
Real-being: the case would be like that of the
affirmation of non-existence, where there is no
real predication but simply a denial.

Is, then, this Privation simply a non-exis-
tence ?

If a non-existence in the sense that it is not a
thing of Real-being, but belongs to some other
Kind of existent, we have still two Principles,
one referring directly to the substratum, the
other merely exhibiting the relation of the Pri-
vation to other things.

Or we might say that the one concept de-
fines the relation of substratum to what is not
substratum, while that of Privation, in bring-
ing out the indeterminateness of Matter, ap-
plies to the Matter in itself: but this still makes
Privation and Matter two in reason though one
in substratum.

Now if Matter possesses an identity though
only the identity of being indeterminate, un-
fixed and without quality how can we bring

15. The further question, therefore, is raised
whether boundlessness and indetermination
are things lodging in something other than
themselves as a sort of attribute and whether
Privation [or Negation of quality] is also an
attribute residing in some separate substratum.

Now all that is Number and Reason-Prin-
ciple is outside of boundlessness: these bestow
bound and settlement and order in general up-
on all else: neither anything that has been
brought under order nor any Order- Absolute
is needed to bring them under order. The
thing that has to be brought under order [e.g.,
Matter] is other than the Ordering Principle
which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-
Principle. Therefore, necessarily, the thing to
be brought under order and to definiteness
must be in itself a thing lacking delimitation.

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under
order like all that shares its nature by partici-
pation or by possessing the same principle
therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Unde-
limited and not merely the recipient of a non-
essential quality of Indefiniteness entering as
an attribute.

For, first, any attribute to any subject must
be a Reason-Principle; and Indefiniteness is
not a Reason-Principle.

Secondly, what must a thing be to take In-
definiteness as an attribute? Obviously it must,
beforehand, be either Definiteness or a defined
thing. But Matter is neither.

Then again Indefiniteness entering as an at-
tribute into the definite must cease to be in-
definite: but Indefiniteness has not entered
as an attribute into Matter: that is. Matter is
essentially Indefiniteness.

The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is
the Indefinite, [the undelimited] ; it must be
a thing generated by the undefined nature, the
illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The
One an illimitableness, however, not possess-
ing native existence There but engendered by
The One.

But how can Matter be common to both
spheres,'be here and be There?

Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.

But what difference can there be between
phase and phase of Indefiniteness?

The difference of archetype and image.

So that Matter here [as only an image of In-
definiteness] would be less indefinite?

On the contrary, more indefinite as an Im-
age-thing remote from true being. Indefinite-
ness is the greater in the less ordered object; the

SECOND ENNEAD V. i

less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The In-
determinate in the Intellectual Realm, where
there is truer being, might almost be called
merely an Image of Indefiniteness : in this low-
er Sphere where there is less Being, where there
is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption
of the Image-Kind, Indefiniteness is more au-
thentically indefinite.

But this argument seems to make no differ-
ence between the indefinite object and Indefi-
niteness-essential. Is there none?

In any object in which Reason and Matter
co-exist we distinguish between Indeterminate-
ness and the Indeterminate subject: but where
Matter stands alone we make them identical,
or, better, we would say right out that in that
case essential Indeterminateness is not present;
for it is a Reason-Principle and could not
lodge in the indeterminate object without at
once annulling the indeterminateness.

Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite
of itself, by its natural opposition to Reason-
Principle. Reason is Reason and nothing else;
just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminate-
ness to Reason, is Indeterminateness and noth-
ing else.

1 6. Then Matter is simply Alienism [the
Principle of Difference] ?

No: it is merely that part of Alienism which
stands in contradiction with the Authentic Ex-
istents which are Reason-Principles. So under-
stood, this non-existent has a certain measure
of existence; for it is identical with Privation,
which also is a thing standing in opposition to
the things that exist in Reason.

But must not Privation cease to have exist-
ence, when what has been lacking is present at
last?

By no means: the recipient of a state or char-
acter is not a state but the Privation of the state;
and that into which determination enters is
neither a determined object nor determination
itself, but simply the wholly or partly unde-
termined.

Still, must not the nature of this Undeter-
mined be annulled by the entry of Determina-
tion, especially where this is no mere attribute?

No doubt to introduce quantitative deter-
mination into an undetermined object would
annul the original state; but in the particular
case, the introduction of determination only
confirms the original state, bringing it into ac-
tuality, into full efect, as sowing brings out
the natural quality of land or as a female or-
ganism impregnated by the male is not defem-
inized but becomes more decidedly of its sex;

the thing becomes more emphatically itself.

But on this reasoning must not Matter owe
its evil to having in some degree participated
in good?

No: its evil is in its first lack: it was not a
possessor (of some specific character).

To lack one thing and to possess another, in
something like equal proportions, is to hold a
middle state of good and evil: but whatsoever
possesses nothing and so is in destitution and
especially what is essentially destitution must
be evil in its own Kind.

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.

The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an
Existent, for there is nothing previous to it ex-
cept the Beyond-Existence; but what precedes
the Matter of this sphere is Existence; by its
alienism in regard to the beauty and good of
Existence, Matter is therefore a non-existent.

FIFTH TRACTATE
ON POTENTIALITY AND ACTUALITY

i. A distinction is made between things exist-
ing actually and things existing potentially; a
certain Actuality, also, is spoken of as a really
existent entity. We must consider what content
there is in these terms.

Can we distinguish between Actuality [an
absolute, abstract Principle] and the state of
being-in-act? And if there is such an Actuality,
is this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct
so that this actually existent thing need not be,
itself, an Act?

It is indubitable that Potentiality exists in the
Realm of Sense: but does the Intellectual
Realm similarly include the potential or only
the actual? and if the potential exists there,
does it remain merely potential for ever? And,
if so, is this resistance to actualization due to its
being precluded [as a member of the Divine
or Intellectual world] from time-processes?

First we must make clear what potentiality
is.

We cannot think of potentiality as standing
by itself; there can be no potentiality apart
from something which a given thing may be or
become. Thus bronze is the potentiality of a
statue: but if nothing could be made out of the
bronze, nothing wrought upon it, if it could
never be anything as a future to what it has
been, if it rejected all change, it would be

bronze and nothing else: its own character it
holds already as a present thing, and that
would be the full of its capacity: it would be
destitute of potentiality. Whatsoever has a po-
tentiality must first have a character of its own;
and its potentiality will consist in its having a
reach beyond that character to some other.

Sometimes after it has turned its potentiality
into actuality it will remain what it was; some-
times it will sink itself to the fullest extent in
the new form and itself disappear: these two
different modes are exemplified in (r) bronze
as potentially a statue and (2) water [=
primal-liquid] as potentially bronze or, again,
air as potentially fire.

But if this be the significance of potentiality,
may we describe it as a Power towards the
thing that is to be? Is the Bronze a power to-
wards a statue?

Not in the sense of an effectively productive
force: such a power could not be called a po-
tentiality. Of course Potentiality may be a pow-
er, as, for instance, when we are referring not
merely to a thing which may be brought into
actualization but to Actuality itself [the Prin-
ciple or Abstract in which potentiality and the
power of realizing potentiality may be thought
of as identical] : but it is better, as more con-
ducive to clarity, to use "Potentiality" in regard
to the process of Actualization and "Power" in
regard to the Principle, Actuality.

Potentiality may be thought of as a Sub-
stratum to states and shapes and forms which
are to be received, which it welcomes by its na-
ture and even strives for sometimes in gain
but sometimes, also, to loss, to the annulling of
some distinctive manner of Being already ac-
tually achieved.

2. Then the question rises whether Matter
potentially what it becomes by receiving shape
is actually something else or whether it has
no actuality at all. In general terms: When a
potentiality has taken a definite form, does it
retain its being? Is the potentiality, itself, in
actualization? The alternative is that, when
we speak of the "Actual Statue" and of the
"Potential Statue," the Actuality is not pred-
icated of the same subject as the "Potential-
ity." If we have really two different subjects,
then the potential does not really become the
actual: all that happens is that an actual entity
takes the place of a potential.

The actualized entity is not the Matter [the
Potentiality, merely] but a combination, in-
cluding the Form-Idea upon the Matter.

This is certainly the case when a quite differ-

PLOTINUS

ent thing results from the actualization the
statue, for example, the combination, is dis-
tinctly different from the bronze, the base;
where the resultant is something quite new,
the Potentiality has clearly not, itself, become
what is now actualized. But take the case
where a person with a capacity for education
becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality,
here, identical with actualization? Is not the
potentially wise Socrates the same man as the
Socrates actually wise?

But is an ignorant man a being of knowl-
edge because he is so potentially? Is he, in vir-
tue of his non-essential ignorance, potentially
an instructed being?

It is not because of his accidental ignorance
that he is a being of Knowledge: it is because,
ignorant though he be by accident, his mind,
apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through
which he may become so. Thus, in the case of
the potentially instructed who have become so
in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the ac-
tual; or, if we prefer to put it so, there is on the
one side the potentiality while, on the other,
there is the power in actual possession of the
form.

If, then, the Potentiality is the Substratum
while the thing in actualization the Statue for
example is a combination, how are we to de-
scribe the form that has entered the bronze?

There will be nothing unsound in describing
this shape, this Form which has brought the
entity from potentiality to actuality, as the ac-
tualization; but of course as the actualization
of the definite particular entity, not as Actual-
ity the abstract: we must not confuse it with
the other actualization, strictly so called, that
which is contrasted with the power producing
actualization. The potential is led out into real-
ization by something other than itself; power
accomplishes, of itself, what is within its scope,
but by virtue of Actuality [the abstract]: the
relation is that existing between a tempera-
ment and its expression in act, between cour-
age and courageous conduct. So far so good:

3, We come now to the purpose of all this
discussion; to make clear in what sense or to
what degree Actualization is predicable in the
Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Ac-
tualization there, each and every member of
that realm being an Act, or whether Potential-
ity also has place there.

Now: if there is no Matter there to harbour
potentiality: if nothing there has any future
apart from its actual mode: if nothing there
generates, whether by changes or in the per-

SECOND ENNEAD V. 5

manence of its identity; if nothing goes outside
of itself to give being to what is other than it-
self; then, potentiality has no place there: the
Beings there possess actuality as belonging to
eternity, not to time.

Those, however, who assert Matter in the
Intellectual Realm will be asked whether the
existence of that Matter does not imply the po-
tential there too; for even if Matter there exists
in another mode than here, every Being there
will have its Matter, its form and the union of
the two [and therefore the potential, separable
from the actual] . What answer is to be made?

Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea,
just as the Soul, an Idea, is Matter to another
[a higher] Being.

But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a
potentiality ?

No: for the Idea [to which it is Matter] is
integral to the Soul and does not look to a fu-
ture; the distinction between the Soul and its
Idea is purely mental: the Idea and the Matter
it includes are conceived as a conjunction but
are essentially one Kind: remember that Aris-
totle makes his Fifth Body immaterial.

But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul?
Surely the Soul is potentially the living-being
of this world before it has become so? Is it not
potentially musical, and everything else that it
has not been and becomes? Does not this imply
potentiality even in the Intellectual Existences?

No: the Soul is not potentially these things;
it is a Power towards them.

But after what mode does Actualization ex-
ist in the Intellectual Realm ?

Is it the Actualization of a statue, where the
combination is realized because the Form-Idea
has mastered each separate constituent of the
total?

No: it is that every constituent there is a
Form-Idea and, thus, is perfect in its Being.

There is in the Intellectual Principle no pro-
gression from some power capable of intellec-
tion to the Actuality of intellection: such a pro-
gression would send us in search of a Prior
Principle not progressing from Power to Act;
there all stands ever realized. Potentiality re-
quires an intervention from outside itself ^to
bring it to the actualization which otherwise
cannot be; but what possesses, of itself, iden-
tity unchangeable for ever is an actualization:
all the Firsts then are actualizations, simply be-
cause eternally and of themselves they possess
all that is necessary to their completion.

This applies equally to the Soul, not to that
in Matter but to that in the Intellectual Sphere;

and even that in Matter, the Soul of Growth,
is an actualization in its difference; it possesses
actually [and not, like material things, merely
in image] the Being that belongs to it.

Then, everything, in the intellectual is in
actualization and so all There is Actuality?

Why not? If that Nature is rightly said to
be "Sleepless," and to be Life and the noblest
mode of Life, the noblest Activities must be
there; all then is actualization there, everything
is an Actuality, for everything is a Life, and
all Place there is the Place of Life, in the true
sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the
Intellectual Principle.

4. Now, in general anything that has a po-
tentiality is actually something else, and this
potentiality of the future mode of being is an
existing mode.

But what we think of as Matter, what we as-
sert to be the potentiality of all things, cannot
be said to be actually any one being among
beings: if it were of itself any definite being,
it could not be potentially all.

If, then, it is not among existences, it must
necessarily be without existence.

How, therefore, can it be actually anything?

The answer is that while Matter can not be
any of the things which are founded upon it, it
may quite well be something else, admitting
that all existences are not rooted in Matter.

But once more, if it is excluded from the
entities founded upon it and all these are Be-
ings, it must itself be a Non-Being.

It is, further, by definition, formless and
therefore not an Idea: it cannot then be classed
among things of the Intellectual Realm, and so
is, once more, a Non-Being. Falling, as regards
both worlds, under Non-Being, it is all the
more decidedly the Non-Being.

It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic
Existences; it has even failed to come up with
the things to which a spurious existence can be
attributed for it is not even a phantasm of
Reason as these are how is it possible to in-
clude it under any mode of Being?

And if it falls under no mode of Being, what
can it actually be?

5. How can we talk of it? How can it be the
Matter of real things?

It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a
Potentiality.

And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the
order of the thing it is to become: its existence
is no more than an announcement of a future,
as it were a thrust forward to what is to come
into existence.

PLOTINUS

As Potentiality then, it is not any definite
thing but the potentiality of everything: being
nothing in itself beyond what being Matter
amounts to it is not in actualization. For if it
were actually something, that actualized some-
thing would not be Matter, or at least not Mat-
ter out and out., but merely Matter in the
limited sense in which bronze is the matter of
the statue.

And its Non-Being must be no mere differ-
ence from Being.

Motion, for example, is different from Be-
ing, but plays about it, springing from it and
living within it: Matter is, so to speak, the out-
cast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeem-
ably what it was from the beginning: in origin
it was Non-Being and so it remains.

Nor are we to imagine that, standing away
at the very beginning from the universal circle
of Beings, it was thus necessarily an active
Something or that it became a Something. It
has never been able to annex for itself even a
visible outline from all the forms under which
it has sought to creep: it has always pursued
something other than itself; it was never more
than a Potentiality towards its next: where all
the circle of Being ends, there only is it mani-
fest; discerned underneath things produced
after it, it is remoter [from Real-Being] even
than they.

Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order
of Being, it can be no actualization of either:
all that is allowed to it is to be a Potentiality,
a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing inca-
pable of a Shape of its own.

Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the
actuality of being a falsity; and the false in ac-
tualization is the veritably false, which again
is Authentic Non-Existence.

So that Matter, as the Actualization of Non-
Being, is all the more decidedly Non-Being, is
Authentic Non-Existence.

Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is
situated in Non-Being, it is in no degree the
Actualization of any definite Being.

If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an
Actualization, for then it would not be the
stray from Authentic Being which it is, the
thing having its Being in Non-Beingness: for,
note, in the case of things whose Being is a
falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away
what Being they have, and if we introduce ac-
tualization into things whose Being and Es-
sence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation
of their nature since their Being is Potentiality.

I Matter is to be kept as the unchanging

substratum, we must keep it as Matter: that
means does it not? that we must define it as
a Potentiality and nothing more or refute
these considerations.

SIXTH TRACTATE
QUALITY AND FORM-IDEA
i. Are not Being and Reality (to on and he
ousia) distinct ; must we not envisage Being as
the substance stripped of all else, while Reality
is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the
others Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference
so that these are the specific constituents of
Reality?

The universal fabric, then, is Reality in
which Being, Movement, and so on are sepa-
rate constituents.

Now Movement has Being as an accident
and therefore should have Reality as an acci-
dent; or is it something serving to the comple-
tion of Reality?

No: Movement is a Reality; everything in
the Supreme is a Reality.

Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally,
in this sphere?

In the Supreme there is Reality because all
things are one; ours is the sphere of images
whose separation produces grades of differ-
ence. Thus in the spermatic unity all the hu-
man members are present undistinguishably;
there is no separation of head and hand: their
distinct existence begins in the life here, whose
content is image, not Authentic Existence.

And are the distinct Qualities in the Au-
thentic Realm to be explained in the same
way? Are they differing Realities centred in
one Reality or gathered round Being differ-
ences which constitute Realities distinct from
each other within the common fact of Reality?

This is sound enough; but it does not ap-
ply to all the qualities of this sphere, some of
which, no doubt, are differentiations of Reality
such as the quality of two-footedness or four-
f ootedness but others are not such differentia-
tions of Reality and, because they are not so,
must be called qualities and nothing more.

On the other hand, one and the same thing
may be sometimes a differentiation of Reality
and sometimes not a differentiation when it
is a constitutive element, and no differentiation
in some other thing, where it is not a constitu-
tive element but an accidental. The distinction
may be seen in the [constitutive] whiteness of
a swan or of ceruse and the whiteness which in
a man is an accidental.

Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-

SECOND ENNEAD VI. 2

Form o the thing it is a constitutive element
and not a quality; where it is a superficial ap-
pearance it is a quality.

In other words, qualification may be dis-
tinquished. We may think of a qualification
that is of the very substance of the thing, some-
thing exclusively belonging to it. And there is
a qualifying that is nothing more, [not consti-
tuting but simply] giving some particular
character to the real thing; in this second case
the qualification does not produce any altera-
tion towards Reality or away from it; the Real-
ity has existed fully constituted before the in-
coming of the qualification which whether
in soul or body merely introduces some state
from outside, and by this addition elaborates
the Reality into the particular thing.

But what if [the superficial appearance such
as] the visible whiteness in ceruse is constitu-
tive? In the swan the whiteness is not con-
stitutive since a swan need not be white: it is
constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is con-
stitutive of the Reality, fire.

No doubt we may be told that the Reality in
fire is [not warmth but] fieriness and in ceruse
an analogous abstraction: yet the fact remains
that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is con-
stitutive and in the ceruse whiteness.

Thus the same entities are represented at
once as being not qualities but constituents of
Reality and not constituents but qualities.

Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical
thing changed its own nature according to
whether it is present as a constituent or as an
accidental.

The truth is that while the Reason-Principles
producing these entities contain nothing but
what is of the nature of Reality, yet only in the
Intellectual Realm do the produced things
possess real existence: here they are not real;
they are qualified.

And this is the starting-point of an error we
constantly make: in our enquiries into things
we let realities escape us and fasten on what is
mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so
name from the observation of certain qualities
present; fire is a Reality [not a combination of
material phenomena]; the phenomena ob-
served here and leading us to name fire call us
away from the authentic thing; a quality is
erected into the very matter of definition a
procedure, however, reasonable enough in re-
gard to things- of the realm of sense which are
in no case realities but accidents of Reality.

And this raises the question how Reality can
ever spring from what are not Realities.

It has been shown that a thing coming into
being cannot be identical with its origins: it
must here be added that nothing thus coming
into being [no "thing of process"] can be a
Reality.

Then how do we assert the rising in the Su-
preme of what we have called Reality from
what is not Reality [i.e., from the pure Being
which is above Reality] ?

The Reality there possessing Authentic Be-
ing in the strictest sense, with the least admix-
ture is Reality by existing among the differ-
entiations of the Authentic Being; or, better,
Reality is affirmed in the sense that with the
existence of the Supreme is included its Act so
that Reality seems to be a perfect! onrnent of the
Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a
diminution; the produced thing is deficient by
the very addition, by being less simplex, by
standing one step away from the Authentic.

2. But we must enquire into Quality in it-
self: to know its nature is certainly the way to
settle our general question.

The first point is to assure ourselves whether
or not one and the same thing may be held to
be sometimes a mere qualification and some-
times a constituent of Reality not staying on
the point that qualification could not be con-
stitutive of a Reality but of a qualified Reality
only.

Now in a Reality possessing a determined
quality, the Reality and the fact of existence
precede the qualified Reality.

What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality
which precedes the qualified Reality?

Its mere body, perhaps? If so, body being the
Reality, fire is a warmed body; and the total
thing is not the Reality; and the fire has
warmth as a man might have a snub nose.

Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness
all which certainly do seem to be qualities
and its resistance, there is left only its extension
by three dimensions: in other words, its Mat-
ter is its Reality.

But that cannot be held: surely the form is
much more likely than the Matter to be the
Reality.

But is not the Form of Quality?

No, the Form is not a Quality: it is a Reason-
Principle.

And the outcome of this Reason-Principle
entering into the underlying Matter, what is
that?

Certainly not what is seen and burns, for that
is the something in which these qualities in-
here.

PLOTINUS

We might define the burning as an Act
springing from the Reason-Principle: then the
warming and lighting and other effects of fire
will be its Acts and we still have found no foot-
hold for its quality.

Such completions of a Reality cannot be
called qualities since they are its Acts emanat-
ing from the Reason-Principles and from the
essential powers. A quality is something per-
sistendy outside Reality; it cannot appear as
Reality in one place after having figured in an-
other as quality; its function is to bring in the
something more after the Reality is established,
such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty,
health, a certain shape. On this last, however,
it may be remarked that triangularity and
quadrangularity are not in themselves qual-
ities, but there is quality when a thing is tri-
angular by having been brought to that shape;
the quality is not the triangularity but the pat-
terning to it. The case is the same with the arts
and avocations.

Thus: Quality is a condition superadded to a
Reality whose existence does not depend upon
it, whether this something more be a later ac-
quirement or an accompaniment from the
first; it is something in whose absence the Real-
ity would still be complete. It will sometimes
come and go, sometimes be inextricably at-
tached, so that there are two forms of Quality,
the moveable and the fixed.

3. The Whiteness, therefore, in a human be-
ing is, clearly, to be classed not as a quality but
as an activity the act of a power which can
make white; and similarly what we think of as
qualities in the Intellectual Realm should be
known as activities; they are activities which
to our minds take the appearance of quality
from the fact that, differing in character among
themselves, each of them is a particularity
which, so to speak, distinguishes those Real-
ities from each other.

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the In-
tellectual Realm from that here, if both are
Acts?

The difference is that these ["Quality- Activ-
ities"] in the Supreme do not indicate the very
nature of the Reality [as do the corresponding
Activities here] nor do they indicate variations
of substance or of [essential] character; they
merely indicate what we think of as Quality
but in the Intellectual Realm must still be
Activity.

In other words this thing, considered in its
aspect as possessing the characteristic property
of Reality is by that alone recognised as no

mere Quality. But when our reason separates
what is distinctive in these ["Quality- Activ-
ities"] not in the sense of abolishing them
bu-t rather as taking them to itself and mak-
ing something new of them this new some-
thing is Quality: reason has, so to speak, ap-
propriated a portion of Reality, that portion
manifest to it on the surface.

By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant
of the specific nature of fire, may very well be
no quality in fire but an Idea-Form belonging
to it, one of its activities, while being merely a
Quality in other things than fire: as it is mani-
fested in any warm object, it is not a mode of
Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image,
something that has gone forth from its own
Reality where it was an Act and in the
warm object is a quality.

All, then, that is accident and not Act; all
but what is Idea-form of the Reality; all that
merely confers pattern; all this is Quality:
qualities are characteristics and modes other
than those constituting the substratum of a
thing.

But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the
foundation in which they exist primarily, these
are Activities of the Intellectual Beings.

And; one and the same thing cannot be both
Quality and non-quality: the thing void of
Real-Existence is Quality; but the thing ac-
companying Reality is either Form or Activ-
ity: there is no longer self-identity when, from
having its being in itself, anything comes to be
in something else with a fall from its standing
as Form and Activity.

Finally, anything which is never Form but
always accidental to something else is Quality
unmixed and nothing more.

SEVENTH TRACTATE
ON COMPLETE TRANSFUSION

i. Some enquiry must be made into what is
known as the complete transfusion of mate-
rial substances.

Is it possible that fluid be blended with
fluid in such a way that each penetrate the oth-
er through and through? or a difference of
no importance if any such penetration occurs
that one of them pass completely through
the other?

Those that admit only contact need not de-
tain us. They are dealing with mixture, not
with the coalescence which makes the total a
thing of like parts, each minutest particle be-
ing composed of all the combined elements.

SECOND ENNEAD VII. 2

But there are those who, admitting coales-
cence, confine it to the qualities: to them the
material substances of two bodies are in con-
tact merely, but in this contact of the matter
they find footing for the qualities of each.

Their view is plausible because it rejects the
notion of total admixture and because it rec-
ognizes that the masses of the mixing bodies
must be whitded away if there is to be mixture
without any gap, if, that is to say, each sub-
stance must be divided within itself through
and through for complete interpenetration
with the other. Their theory is confirmed by
the cases in which two mixed substances occu-
py a greater space than either singly, especially
a space equal to the conjoined extent of each:
for, as they point out, in an absolute interpen-
etration the infusion of the one into the other
would leave the occupied space exacdy what it
was before and, where the space occupied is
not increased by the juxtaposition, they ex-
plain that some expulsion of air has made room
for the incoming substance. They ask further,
how a minor quantity of one substance can
be spread out so as to interpenetrate a major
quantity of another. In fact they have a multi-
tude of arguments.

Those, on the other hand, that accept "com-
plete transfusion," might object that it does
not require the reduction of the mixed things
to fragments, a certain cleavage being suffi-
cient: thus, for instance, sweat does not split
up the body or even pierce holes in it. And if
it is answered that this may well be a special
decree of Nature to allow of the sweat exud-
ing, there is the case of those manufactured ar-
ticles, slender but without puncture, in which
we can see a liquid wetting them through and
through so that it runs down from the upper
to the under surface. How can this fact be ex-
plained, since both the liquid and the solid are
bodily substances? Interpenetration without
disintegration is difficult to conceive, and if
there is such mutual disintegration the two
must obviously destroy each other.

When they urge that often there is a mixing
without augmentation their adversaries can
counter at once with the exit of air.

When there is an increase in the space occu-
pied, nothing refutes the explanation how-
ever unsatisfying that this is a necessary con-
sequence of two bodies bringing to a common
stock their magnitude equally with their other
attributes: size is as permanent as any other
property; and, exactly as from the blending of
qualities there results a new form of thing,

the combination of the two, so we find a new
magnitude; the blending gives us a magnitude
representing each of the two. But at this point
the others will answer, "If you mean that sub-
stance lies side by side with substance and
mass with mass, each carrying its quantum
of magnitude, you are at one with us: if there
were complete transfusion, one substance sink-
ing its original magnitude in the other, we
would have no longer the case of two lines
joined end to end by their terminal points and
thus producing an increased extension; we
would have line superimposed upon line with,
therefore, no increase."

But a lesser quantity permeates the entire
extent of a larger; the smallest is sunk in the
greatest; transfusion is exhibited unmistak-
ably. In certain cases it is possible to pretend
that there is no total penetration but there are
manifest examples leaving no room for the
pretence. In what they say of the spreading
out of masses they cannot be thought very
plausible; the extension would have to be con-
siderable indeed in the case of a very small
quantity [to be in true mixture with a very
large mass] ; for they do not suggest any such
extension by change as that of water into air.

2. This, however, raises a problem deserv-
ing investigation in itself: what has happened
when a definite magnitude of water becomes
air, and how do we explain the increase of vol-
ume? But for the present we must be content
with the matter thus far discussed out of all
the varied controversy accumulated on either
side.

It remains for us to make out on our own
account the true explanation of the phenom-
enon of mixing, without regard to the agree-
ment or disagreement of that theory with any
of the current opinions mentioned.

When water runs through wool or when
papyrus-pulp gives up its moisture why is not
the moist content expressed to the very last
drop or even, without question of outflow,
how can we possibly think that in a mixture
the relation of matter with matter, mass with
mass, is contact and that only the qualities
are fused ? The pulp is not merely -in touch
with water outside it or even in its pores; it
is wet through and through sa that every par-
ticle of its matter is drenched in that quality.
Now if the matter is soaked all through with
the quality, then the water is everywhere in
the pulp.

"Not the water; the quality of the water.'*

But then, where is the water? and [if only

6 4

a quality has entered] why is there a change
of volume? The pulp has been expanded by
the addition: that is to say it has received mag-
nitude from the incoming substance but if
it has received the magnitude, magnitude has
been added; and a magnitude added has not
been absorbed; therefore the combined matter
must occupy two several places. And as the
two mixing substances communicate quality
and receive matter in mutual give and take so
they may give and take magnitude. Indeed
when a quality meets another quality it suf-
fers some change; it is mixed, and by that ad-
mixture it is no longer pure and therefore no
longer itself but a blunter thing, whereas
magnitude joining magnitude retains its full
strength.

But let it be understood how we came to
say that body passing through and through
another body must produce disintegration,
while we make qualities pervade their sub-
stances without producing disintegration: the
bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter,
too, is bodiless: it may, then, be supposed
that as Matter pervades everything so the bodi-
less qualities associated with it as long as
they are few have the power of penetration
without disintegration. Anything solid would
be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a
solid has the precise quality which forbids it
to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of
too many qualities in Matter [constitutes den-
sity and so] produces the same inhibition.

If, then, what we call a dense body is so by
reason of the presence of many qualities, that
plenitude of qualities will be the cause [of the
inhibition] .

If on the other hand density is itself a qual-
ity like what they call corporeity, then the
cause will be that particular quality.

This would mean that the qualities of two
substances do not bring about the mixing by
merely being qualities but by being apt to mix-
ture; nor does Matter refuse to enter into a
mixing as Matter but as being associated with
a quality repugnant to mixture; and this all
the more since it has no magnitude of its own
but only .does not reject magnitude.

3. We have thus covered our main ground,
but since corporeity has been mentioned, we
must consider its nature: is it the conjunction
of all the qualities or is it an Idea, or Reason-
Principle, whose presence in Matter constitutes
a body?

Now if body is the compound, the thing
made up of all the required qualities plus Mat-

PLOTINUS

ter, then corporeity is nothing more than their
conjunction.

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.

EIGHTH TRACTATE
WHY DISTANT OBJECTS APPEAR SMALL

i. Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced
and close together, however far apart they be:
within easy range, their sizes and the distances
that separate them are observed correctly.

Distant objects show in this reduction be-
cause they must be drawn together for vision
and the light must be concentrated to suit the
size of the pupil; besides, as we are placed far-
ther and farther away from the material mass
under observation, it is more and more the
bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak,
of magnitude as of all other quality.

Or it may be that we appreciate the magni-
tude of an object by observing the salience
and recession of its several parts, so that to
perceive its true size we must have it close
at hand.

Or again, it may be that magnitude is known
incidentally [as a deduction] from the obser-
vation of colour. With an object at hand we
know how much space is covered by the colour;
at a distance, only that something is coloured,
for the parts, quantitatively distinct among
themselves, do not give us the precise knowl-
edge of that quantity, the colours themselves
reaching us only in a blurred impression.

What wonder, then, if size be like sound
reduced when the form reaches us but faintly
for in sound the hearing is concerned only
about the form; magnitude is not discerned
except incidentally.

Well, in hearing magnitude is known in-
cidentally; but how? Touch conveys a direct

SECOND ENNEAD IX. i

impression of a visible object; what gives us
the same direct impression of an object of
hearing?

The magnitude of a sound is known not
by actual quantity but by degree of impact,
by intensity and this in no indirect knowl-
edge; the ear appreciates a certain degree of
force, exacdy as the palate perceives by no in-
direct knowledge, a certain degree of sweet-
ness. But the true magnitude of a sound is its
extension; this the hearing may define to it-
self incidentally by deduction from the degree
of intensity but not to the point of precision.
The intensity is merely the definite effect at a
particular spot; the magnitude is a matter of
totality, the sum of space occupied.

Still the colours seen from a distance are
faint; but they are not small as the masses are.

True; but there is the common fact of dim-
inution. There is colour with its diminution,
faintness; there is magnitude with its diminu-
tion, smallness; and magnitude follows colour
diminishing stage by stage with it.

But, the phenomenon is more easily ex-
plained by the example of things of wide va-
riety. Take mountains dotted with houses,
woods and other land-marks; the observation
of each detail gives us the means of calculating,
by the single objects noted, the total extent
covered: but, where no such detail of form
reaches us, our vision, which deals with de-
tail, has not the means towards the knowledge
of the whole by measurement of any one clear-
ly discerned magnitude. This applies even to
objects of vision close at hand: where there is
variety and the eye sweeps over all at one
glance so that the forms are not all caught,
the total appears the less in proportion to the
detail which has escaped the eye; observe each
single point and then you can estimate the vol-
ume precisely. Again, magnitudes of one col-
our and unbroken form trick the sense of quan-
tity: the vision can no longer estimate by the
particular; it slips away, not finding the stand-
by of the difference between part and part.

It was the detail that prevented a near ob-
ject deceiving our sense of magnitude: in the
case of the distant object, because the eye does
not pass stage by stage through the stretch of
intervening space so as to note its forms,
therefore it cannot report the magnitude of
that space.

2, The explanation by lesser angle of vision
has been elsewhere dismissed; one point, how-
ever, we may urge here.

Those attributing the reduced appearance

to the lesser angle occupied allow by their very
theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye
still sees something beyond or something quite
apart from the object of vision, if only air-
space.

Now consider some very large object of vi-
sion, that mountain for example. No part of
the eye is unoccupied; the mountain adequate-
ly fills it so that it can take in nothing beyond,
for the mountain as seen either corresponds
exactly to the eye-space or stretches away out
of range to right and to left. How does the ex-
planation by lesser angle of vision hold good
in this case, where the object still appears
smaller, far, than it is and yet occupies the eye
entire?

Or look up to the sky and no hesitation can
remain. Of course we cannot take in the entire
hemisphere at one glance; the eye directed to
it could not cover so vast an expanse. But sup-
pose the possibility: the entire eye, then, em-
braces the hemisphere entire; but the expanse
of the heavens is far greater than it appears;
how can its appearing far less than it is be ex-
plained by a lessening of the angle of vision?

NINTH TRACTATE
AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF

THE KOSMOS AND THE KoSMOS ITSELF

TO BE EVIL: [GENERALLY QUOTED AS
"AGAINST THE GNOSTICS"]

i. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the
Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly,
primal for the secondary can never be sim-
plex that it contains nothing: that it is an
integral Unity.

Now the same Nature belongs to the Prin-
ciple we know as The One. Just as the good-
ness of The Good is essential and not the out-
growth of some prior substance so the Unity
of The One is its essential.

Therefore:

When we speak of The One and when we
speak of The Good we must recognize an
Identical Nature; we must affirm that they are
the same not, it is true, as venturing any
predication with regard to that [unknowable]
Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to our-
selves in the best terms we find.

Even in calling it "The First" we mean no
more than to express that it is the most abso-
lutely simplex: it is the Self -Sufficing only in
the sense that it is not of that compound nature
which would make it dependent upon any
constituent; it is "the Self -Contained" because

PLOTINUS

everything contained in something alien must
also exist by that alien.

Deriving, then, from nothing alien, enter-
ing into nothing alien, in no way a made-up
thing, there can be nothing above it.

We need not, then, go seeking any other
Principles; this the One and the Good is
our First; next to it follows the Intellectual
Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this
follows Soul. Such is the order in nature. The
Intellectual Realm allows no more than these
and no fewer.

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

It remains for us to consider whether there
are more than these Three.

Now what other [Divine] Kinds could
there be? No Principles of the universe could
be found at once simpler and more transcend-
ent than this whose existence we have af-
firmed and described.

They will scarcely urge upon us the dou-
bling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in
Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurali-
ty by distinguishing between potentiality and
actuality in the case of immaterial beings
whose existence is in Act even in lower
forms no such division can be made and we
cannot conceive a duality in the Intellectual-
Principle, one phase in some vague calm, an-
other all astir. Under what form can we think
of repose in the Intellectual Principle as con-
trasted with its movement or utterance ? What
would the quiescence of the one phase be as
against the energy of the others?

No: the Intellectual-Principle is continu-
ously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable
Act. With movement towards it or within
it we are in the realm of the Soul's operation:
such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from
it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intel-
lectual Soul, but in no sense creating an inter-
mediate Principle to stand between the two.

Nor are we warranted in affirming a plural-
ity 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 un-
consciousness in the Authentic Intelligence;

the knowing principle must be one and the
selfsame with that which knows of the know-
ing.

The contrary supposition would give us two
beings, one that merely knows, and another
a separate being that knows of the act of
knowing.

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 Hypos-
tasis is abandoned: further, the question is
opened whether our thought can entertain a
knowing principle so narrowed to its know-
ing as not to know that it knows a limita-
tion 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.

No: The Divine Mind in its mentation
thinks itself; the object of the thought is noth-
ing external: Thinker and Thought are one;
therefore in its thinking and knowing it pos-
sesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not
as something unconscious but as knowing: in
this Primal Knowing it must include, as one
and the same Act, the knowledge of the know-
ing; and even the logical distinction men-
tioned above cannot be made in the case of the
Divine; the very eternity of its self -thinking
precludes any such separation between that in-
tellective act and the consciousness of the act.

The absurdity becomes still more blatant if
we introduce yet a further distinction after
that which affirms the knowledge of the know-
ing, a third distinction affirming the knowing
of the knowledge of the knowing: yet there is
no reason against carrying on the division for
ever and ever.

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

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

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 4

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that
it stands, in part, always in the presence of
The Divine Beings, while in part it is con-
cerned with the things of this sphere and in
part occupies a middle ground. It is one na-
ture in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul
in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in
itself and in the Authentic Existent; some-
times, the less noble part is dragged down and
drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is
that the Soul may never succumb entire.

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it
ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty the ap-
propriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is
no part and of which we too are no part
thence to pour forth into the frame of the All
whatsoever the All can hold of good and
beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all
solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not
redressing, but establishing order by the mar-
vellous efficacy of its contemplation of the
things above it.

For the measure of its absorption in that vi-
sion is the measure of its grace and power,
and what it draws from this contemplation it
communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated
and illuminating always.

3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfail-
ing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire se-
ries of later Being which by this light is sus-
tained and fostered and endowed with the
fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It
may be compared with a central fire warming
every receptive body within range.

Our fire, however, is a thing of limited
scope: given powers that have no limitation
and are never cut off from the Authentic Ex-
istences, how imagine anything existing and
yet failing to receive from them?

It is of the essence of things that each gives
of its being to another: without this communi-
cation, The Good would not be Good, nor the
Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle,
nor would Soul itself be what it is: the law is,
"some life after the Primal Life, a second
where there is a first; all linked in one un-
broken chain; all eternal; divergent types be-
ing engendered only in the sense of being sec-
ondary."

In other words, things commonly described
as generated have never known a beginning:
all has been and will be. Nor can anything
disappear unless where a later form is possible:
without such a future there can be no dissolu-
tion.

If we are told that there is always Matter as

a possible term, we ask why then should not
Matter itself come to nothingness. If we are
told it may, then we ask why it should ever
have been generated. If the answer comes that
it had its necessary place as the ultimate of
the series, we return that the necessity still
holds.

With Matter left aside as wholly isolated,
the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in
some bounded place, walled off, so to speak;
if that is not possible, Matter itself must re-
ceive the Divine light [and so cannot be an-
nihilated].

4. To those who assert that creation is the
work of the Soul after the failing of its wings,
we answer that no such disgrace could over-
take the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its
falling, they must tell us also what caused the
fall. And when did it take place? If from eter-
nity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen
thing: if at some one moment, why not before
that?

We assert its creative act to be a proof not of
decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its de-
cline could consist only in its forgetting the
Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create?
Whence does it create but from the things it
knew in the Divine? If it creates from the
memory of that vision, it never fell. Even sup-
posing it to be in some dim intermediate state,
it need not be supposed more likely to decline:
any inclination would be towards its Prior, in
an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory
at all remained, what other desire could it have
than to retrace the way?

What could it have been planning to gain by
world-creating? Glory? That would be absurd
a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our
earth.

Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not
by sheer need of its nature, by being character-
istically the creative power how explain the
making of this universe?

And when will it destroy the work? If it re-
pents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it
has not yet repented, then it will never repent:
it must be already accustomed to the world,
must be growing more tender towards it with
the passing of time.

Can it be waiting for certain souls still here?
Long since would these have ceased returning
for such re-birth, having known in former life
the evils of this sphere; long since would they
have foreborne to come.

Nor may we grant that this world is of un-
happy origin because there are many jarring

PLOTINUS

things in it. Such a judgement would rate it too
high, treating it as the same with the Intelli-
gible Realm and not merely its reflection.

And yet what reflection o that world could
be conceived more beautiful than this of ours?
What fire could be a nobler reflection of the
fire there than the fire we know here? Or what
other earth than this could have been modelled
after that earth ? And what globe more minute-
ly perfect than this, or more admirably ordered
in its course could have been conceived in the
image of the self-centred circling of the World
of Intelligibles? And for a sun figuring the Di-
vine sphere, if it is to be more splendid than
the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be.

5. Still more unreasonably:

There are men, bound to human bodies and
subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so
generously of their own faculty that they De-
clare themselves in contact with the Intelligible
World, but deny that the sun possesses a simi-
lar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder,
to change; they deny that it is any wiser than
we, the late born, hindered by so many cheats
on the way towards truth.

Their own soul, the soul of the least of man-
kind, they declare deathless, divine; but the en-
tire heavens and the stars within the heavens
have had no communion with the Immortal
Principle, though these are far purer and love-
lier than their own souls yet they are not
blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the dis-
cipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are
the loudest in complaint of the disorder that
troubles our earth. We are to imagine the
deathless Soul choosing of design the less
worthy place, and preferring to abandon the
nobler to the Soul that is to die.

Equally unreasonable is their introduction
of that other Soul which they piece together
from the elements.

How could any form or degree of life come
about by a blend of the elements? Their con-
junction could produce only a warm or cold or
an intermediate substance, something dry or
wet or intermediate.

Besides, how could such a soul be a bond
holding the four elements together when it is
a later thing and rises from them? And this
element-soul is described as possessing con-
sciousness and will and the rest what can we
think?

Furthermore, these teachers, in their con-
tempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim
that another earth has been made for them into
which they are to enter when they depart. Now

this new earth is the Reason-Form [the Logos]
of our world. Why should they desire to live in
the archetype of a world abhorrent to them?

Then again, what is the origin of that pat-
tern world? It would appear, from the theory,
that the Maker had already declined towards
the- things of this sphere before that pattern
came into being.

Now let us suppose the Maker craving
to construct such an Intermediate World
though what motive could He have? in ad-
dition to the Intellectual world which He eter-
nally possesses. If He made the mid-world first,
what end was it to serve?
To be a dwelling-place for Souls?
How then did they ever fall from it? It ex-
ists in vain.

If He made it later than this world ab-
stracting the formal-idea of this world and leav-
ing the Matter out the Souls that have come
to know that intermediate sphere would have
experienced enough to keep them from enter-
ing this. If the meaning is simply that Souls
exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is
there distinctive in the teaching?

6. And, what are we to think of the new
forms of being they introduce their "Exiles"
and "Impressions" and "Repentings" ?

If all comes to states of the Soul "Repent-
ance" when it has undergone a change of pur-
pose; "Impressions" when it contemplates not
the Authentic Existences but their simulacra
there is nothing here but a jargon invented to
make a case for their school: all this terminolo-
gy is piled up only to conceal their debt to the
ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clear-
ly and without bombast, the ascent from the
cave and the gradual advance of souls to a
truer and truer vision.

For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes
from Plato; all the novelties through which
they seek to establish a philosophy of their own
have been picked up outside of the truth.

From Plato come their punishments, their
rivers of the underworld and the changing
from body to body; as for the plurality they as-
sert in the Intellectual Realm the Authentic
Existent, the Intellectual-Principle, the Second
Creator and the Soul all this is taken over
from the Timceus, where we read:

"As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind
beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living
Being, so many the Maker resolved should be
contained in this All."

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived
one Mind passively including within itself all

that has being, another mind, a distinct exist-
ence, having vision, and a third planning the
Universe though often they substitute Soul
for this planning Mind as the creating Princi-
ple and they think that this third being is the
Creator according to Plato.

They are in fact quite outside of the truth in
their identification of the Creator.

In every way they misrepresent Plato's theory
as to the method of creation as in many other
respects they dishonour his teaching: they, we
are to understand, have penetrated the Intellec-
tual Nature, while Plato and all those other il-
lustrious teachers have failed.

They hope to get the credit of minute and
exact identification by setting up a plurality of
intellectual Essences; but in reality this multi-
plication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the
level of the Sense-Kind: their true course is to
seek to reduce number to the least possible in
the Supreme, simply referring all things to the
Second Hypostasis which is all that exists as
it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only
thing that is good except only for the first Na-
ture and to recognize Soul as the third Prin-
ciple, accounting for the difference among souls
merely by diversity of experience and charac-
ter. Instead of insulting those venerable teach-
ers they should receive their doctrine with the
respect due to the older thought and honour
all that noble system an immortal soul, an
Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Su-
preme God, the Soul's need of emancipation
from all intercourse with the body, the fact of
separation from it, the escape from the world
of process to the world of essential-being. These
doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato,
they do well to adopt: where they differ, they
are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not
to procure assent for their own theories by flay-
ing and flouting the Greeks: where they have
a divergent theory to maintain they must es-
tablish it by its own merits, declaring their own
opinions with courtesy and with philosophical
method and stating the controverted opinion
fairly; they must point their minds towards the
truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and
seeking in their own persons to replace men
honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.

As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of
the Divine Essences was far the sounder and
more instructed, and must be accepted by all
not caught in the delusions that beset human-
ity: it is easy also to identify what has been con-
veyed in these later times from the ancients
with incongruous novelties how for example,

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 7

where they must set up a contradictory doc-
trine, they introduce a medley of generation
and destruction, how they cavil at the Uni-
verse, how they make the Soul blameable for
the association with body, how they revile the
Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to
the Creator, identified with the Soul, the char-
acter and experiences appropriate to partial be-
ings.

7. That this world has neither beginning nor
end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme
stands is certainly no novel teaching. And be-
fore this school rose it had been urged that
commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul.

But to treat the human Soul as a fair pre-
sentment of the Soul of the Universe is like
picking out potters and blacksmiths and mak-
ing them warrant for discrediting an entire
well-ordered city.

We must recognize how different is the gov-
ernance exercised by the All-Soul; the relation
is not the same : it is not in fetters. Among the
very great number of differences it should not
have been overlooked that the We [the human
Soul] lies under fetter; and this in a second
limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fet-
tered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it
grasps.

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 en-
cumbering; 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] , neces-
sarily shares the conditions of its containing
principle [as the Soul], and does not communi-
cate 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; aad if fire itself
were annihilated that would make no differ-
ence 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 Kos-
mos, the Soul in the Supreme would be un-
concerned.

The constitution of the All is very different
from that of the single, separate forms of life:
there, the established rule commanding to per-
manence is sovereign; here things are like de-
serters kept to their own place and duty by a

double bond; there is no outlet from the All,
and therefore no need of restraining or of driv-
ing errants back to bounds : all remains where
from the beginning the Soul's nature ap-
pointed.

The natural movement within the plan will
be injurious to anything whose natural ten-
dency it opposes: one group will sweep bravely-
onward with the great total to which it is
adapted; the others, not able to comply with
the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral
is moving to its concerted plan; midway in the
march, a tortoise is intercepted; unable to get
away from the choral line it is trampled under
foot; but if it could only range itself within the
greater movement it too would suffer nothing.

8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kos-
mosj is to ask why there is a Soul and why a
Creator creates. The question, also, implies a
beginning in the eternal and, further, repre-
sents creation as the act of a changeful Being
who turns from this to that.

Those that so think must be instructed if
they would but bear with correction in the
nature of the Supernals, and brought to desist
from that blasphemy of majestic powers which
comes so easily to them, where all should be
reverent scruple.

Even in the administration of the Universe
there is no ground for such attack, for it affords
manifest proof of the greatness of the Intellec-
tual Kind.

This All that has emerged into life is no
amorphous structure like those lesser forms
within it which are born night and day out of
the lavishness of its vitality the Universe is a
life organized, effective, complex, all-compre-
hensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom.
How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear
image, beautifully formed, of the Intellectual
Divinities? No doubt it is copy, not original;
but that is its very nature; it cannot be at once
symbol and reality. But to say that it is an in-
adequate copy is false; nothing has been left
out which a beautiful representation within the
physical order could include.

Such a reproduction there must necessarily
be though not by deliberation and contriv-
ance for the Intellectual could not be the last
of things, but must have a double Act, one
within itself and one outgoing; there must,
then, be something later than the Divine; for
only the thing with which all power ends fails
to pass downwards something of itself. In the
Supreme there flourishes a marvellous vigour,
and therefore it produces.

PLOTINUS

Since there is no Universe nobler than this,
is it not clear what this must be? A representa-
tion carrying down the features of the Intel-
lectual Realm is necessary; there is no other
Kosmos than this; therefore this is such a
representation.

This earth of ours is full of varied life-forms
and of immortal beings; to the very heavens it
is crowded. And the stars, those of the upper
and the under spheres, moving in their or-
dered path, fellow-travellers with the universe,
how can they be less than gods? Surely they
must be morally good: what could prevent
them? All that occasions vice here below is un-
known there no evil of body, perturbed and
perturbing.

Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace,
what hinders them from the intellectual grasp
of the God-Head and the Intellectual Gods?
What can be imagined to give us a wisdom
higher than belongs to the Supernals? Could
anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such
an idea?

Admitting that human Souls have descended
under constraint of the All-Soul, are we to
think the constrained the nobler? Among
Souls, what commands must be higher than
what obeys. And if the coming was uncon-
strained, why find fault with a world you have
chosen and can quit if you dislike it?

And further, if the order of this Universe is
such that we are able, within it, to practise wis-
dom and to live our earthly course by the Su-
pernal, does not that prove it a dependency of
the Divine?

9. Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities
of that order, are made ground of complaint.
But this is to ignore that the Sage demands no
equality in such matters: he cannot think that
to own many things is to be richer or that the
powerful have the better of the simple; he
leaves all such preoccupations to another kind
of man. He has learned that life on earth has
two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and
the way of the mass, the Sage intent upon the
sublimest, upon the realm above, while those
of the more strictly human type fall, again, un-
der two classes, the one reminiscent of virtue
and therefore not without touch with good, the
other mere populace, serving to provide neces^
saries to the better sort.

But what of murder? What of the feeble-
ness that brings men under slavery to the pas-
sions?

Is it any wonder that there should be failing
and error, not in the highest, the intellectual,

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 9

Principle but in Souls that are like undeveloped
children? And is not life justified even so if it
is a training ground with its victors and its
vanquished?

You are wronged; need that trouble an im-
mortal? You are put to death; you have at-
tained your desire. And from the moment your
citizenship of the world becomes irksome you
are not bound to it.

Our adversaries do not deny that even here
there is a system of law and penalty: and sure-
ly we cannot in justice blame a dominion which
awards to every one his due, where virtue has
its honour, and vice comes to its fitting shame,
in which there are not merely representations
of the gods, but the gods themselves, watchers
from above, and as we read easily rebutting
human reproaches, since they lead all things in
order from a beginning to an end, allotting to
each human being, as life follows life, a fortune
shaped to all that has preceded the destiny
which, to those that do not penetrate it, be-
comes the matter of boorish insolence upon
things divine.

A man's one task is to strive towards making
himself perfect though not in the idea really
fatal to perfection that to be perfect is possi-
ble to himself alone.

We must recognize that other men have at-
tained the heights of goodness; we must admit
the goodness of the celestial spirits, and above
all of the gods those whose presence is here
but their contemplation in the Supreme, and
loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most
blessed Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the
divinities of the Intellectual Sphere, and, above
all these, the mighty King of that dominion,
whose majesty is made patent in the very mul-
titude of the gods.

It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity
but by displaying its exuberance as the Su-
preme himself has displayed it that we show
knowledge of the might of God, who, abiding-
ly what He is, yet creates that multitude, all de-
pendent on Him., existing by Him and from
Him.

This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks
to Him the Universe as a whole and every
God within it and tells of Him to men, all
alike revealing the plan and will of the Su-
preme.

These, in the nature of things, cannot be
what He is, but that does not justify you in
contempt of them, in pushing yourself forward
as not inferior to them.

The more perfect the man, the more compli-

ant he is, even towards his fellows; we must
temper our importance, not thrusting insolent-
ly beyond what our nature warrants; we must
allow other beings, also, their place in the pres-
ence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves
alone next after the First in a dream-flight
which deprives us of our power of attaining
identity with the Godhead in the measure pos-
sible to the human Soul, that is to say, to the
point of likeness to which the Intellectual-Prin-
ciple leads us; to exalt ourselves above the In-
tellectual-Principle is to fall from it.

Yet imbeciles are found to accept such teach-
ing at the mere sound of the words "You, your-
self, are to be nobler than all else, nobler than
men, nobler than even gods." Human audacity
is very great: a man once modest, restrained
and simple hears, "You, yourself, are the child
of God; those men whom you used to venerate,
those beings whose worship they inherit from
antiquity, none of these are His children; you
without lifting a hand are nobler than the very
heavens"; others take up the cry: the issue will
be much as if in a crowd all equally ignorant of
figures, one man were told that he stands a
thousand cubic feet; he will naturally accept
his thousand cubits even though the others
present are said to measure only five cubits; he
will merely tell himself that the thousand in-
dicates a considerable figure.

Another point: God has care for you; how
then can He be indifferent to the entire Uni-
verse in which you exist?

We may be told that He is too much oc-
cupied to look upon the Universe, and that it
would not be right for Him to do so ; yet, when
He looks down and upon these people, is He
not looking outside Himself and upon the Uni-
verse in which they exist? If He cannot look
outside Himself so as to survey the Kosmos,
then neither does He look upon them.

But they have no need of Him?

The Universe has need of Kim, and He
knows its ordering and its indwellers and how
far they belong to it and how far to the Su-
preme, and which of the men upon it are
friends of God, mildly acquiescing with the
Kosmic dispensation when in the total course
of things some pain must be brought to them
for we are to look not to the single will of
any man but to the universe entire, regarding
every one according to worth but not stopping
for such things where all that may is hastening
onward.

Not one only kind of being is bent upon
this quest, which brings bliss to whatsoever

PLOTINUS

achieves, and earns for the others a future des-
tiny in accord with their power. No man, there-
fore, may flatter himself that he alone is com-
petent; a pretension is not a possession; many
boast though fully conscious of their lack and
many imagine themselves to possess what was
never theirs and even to be alone in possessing
what they alone of men never had.

10. Under detailed investigation, many other
tenets of this school indeed we might say all
could be corrected with an abundance of
proof. But I am withheld by regard for some
of our own friends who fell in with this doc-
trine before joining our circle and, strangely,
still cling to it.

The school., no doubt, is free-spoken enough
whether in the set purpose of giving its opin-
ions a plausible colour of verity or in honest
belief but we are addressing here our own
acquaintances, not those people with whom
we could make no way. We have spoken in the
hope of preventing our friends from being per-
turbed by a party which brings, not proof
how could it? but arbitrary, tyrannical asser-
tion; another style of address would be appli-
cable to such as have the audacity to flout the
noble and true doctrines of the august teachers
of antiquity.

That method we will not apply; anyone that
has fully grasped the preceding discussion will
know how to meet every point in the system.

Only one other tenet of theirs will be men-
tioned before passing the matter; it is one
which surpasses all the rest in sheer folly, if
that is the word.

They first maintain that the Soul and a cer-
tain "Wisdom" [Sophia] declined and entered
this lower sphere though they leave us in
doubt of whether the movement originated in
Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or whether the
two are the same to them then they tell us
that the other Souls came down in the descent
and that these members of Sophia took to
themselves bodies, human bodies, for example.

Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which
was the occasion of descent to the others is de-
clared not to have descended. "It knew no de-
cline," but merely illuminated the darkness in
such a way that an image of it was formed up-
on the Matter. Then, they shape an image of
that image somewhere below through the
medium of Matter or of Materiality or what-
ever else of many names they choose to give it
in their frequent change of terms, invented to
darken their doctrine and so they bring into
being what they call the Creator or Demiurge,

then this lower is severed from his Mother
[Sophia] and becomes the author of the Kos-
mos down to the latest of the succession of im-
ages constituting it.

Such is the blasphemy of one of their writers.

1 1. Now, in the first place, if the Soul has
not actually come down but has illuminated
the darkness, how can it truly be said to have
declined? The outflow from it of something in
the nature of light does not justify the assertion
of its decline; for that, it must make an actual
movement towards the object lying in the low-
er realm and illuminate it by contact.

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its
own place and illuminates the lower without
directing any act towards that end, why should
it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the
Kosmos draw light also from the yet greater
powers contained in the total of existence?

Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a
Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates
it, why do not that illumination .and the creat-
ing of the world take place simultaneously?
Why must the Soul wait till the representations
of the plan be made actual?

Then again this Plan the "Far Country"
of their terminology brought into being, as
they hold, by the greater powers, could not
have been the occasion of decline to the cre-
ators.

Further, how explain that under this illumi-
nation the Matter of the Kosmos produces im-
ages of the order of Soul instead of mere
bodily-nature ? An image of Soul could not de-
mand darkness or Matter, but wherever formed
it would exhibit the character of the producing
element and remain in close union with it.

Next, is this image a real-being, or, as they
say, an Intellection?

If it is a reality, in what way does it differ
from its original? By being a distinct form of
the Soul? But then, since the original is the
reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be
the vegetative and generative Soul; and then,
what becomes of the theory that it is produced
for glory V sake, what becomes of the creation
in arrogance and self-assertion? The theory
puts an end also to creation by representation
and, still more decidedly, to any thinking in
the act; and what need is left for a creator creat-
ing by way of Matter and Image ?

If it is an Intellection, then we ask first
"What justifies the name?" and next, "How
does anything come into being unless the Soul
give this Intellection creative power and how,
after all, can creative power reside in a created

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 13

thing?" Are we to be told that it is a question
of a first Image followed by a second?

But this is quite arbitrary.

And why is fire the first creation?

12. And how does this image set to its task
immediately after it comes into being?

By memory of what it has seen?

But it was utterly non-existent, it could have
no vision, either it or the Mother they bestow
upon it.

Another difficulty: These people come upon
earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls;
yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of
them are able to stir beyond the limits of the
world, and when they do attain Reminiscence
barely carry with them some slight recollection
of the Sphere they once knew: on the other
hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is
able, they tell us as also is its Mother to
form at least some dim representation of the
celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in Mat-
ter, yet it not merely has the conception of the
Supreme and adopts from that world the plan
of this, but knows what elements serve the pur-
pose. How, for instance, did it come to make
fire before anything else? What made it judge
fire a better first than some other object?

Again, if it created the fire of the Universe
by thinking of fire, why did it not make the
Universe at a stroke by thinking of the Uni-
verse? It must have conceived the product
complete from the first; the constituent ele-
ments would be embraced in that general con-
ception.

The creation must have been in all respects
more according to the way of Nature than to
that of the arts for the arts are of later origin
than Nature and the Universe, and even at the
present stage the partial things brought into be-
ing by the natural Kinds do not follow any
such order first fire, then the several other
elements, then the various blends of these on
the contrary the living organism entire is en-
compassed and rounded off within the uterine
germ. Why should not the material of the Uni-
verse be similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type
in which earth, fire and the rest would be in-
cluded? We can only suppose that these peo-
ple themselves, acting by their more authentic
Soul, would have produced the world by such
a process, but that the Creator had not wit to
do so.

And yet to conceive the vast span of the
Heavens to be great in that degree to de-
vise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling
path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and

this earth of ours and all in such a way that
reason can be given for the plan this could
never be the work of an Image; it tells of that
Power [the All-Soul] next to the very Highest
Beings,

Against their will, they themselves admit
this: their "outshining upon the darkness," if
the doctrine is sifted, makes it impossible to
deny the true origins of the Kosmos.

Why should this down-shining take place
unless such a process belonged to a universal
law?

Either the process is in the order of Nature
or against that order. If it is in the nature of
things, it must have taken place from eternity;
if it is against the nature of things, then the
breach of natural right exists in the Supreme
also; evil antedates this world; the cause of evil
is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme
is the evil to us; instead of the Soul's harm
coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere
harmed by the Soul.

In fine, the theory amounts to making the
world one of the Primals, and with it the Mat-
ter from which it emerges.

The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw
and illuminated the already existent Darkness.
Now whence came that Darkness?

If they tell us that the Soul created the Dark-
ness by its Decline, then, obviously, there was
nowhere for the Soul to decline to; the cause
of the decline was not the Darkness but the
very nature of the Soul. The theory, therefore,
refers the entire process to pre-existing compul-
sions: the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.

13. Those, then, that censure the constitution
of the Kosmos do not understand what they
are doing or where this audacity leads them.
They do not understand that there is a suc-
cessive order of Primals, Secondaries, Tertiaries
and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that
nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the
First; that we can but accept, meekly, the con-
stitution of the total, and make our best way
towards the Primals, withdrawing from the
tragic spectacle, as they see it, of the Kosmic
spheres which in reality are all suave gra-
ciousness.

And what, after all, is there so terrible in
these Spheres with which it is sought to fright-
en people unaccustomed to thinking, never
trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis ?

Even the fact that their material frame is of
fire does not make them dreadful; their Move-
ments are in keeping with the All and with the
Earth: but what we must consider in them is

the Soul, that on which these people base their

own title to honour.

And, yet, again, their material frames are
pre-eminent in vastness and beauty, as they co-
operate in act and in influence with the entire
order of Nature, and can never cease to exist as
long as the Primals stand; they enter into the
completion of the All of which they are major
parts.

If men rank highly among other living Be-
ings, much more do these, whose office in the
All is not to play the tyrant but to serve to-
wards beauty and order. The action attributed
to them must be understood as a foretelling of
coming events, while the causing of all the
variety is due, in part to diverse destinies for
there cannot be one lot for the entire body of
men in part to the birth moment, in part to
wide divergencies of place, in part to states of
the Souls.

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

14. In yet another way they infringe still more
gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme.

In the sacred formulas they inscribe, pur-
porting to address the Supernal Beings not
merely the Soul but even the Transcendents
they are simply uttering spells and appease-
ments and evocations in the idea that these
Powers will obey a call and be led about by a
word from any of us who is in some degree
trained to use the appropriate forms in the
appropriate way certain melodies, certain
sounds, specially directed breathings, sibilant
cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic po-
tency upon the Supreme. Perhaps they would
repudiate any such intention: still they must
explain how these things act upon the unem-
bodied: they do not see that the power they at-
tribute to their own words is so much taken
away from the majesty of the divine.

They tell us they can free themselves of dis-
eases.

PLOTINUS

If they meant, by temperate living and an
appropriate regime, they would be right and
in accordance with all sound knowledge. But
they assert diseases to be Spirit-Beings and
boast of being able to expel them by formula:
this pretension may enhance their importance
with the crowd, gaping upon the powers of
magicians; but they can never persuade the
intelligent that disease arises otherwise than
from such causes as overstrain, excess, defici-
ency, putrid decay; in a word, some variation
whether from within or from without.

The nature of illness is indicated by its very
cure. A motion, a medicine, the letting of
blood, and the disease shifts down and away;
sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores
the system: presumably the Spiritual power
gets hungry or is debilitated by the purge.
Either this Spirit makes a hasty exit or it re-
mains within. If it stays, how does the disease
disappear, with the cause still present? If it
quits the place, what has driven it out? Has
anything happened to it? Are we to suppose it
throve on the disease? In that case the disease
existed as something distinct from the Spirit-
Power. Then again, if it steps in where no
cause of sickness exists, why should there be
anything else but illness ? If there must be such
a cause, the Spirit is unnecessary: that cause is
sufficient to produce that fever. As for the no-
tion, that just when the cause presents itself,
the watchful Spirit leaps to incorporate itself
with it, this is simply amusing.

But the manner and motive of their teaching
have been sufficiently exhibited; and this was
the main purpose of the discussion here upon
their Spirit-Powers. I leave it to yourselves to
read the books and examine the rest of the doc-
trine: you will note all through how our form
of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character
and honest thinking in addition to all other
good qualities, how it cultivates reverence and
not arrogant self-assertion, how its boldness is
balanced by reason, by careful proof, by cau-
tious progression, by the utmost circumspection
and you will compare those other systems
to one proceeding by this method. You will
find that the tenets of their school have been
huddled together under a very different plan:
they do not deserve any further examination
here.

15. There is, however, one matter which we
must on no account overlook the effect of
these teachings upon the hearers led by them
into despising the world and all that is in it.

There are two theories as to the attainment

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 16

of the End of life. The one proposes pleasure,
bodily pleasure, as the term; the other pro-
nounces for good and virtue, the desire of
which comes from God and moves, by ways to
be studied elsewhere, towards God.

Epicurus denies a Providence and recom-
mends pleasure and its enjoyment, all that is
left to us: but the doctrine under discussion is
still more wanton; it carps at Providence and
the Lord of Providence; it scorns every law
known to us; immemorial virtue and all re-
straint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any
loveliness be seen on earth; it cuts at the root
of all orderly living, and of the righteousness
which, innate in the moral sense, is made per-
fect by thought and by self -discipline: all that
would give us a noble human being is gone.
What is left for them except where the pupil
by his own character betters the teaching
comes to pleasure, self-seeking, the grudge of
any share with one's fellows, the pursuit of ad-
vantage.

Their error is that they know nothing good
here: all they care for is something else to
which they will at some future time apply
themselves: yet, this world, to those that have
known it once, must be the starting-point of the
pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine
nature, they must inaugurate their effort by
some earthly correction. The understanding of
beauty is not given except to a nature scorning
the delight of the body, and those that have
no part in well-doing can make no step to-
wards the Supernal.

This school, in fact, is convicted by its neg-
lect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of
such matters is missing utterly: we are not told
what virtue is or under what different kinds it
appears; there is no word of all the numerous
and noble reflections upon it that have come
down to us from the ancients; we do not learn
what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how
the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say
"Look to God" is not helpful without some in-
struction as to what this looking imports: it
might very well be said that one can "look"
and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave
of impulse, repeating the word God but held
in the grip of every passion and making no ef-
fort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards
the Term and, linked with thought, occupying
a Soul makes God manifest: God on the lips,
without a good conduct of life, is a word.

1 6. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere,
and the Gods within it or anything else that is
lovely, is not the way to goodness.

Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods;
and one not previously corrupt, taking to this
contempt, even though in other respects not
wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very
fact.

Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane
Gods and the world, the honour they profess
for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes
an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts
are warm also to the Kin of the beloved; we
are not indifferent to the children of our friend.
Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but
in the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellec-
tive, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings
than are ours; for how can this Kosmos be a
thing cut off from That and how imagine the
gods in it to stand apart?

But of this matter we have treated elsewhere:
here we urge that where there is contempt for
the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge of the
Supreme itself is merely verbal.

What sort of piety can make Providence
stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit
whatsoever to it?

And what consistency is there in this school
when they proceed to assert that Providence
cares for them, though for them alone?

And is this Providence over them to be un-
derstood of their existence in that other world
only or of their lives here as well? If in the
other world, how came they to this? If in this
world, why are they not already raised from it?

Again, how can they deny that the Lord of
Providence is here? How else can He know
either that they are here, or that in their so-
journ here they have not forgotten Him and
fallen away? And if He is aware of the good-
ness of some, He must know of the wickedness
of others, to distinguish good from bad. That
means that He is present to all, is, by whatever
mode, within this Universe. The Universe,
therefore, must be participant in Him.

If He is absent from the Universe, He is ab-
sent from yourselves, and you can have noth-
ing to tell about Him or about the powers that
come after Him.

But, allowing that a Providence reaches to
you from the world beyond making any con-
cession to your liking it remains none the
less certain that this world holds from the
Supernal and is not deserted and will not be:
a Providence watching entires is even more
likely than one over fragments only; and simi-
larly, Participation is more perfect in the case
of the All-Soul as is shown, further, by the
very existence of things and the wisdom mani-

PLOTINUS

fest in their existence. Of those that advance
these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered,
so wise, as the Universe? The comparison is
laughable, utterly out of place; to make it, ex-
cept as a help towards truth, would be impiety.

The very question can be entertained by no
intelligent being but only by one so blind, so
utterly devoid of perception and thought, so
far from any vision of the Intellectual Universe
as not even to see this world of our own.

For who that truly perceives the harmony of
the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any
bent towards music, to answer to the harmony
in sensible sounds? What geometrician or
arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the
symmetries, correspondences and principles of
order observed in visible things? Consider,
even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the
bodily sense the productions of the art of paint-
ing do not see the one thing in the one only
way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in
the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation
of what lies in the idea, and so are called to
recollection of the truth the very experience
out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of
Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hur-
ries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no
one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of
sense this vast orderliness, the Form which
the stars even in their remoteness display no
one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as
not to be carried by all this to recollection, and
gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all
this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not
to answer thus could only be to have neither
fathomed this world nor had any vision of that
other.

17. Perhaps the hate of this school for the
corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who
inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to
Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be char-
acteristically the inferior.

Then let them for the moment pass over the
corporeal element in the Universe and study
all that still remains.

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 in-
corporeal 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 exercis-
ing as yet no outer governance: either ap-
proach will lead to a true appreciation of the
Soul that conducts this Universe.

Now let them set body within it not in the
sense that Soul suffers any change but that,
since "In the Gods there can be no grudging,"
it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing
has strength to receive and at once their con-
ception of the Kosmos must be revised; they
cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has
exercised such a weight of power as to have
brought the corporeal-principle, in itself un-
lovely, to partake of good and beauty to the ut-
most of its receptivity and to a pitch which
stirs Souls, beings of the divine order.

These people may no doubt say that they
themselves feel no such stirring, and that they
see no difference between beautiful and ugly
forms of body; but, at that, they can make no
distinction between the ugly and the beautiful
in conduct; sciences can have no beauty; there
can be none in thought; and none, therefore, in
God. This world descends from the Firsts: if
this world has no beauty, neither has its Source;
springing thence, this world, too, must have
its beautiful things. And while they proclaim
their contempt for earthly beauty, they would
do well to ignore that of youths and women
so as not to be overcome by incontinence.

In fine, we must consider that their self-satis-
faction could not turn upon a contempt for
anything indisputably base; theirs is the per-
verse pride of despising what was once ad-
mired.

We must always keep in mind that the beau-
ty in a partial thing cannot be identical with
that in a whole; nor can any several objects be
as stately as the total.

And we must recognize, that, even in the
world of sense and part, there are things of a
loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials
forms whose beauty must fill us with vener-
ation for their creator and convince us of their
origin in the divine, forms which show how in-
effable is the beauty of the Supreme since they
cannot hold us but we must, though in all
admiration, leave these for those. Further,
wherever there is interior beauty, we may be
sure that inner and outer correspond; where
the interior is vile, all is brought low by that
flaw in the dominants.

SECOND ENNEAD IX. 18

Nothing base within can be beautiful with-
out at least not with an authentic beauty, for
there are examples of a good exterior not
sprung from a beauty dominant within; peo-
ple passing as handsome but essentially base
have that, a spurious and superficial beauty: if
anyone tells me he has seen people really fine-
looking but interiorly vile, I can only deny it;
we have here simply a false notion of personal
beauty; unless, indeed, the inner vileness were
an accident in a nature essentially fine; in this
Sphere there are many obstacles to self-realiza-
tion.

In any case the All is beautiful, and there
can be no obstacle to its inner goodness: where
the nature of a thing does not comport perfec-
tion from the beginning, there may be a fail-
ure in complete expression; there may even be
a fall to vileness, but the All never knew a
childlike immaturity; it never experienced a
progress bringing novelty into it; it never
had bodily growth: there was nowhere from
whence it could take such increment; it was
always the All-Container.

And even for its Soul no one could imagine
any such a path of process: or, if this were con-
ceded, certainly it could not be towards ^eviL

1 8. But perhaps this school will maintain
that, while their teaching leads to a hate and
utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the
Soul down in it.

In other words: two people inhabit the one
stately house; one of them declaims against its
plan and against its Architect, but none the
less maintains his residence in it; the other
makes no complaint, asserts the entire com-
petency of the Architect and waits cheerfully
for the day when he may leave it, having^no
further need of a house: the malcontent im-
agines himself to be the wiser and to be the
readier to leave because he has learned to re-
peat that the walls are of soulless stone and
timber and that the place falls far short of a

Or would this school reject the word Sister?
They are willing to address the lowest of men
as brothers; are they capable of such raving as
to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers
of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kos-
mos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the
vile; it may be asserted only of those that have
become good and are no longer body but em-
bodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the
body in a mode very closely resembling the
indwelling of the All-Soul in the universal
frame. And this means continence, self-re-
straint, holding staunch against outside pleas-
ure and against outer spectacle, allowing no
hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is
immune from shock; there is nothing that can
affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call
on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced
for us from the beginning by a great concep-
tion of life, annulled by matured strength.

Attaining to something of this immunity, we
begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul
of the vast All and "of the heavenly bodies:
when we are come to the very closest resem-
blance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will
be towards that goal to which they also tend;
their contemplative vision becomes ours, pre-
pared as we are, first by natural disposition and
afterwards by all this training, for that state
which is theirs by the Principle of their Being.

This school may lay claim to vision as a
dignity reserved to themselves, but they are not
any the nearer to vision by the claim or by the
boast that while the celestial powers, bound for
ever to the ordering of the Heavens, can never
stand outside the material universe, they them-
selves have their freedom in their death. This
is a failure to grasp the very notion of "stand-
ing outside," a failure to appreciate the mode
in which the All-Soul cares for the unensouled.

No: it is possible to go free of love for the
body; to be clean-living, to disregard death; to
know the Highest and aim at that other world;

timber ana. mat tne piace 1*1110 icu duun VM, a M.**\J u* *..***-*>-<- 7

true home* he does not see that his only distinc- not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others

* . it 1 1 *. .. ___t_ . ^_^ ,l"v1 r\ ,n*> ! ,rt-/-3 +*! Jt-rfTTl I 1~f\ 1 * 1 f"l /"I f">/"f"

tion is in not being able to bear with necessity
assuming that his conduct, his grumbling,
does not cover a secret admiration for the beau-
ty of those same "stones." As long as we have
bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared
for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast
power of labourless creation.

who are able for it and faithful to it; and not
to err with those that deny vital motion to the
stars because to our sense they stand still the
error which in another form leads this school
to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only
because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer
manifestation.

THE THIRD ENNEAD

FIRST TRACTATE
FATE

i. In the two orders of things those whose ex-
istence is that of process and those in whom it
is Authentic Being there is a variety of possi-
ble relation to Cause.

Cause might conceivably underly all the en-
tities in both orders or none in either. It might
underly some, only, in each order, the others
being causeless. It might, again, underly the
Realm of Process universally while in the
Realm of Authentic Existence some things
were caused, others not, or all were causeless.
Conceivably, on the other hand, the Authentic
Existents are all caused while in the Realm of
Process some things are caused and others not,
or all are causeless.

Now, to begin with the Eternal Existents:
The Firsts among these, by the fact that they
are Firsts, cannot be referred to outside Causes;
but all such as depend upon those Firsts may
be admitted to derive their Being from them.
And in all cases the Act may be referred to
the Essence [as its cause], for their Essence
consists, precisely, in giving forth an appropri-
ate Act.

As for Things of Process or for Eternal
Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable
we must hold that these are due to Cause;
Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can
make no place here for unwarranted "slant-
ings," for sudden movement of bodies apart
from any initiating power, for precipitate
spurts in a soul with nothing to drive it into
the new course of action. Such causelessness
would bind the Soul under an even sterner
compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at
the mercy of movements apart from will and
cause. Something willed within itself or with-
out something desired, must lead it to action;
without motive it can have no motion.

On the assumption that all happens by
Cause, it is easy to discover the nearest deter-
minants of any particular act or state and to
trace it plainly to them.

7 8

The cause of a visit to the centre of affairs
will be that one thinks it necessary to see some
person or to receive a debt, or, in a word, that
one has some definite motive or impulse con-
firmed by a judgement of expediency. Some-
times a condition may be referred to the arts,
the recovery of health for instance to medical
science and the doctor. Wealth has for its cause
the discovery of a treasure or the receipt of a
gift, or the earning of money by manual or in-
tellectual labour. The child is traced to the
father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of
favourable outside circumstances such as a par-
ticular diet or, more immediately, a special or-
ganic aptitude or a wife apt to childbirth.

And the general cause of all is Nature.

2. But to halt at these nearest determinants,
not to be willing to penetrate deeper, indicates
a sluggish mind, a dullness to all that calls us
towards the primal and transcendent causes.

How comes it that the same surface causes
produce different results? There is moonshine,
and one man steals and the other does not: un-
der the influence of exactly similar surround-
ings one man falls sick and the other keeps
well; an identical set of operations makes one
rich and leaves another poor. The differences
amongst us in manners, in characters, in suc-
cess, force us to go still further back.

Men therefore have never been able to rest
at the surface causes.

One school postulates material principles,
such as atoms; from the movement, from the
collisions and combinations of these, it derives
the existence and the mode of being of all par-
ticular phenomena, supposing that all depends
upon how these atoms are agglomerated, how
they act, how they are affected; our own im-
pulses and states, even, are supposed to be de-
termined by these principles.

Such teaching, then, obtrudes this compul-
sion, an atomic Anag\e, even upon Real Being.
Substitute, for the atoms, any other material
entities as principles and the cause of all things,
and at once Real Being becomes servile to the
determination set up by them.

THIRD ENNEAD I. 4

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
hut making each and everything; but they pose
this as a fate and a supremely dominating
cause; not merely all else that comes into be-
ing, 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.

Yet another school fastens on the universal
Circuit as embracing all things and producing
all by its motion and by the positions and mu-
tual aspect of the planets and fixed stars in
whose power of foretelling they find warrant
for the belief that this Circuit is the universal
determinant.

Finally, there are those that dwell on the in-
terconnection 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 de-
pend upon some one principle and a section
which ignores such a unity.

Of this last opinion we will have something
to say, but for the moment we will deal with
the former, taking the others in their turn.

3. "Atoms" or "elements" it is in either case
an absurdity, an impossibility, to hand over
the universe and its contents to material en-
tities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus oc-
casioned to call order, reasoning, and the gov-
erning soul into being; but the atomic origin
is, if we may use the phrase, the most impos-
sible.

A good deal of truth has resulted from the
discussion of this subject; but, even to admit
such principles does not compel us to admit
universal compulsion or any kind of "fate."

Suppose the atoms to exist:

These atoms are to move, one downwards
admitting a down and an up another slant-
wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict.
Nothing here is orderly; order has not come
into being, though the outcome, this Universe,
when it achieves existence, is all order; and
thus prediction and divination are utterly im-
possible, whether by the laws of the science
what science can operate where there is no or-
der? or by divine possession and inspiration,

which no less require that the future be some-
thing regulated.

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught
may very well be under compulsion to yield to
whatsoever the atoms may bring: but would
anyone pretend that the acts and states of a soul
or mind could be explained by any atomic
movements? How can we imagine that the on-
slaught of an atom, striking downwards or
dashing in from any direction, could force the
soul to definite and necessary reasonings or im-
pulses or into any reasonings, impulses or
thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? And
what of the soul's resistance to bodily states?
What movement of atoms could compel one
man to be a geometrician, set another studying
arithmetic or astronomy, lead a third to the
philosophic life? In a word, if we must go, like
soulless bodies, wherever bodies push and drive
us, there is an end to our personal act and to
our very existence as living beings.

The School that erects other material forces
into universal causes is met by the same rea-
soning: we say that while these can warm us
and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of ex-
istence, they can be causes of nothing that is
done in the sphere of mind or soul: all this
must be traceable to quite another kind of
Principle.

4. Another theory:

The Universe is permeated by one Soul,
Cause of all things and events; every separate
phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in
its place with the general movement; all the
various causes spring into action from one
source: therefore, it is argued, the entire de-
scending claim of causes and all their interac-
tion must follow inevitably and so constitute a
universal determination. A plant rises from a
root, and we are asked on that account to rea-
son that not only the interconnection linking
the root to all the members and every member
to every other but the entire activity and experi-
ence of the plant, as well, must be one organ-
ized overruling, a "destiny" of the plant.

But such an extremity of determination, a
destiny so all-pervasive, does away with the
very destiny that is affirmed: it shatters the se-
quence and co-operation of causes.

It would be unreasonable to attribute to des-
tiny the movement of our limbs dictated by the
mind and will: this is no case of something out-
side bestowing motion while another thing ac-
cepts it and is thus set into action; the mind it-
self is the prime mover.

Similarly in the case of the universal system;

PLOTINUS

if all that performs act and is subject to experi-
ence constitutes one substance, if one thing
does not really produce another thing under
causes leading back continuously one to an-
other, then it is not a truth that all happens by
causes, there is nothing but a rigid unity. We
are no "We": nothing is our act; our thought
is not ours; our decisions are the reasoning of
something outside ourselves; we are no more
agents than our feet are kickers when we use
them to kick with.

No; each several thing must be a separate
thing; there must be acts and thoughts that are
our own; the good and evil done by each hu-
man being must be his own; and it is quite cer-
tain that we must not lay any vileness to the
charge of the All.

5. But perhaps the explanation of every par-
ticular act or event is rather that they are de-
termined by the spheric movement the Phora
and by the changing position of the heavenly
bodies as these stand at setting or rising or in
mid-course and in various aspects with each
other.

Augury, it is urged, is able from these indi-
cations to foretell what is to happen not merely
to the universe as a whole, but even to indi-
viduals, and this not merely as regards external
conditions of fortune but even as to the events
of the mind. We observe, too, how growth or
check in other orders of beings animals and
plants is determined by their sympathetic
relations with the heavenly bodies and how
widely they are influenced by them, how, for
example, the various countries show a differ-
ent produce according to their situation on the
earth and especially their lie towards the sun.
And the effect of place is not limited to plants
and animals; it rules human beings too, deter-
mining their appearance, their height and col-
our, their mentality and their desires, their pur-
suits and their moral habit. Thus the universal
circuit would seem to be the monarch of the
AIL

Now a first answer to this theory is that its
advocates have merely devised another shift
to immolate to the heavenly bodies all that is
ours, our acts of will and our states, all the evil
in us, our entire personality; nothing is al-
lowed to us; we are left to be stones set rolling,
not men, not beings whose nature implies a
task.

But we must be allowed our own with the
understanding that to what is primarily ours,
our personal holding, there is added some in-
flux from the All the distinction must be

made between our individual act and what is
thrust upon us: we are not to be immolated to
the stars.

Place and climate, no doubt, produce con-
stitutions warmer or colder; and the parents
tell on the offspring, as is seen in the resem-
blance between them, very general in personal
appearance and noted also in some of the un-
reflecting states of the mind.

None the less, in spite of physical resem-
blance and similar environment, we observe
the greatest difference in temperament and in
ideas: this side of the human being, then, de-
rives from some quite other Principle [than
any external causation or destiny] . A further
confirmation is found in the efforts we make
to correct both bodily constitution and mental
aspirations.

If the stars are held to be causing principles
on the ground of the possibility of foretelling
individual fate or fortune from observation of
their positions, then the birds and all the other
things which the soothsayer observes for divin-
ation must equally be taken as causing what
they indicate.

Some further considerations will help to
clarify this matter:

The heavens are observed at the moment of
a birth and the individual fate is thence pre-
dicted in the idea that the stars are no mere in-
dications, but active causes, of the future
events. Sometimes the Astrologers tell of noble
birth; "the child is born of highly placed par-
ents"; yet how is it possible to make out the
stars to be causes of a condition which ex-
isted in the father and mother previously to
that star pattern on which the prediction is
based?

And consider still further:

They are really announcing the fortunes of
parents from the birth of children; the char-
acter and career of children are included in the
predictions as to the parents they predict for
the yet unborn ! in the lot of one brother they
are foretelling the death of another; a girl's
fate includes that of a future husband, a boy's
that of a wife.

Now, can we think that the star-grouping
over any particular birth can be the cause of
what stands already announced in the facts
about the parents? Either the previous star-
groupings were the determinants of the child's
future career or, if they were not, then neither
is the immediate grouping. And notice further
that physical likeness to the parents the As-
trologers hold is of purely domestic origin:

THIRD ENNEAD L 8

this implies that ugliness and beauty are so
caused and not by astral movements.

Again, there must at one and the same time
be a widespread coming to birth men, and
the most varied forms o animal life at the
same moment and these should all be under
the one destiny since the one pattern rules at
the moment; how explain that identical star-
groupings give here the human form, there the
animal?

6. But in fact everything follows its own
Kind; the birth is a horse because it comes
from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from
the Human Kind; offspring answers to species.
Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a very power-
ful influence upon the thing brought into be-
ing: allow the stars a wide material action upon
the bodily part of the man, producing heat and
cold and their natural resultants in the physical
constitution; still does such action explain char-
acter, vocation and especially all that seems
quite independent of material elements, a man
taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and
becoming an originator in any of these pur-
suits? And can we imagine the stars, divine be-
ings, bestowing wickedness? And what of a
doctrine that makes them wreak vengeance, as
for a wrong, because they are in their decline
or are being carried to a position beneath the
earth as if a decline from our point of view
brought any change to themselves, as if they
ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and
to make the same figure around the earth.

Nor may we think that these divine beings
lose or gain in goodness as they see this one or
another of the company in various aspects, and
that in their happier position they are benig-
nant to us and, less pleasantly situated, turn
maleficent. We can but believe that their cir-
cuit is for the protection of the entirety of
things while they furnish the incidental serv-
ice of being letters on which the augur, ac-
quainted with that alphabet, may look and
read the future from their pattern arriving at
the thing signified by such analogies as that a
soaring bird tells of some lofty event.

7. It remains to notice the theory of the one
Causing-Principle alleged to interweave every-
thing with everything else, to make things into
a chain, to determine the nature and condition
of each phenomenon a Principle which, act-
ing through seminal Reason-Forms Logoi
Spermati%oi elaborates all that exists and
happens.

The doctrine is close to that which makes
the Soul of the Universe the source and cause

of all condition and of all movement whether
without or supposing that we are allowed as
individuals some little power towards personal
act within ourselves.

But it is the theory of the most rigid and
universal Necessity: all the causative forces
enter into the system, and so every several
phenomenon rises necessarily; where nothing
escapes Destiny, nothing has power to check or
to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it
were, from one general cause leave us no re-
source but to go where they drive. All our ideas
will be determined by a chain of previous
causes; our doings will be determined by those
ideas; personal action becomes a mere word.
That we are the agents does not save our free-
dom when our action is prescribed by those
causes; we have precisely what belongs to
everything that lives, to infants guided by
blind impulses, to lunatics; all these act; why>
even fire acts; there is act in everything that
follows the plan of its being, servilely.

No one that sees the implications of this
theory can hesitate: unable to halt at such a de-
terminant principle, we seek for other explana-
tions of our action.

8. What can this other cause be; one stand-
ing above those treated of; one that leaves noth-
ing causeless, that preserves sequence and
order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves
some reality and leaves room for prediction and
augury?

Soul: we must place at the crest of the world
of beings, this other Principle, not merely the
Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the
Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle,
is needed to be the bond of union in the total
of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things
from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless
and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond
the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into
body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign;
it would hold rank in a series.

Now the environment into which this inde-
pendent principle enters, when it comes to this
midpoint, will be largely led by secondary
causes [or, by chance-causes] : there will there-
fore be a compromise; the action of the Soul
will be in part guided by this environment
while in other matters it will be sovereign, lead-
ing 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 tem-
perament cannot escape desire and rage and is
abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbi-
trary in power. The soul of nobler nature holds

PLOTINUS

good against its surroundings; it is more apt
to change them than to be changed, so that of-
ten it improves the environment and, where
it must make concession, at least keeps its in-

SECOND TRACTATE
ON PROVIDENCE (i)

nocence.

9. We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is
brought about by this compromise between evil
and accidental circumstance: what room was
there for anything else than the thing that is?
Given all the causes, all must happen beyond
aye or nay that is, all the external and what-
ever may be due to the sidereal circuit there-
fore when the Soul has been modified by outer
forces and acts under that pressure so that what
it does is no more than an unreflecting accept-
ance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state
can be described as voluntary: so, too, when
even from within itself, it falls at times below
its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws
of action.

But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Prin-
ciple, to the guide, pure and detached and
native to itself, only then can we speak of per-
sonal operation, of voluntary act. Things so
done may truly be described as our doing, for
they have no other source; they are the issue of
the unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First,
a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors
of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyr-
anny of the desires which> where they can
break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no
act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus.

10. To sum the results of our argument: All
things and events are foreshown and brought
into being by causes; but the causation is of two
Kinds; there are results originating from the
Soul and results due to other causes, those of
the environment.

In the action of our Souls all that is done of
their own motion in the light of sound reason
is the Soul's work, while what is done where
they are hindered from their own action is not
so much done as suffered. Unwisdom, then, is
not due to the Soul, and, in general if we
mean by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves
an act is fated when it is contrary to wis-
dom.

But all our best is of our own doing: such is
our nature as long as we remain detached. The
wise and good do perform acts; their right ac-
tion is the expression of their own power:
in the others it comes in the breathing spaces
when the passions are in abeyance; but it is not
that they draw this occasional wisdom from
outside themselves; simply, they are for the
time being unhindered.

i. To make the existence and coherent struc-
ture of this Universe depend upon automatic
activity and upon chance is against all good
sense.

Such a notion could be entertained only
where there is neither intelligence nor even
ordinary perception; and reason enough has
been urged against it, though none is really
necessary.

But there is still the question as to the proc-
ess by which the individual things of this
sphere have come into being, how they were
made.

Some of them seem so undesirable as to cast
doubts upon a Universal Providence; and we
find, on the one hand, the denial of any con-
trolling power, on the other the belief that the
Kosmos is the work of an evil creator.

This matter must be examined through and
through from the very first principles. We
may, however, omit for the present any con-
sideration of the particular providence, that
beforehand decision which accomplishes or
holds things in abeyance to some good purpose
and gives or withholds in our own regard:
when we have established the Universal Provi-
dence which we affirm, we can link the sec-
ondary with it.

Of course the belief that after a certain lapse
of time a Kosmos previously non-existent came
into being would imply a foreseeing and a rea-
soned plan on the part of God providing for
the production of the Universe and securing
all possible perfection in it a guidance and
partial providence, therefore, such as is indi-
cated. But since we hold the eternal existence
of the Universe, the utter absence of a begin-
ning to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent
reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in
the Universe as a universal consonance with
the divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos
is subsequent not in time but in the fact of
derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelli-
gence, preceding it in Kind, is its cause as be-
ing the Archetype and Model which it merely
images, the primal by which, from all eternity,
it has its existence and subsistence.

The relationship may be presented thus:

The authentic and primal Kosmos is the Be-
ing of the Intellectual Principle and of the
Veritable Existent. This contains within itself
no spatial distinction, and has none of the
feebleness of division, and even its parts bring

THIRD ENNEAD II. 3

no incompleteness to it since here the indi-
vidual is not severed from the entire. In this
Nature inheres all life and all intellect, a life
living and having intellection as one act within
a unity: every part that it gives forth is a
whole; all its content is its very own, for there
is here no separation of thing from thing, no
part standing in isolated existence estranged
from the rest, and therefore nowhere is there
any wronging of any other, any opposition.
Everywhere one and complete, it is at rest
throughout and shows difference at no point;
it does not make over any of its content into
any new form; there can be no reason for
changing what is everywhere perfect.

Why should Reason elaborate yet another
Reason, or Intelligence another Intelligence?
An indwelling power of making things is in
the character of a being not at all points as it
should be but making, moving, by reason of
some failure in quality. Those whose nature is
all blessedness have no more to do than to re-
pose in themselves and be their being.

A widespread activity is dangerous to those
who must go out from themselves to act. But
such is the blessedness of this Being that in its
very non-action it magnificently operates and
in its self-dwelling it produces mightily.

2. By derivation from that Authentic Kos-
mos, one within itself, there subsists this lower
kosmos, no longer a true unity.

It is multiple, divided into various elements,
thing standing apart from thing in a new es-
trangement. No longer is there concord un-
broken; hostility, too, has entered as the result
of difference and distance; imperfection has in-
evitably introduced discord; for a part is not
self-sufficient, it must pursue something out-
side itself for its fulfilment, and so it becomes
the enemy to what it needs.

This Kosmos of parts has come into being
not as the result of a judgement establishing its
desirability, but by the sheer necessity of a sec-
ondary Kind.

The Intellectual Realm was not of a nature
to be the ultimate of existents. It was the First
and it held great power, all there is of power;
this means that it is productive without seek-
ing to produce; for if effort and search were in-
cumbent upon it, the Act would not be its own,
would not spring from its essential nature; it
would be, like a craftsman, producing by a
power not inherent but acquired, mastered by
dint of study.

The Intellectual Principle, then, in its un-
perturbed serenity has brought the universe in-

to being, by communicating from its own store
to Matter: and this gift is the Reason-Form
flowing from it. For the Emanation of the In-
tellectual Principle is Reason, an emanation
unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle
continues to have place among beings.

The Reason-Principle within a seed contains
all the parts and qualities concentrated in iden-
tity; there is no distinction, no jarring, no inter-
nal hindering; then there comes a pushing out
into bulk, part rises in distinction with part,
and at once the members of the organism stand
in each other's way and begin to wear each
other down.

So from this, the One Intellectual Principle,
and the Reason-Form emanating from it, our
Universe rises and develops part, and inevitably
are formed groups concordant and helpful in
contrast with groups discordant and comba-
tive; sometimes of choice and sometimes inci-
dentally, the parts maltreat each other; engen-
dering proceeds by destruction.

Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the
divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act;
each utters its own voice, but all is brought in-
to accord, into an ordered system, for the uni-
versal purpose, by the ruling Reason-Principle.
This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason,
like the Supernal, but participant in Intelli-
gence and Reason: it stands in need of the har-
monizing because it is the meeting ground of
Necessity and divine Reason Necessity pull-
ing towards the lower, towards the unreason
which is its own characteristic, while yet the
Intellectual Principle remains sovereign over it.

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, pre-
siding 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.

3. Nor would it be sound to condemn this
Kosmos as less than beautiful, as less than the
noblest possible in the corporeal; and neither
can any charge be laid against its source.

The world, we must reflect, is a product of
Necessity, not of deliberate purpose: it is due
to a higher Kind engendering in its own like-
ness by a natural process. And none the less, a

second consideration, if
brought it into being it would still be no dis-
grace to its maker for it stands a stately
whole, complete within itself, serving at once
its own purpose and that of all its parts which,
leading and lesser alike, are of such a nature as
to further the interests of the total. It is, there-
fore, impossible to condemn the whole on the
merits of the parts which, besides, must be
judged only as they enter harmoniously or not
into the whole, the main consideration, quite
overpassing the members which thus cease to
have importance. To linger about the parts is
to condemn not the Kosmos but some isolated
appendage of it; in the entire living Being we
fasten our eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the
marvellous spectacle of the complete Man; we
ignore all the tribes and kinds of animals ex-
cept for the meanest; we pass over an entire
race, humanity, and bring forward Thersites.
No: this thing that has come into Being is
the Kosmos complete: do but survey it, and
surely this is the pleading you will hear:

I am made by a God: from that God I
came perfect above all forms of life, ade-
quate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking
nothing: for I am the container of all, that
is, of every plant and every animal, of all the
Kinds of created things, and many Gods and
nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and
men happy in their goodness.

And do not think that, while earth is or-
nate with all its growths and with living
things of every race, and while the very sea
has answered to the power of Soul, do not
think that the great air and the ether and the
far-spread heavens remain void of it: there
it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life
into the stars and into that orderly eternal
circuit of the heavens which in its conscious
movement ever about the one Centre, seek-
ing nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the
divine Mind. And all that is within me
strives towards the Good; and each, to the
measure of its faculty, attains. For from that
Good all the heavens depend, with all my
own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my
every part, and all that lives and grows, and
even all in me that you may judge inani-
mate.

But there are degrees of participation: here
no more than Existence, elsewhere Life; and,
in Life, sometimes mainly that of Sensation,
higher again that of Reason, finally Life in all
its fullness. We have no right to demand equal
powers in the unequal: the finger is not to be

PLOTINUS
considered plan asked to see; there is the eye for that; a finger

has its own business to be finger and have
finger power.

4. That water extinguishes fire and fire con-
sumes other things should not astonish us. The
thing destroyed derived its being from outside
itself: this is no case of a self -originating sub-
stance being annihilated by an external; it rose
on the ruin of something else, and thus in its
own ruin it suffers nothing strange; and for
every fire quenched, another is kindled.

In the immaterial heaven every member is
unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of
our universe, while the whole has life eternally
and so too all the nobler and lordlier compo-
nents, the Souls pass from body to body enter-
ing into varied forms and, when it may, a
Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and
dwell with the one Soul of all. For the em-
bodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: in-
dividual or partial things exist by virtue of Uni-
versals; from these priors they derive their life
and maintenance, for life here is a thing of
change; only in that prior realm is it unmov-
ing. From that unchangingness, change had
to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its
derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the
respiration of the still life of the divine.

The conflict and destruction that reign a-
mong living beings are inevitable, since things
here are derived, brought into existence be-
cause the Divine Reason which contains all of
them in the upper Heavens how could they
come here unless they were There? must out-
flow over the whole extent of Matter.

Similarly, the very wronging of man by man
may be derived from an effort towards the
Good; foiled, in their weakness, of their true
desire, they turn against each other: still, when
they do wrong, they pay the penalty that of
having hurt their Souls by their evil conduct
and of degradation to a lower place for noth-
ing can ever escape what stands decreed in the
law of the Universe.

This is not to accept the idea, sometimes
urged, that order is an outcome of disorder and
law of lawlessness, as if evil were a necessary
preliminary to their existence or their mani-
festation: on the contrary order is the original
and enters this sphere as imposed from with-
out: it is because order, law and reason exist
that there can be disorder; breach of law and
unreason exist because Reason exists not that
these better things are directly the causes of the
bad but simply that what ought to absorb the
Best is prevented by its own nature, or by some

THIRD ENNEAD II. 6

accident, or by foreign interference. An entity
which must look outside itself for a law, may
be foiled of its purpose by either an internal or
an external cause; there will be some flaw in
its own nature, or it will be hurt by some alien
influence, for often harm follows, unintended,
upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite
unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the
other hand, as have freedom of motion under
their own will sometimes take the right turn,
sometimes the wrong.

Why the wrong course is followed is scarce-
ly worth enquiring: a slight deviation at the
beginning develops with every advance into a
continuously wider and graver error especial-
ly since there is the attached body with its in-
evitable concomitant of desire and the first
step, the hasty movement not previously con-
sidered and not immediately corrected, ends
by establishing a set habit where there was at
first only a fall.

Punishment naturally follows: there is no in-
justice in a man suffering what belongs to the
condition in which he is; nor can we ask to be
happy when our actions have not earned us
happiness; the good y only, are happy; divine
beings are happy only because they are good.

5. Now, once Happiness is possible at all to
Souls in this Universe, if some fail of it, the
blame must fall not upon the place but upon
the feebleness insufficient to the staunch com-
bat in the one arena where the rewards of ex-
cellence are offered. Men are not born divine;
what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine
life. And poverty and sickness mean nothing
to the good only to the evil are they disas-
trous and where there is body there must be
ill health.

Besides, these accidents are not without their
service in the co-ordination and completion of
the Universal system.

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason
whose control nothing anywhere eludes
employs that ending to the beginning of some-
thing new; and, so, when the body suffers and
the Soul, under the affliction, loses power, all
that has been bound under illness and evil is
brought into a new set of relations, into an-
other class or order. Some of these troubles are
helpful to the very sufferers poverty and sick-
ness, for example and as for vice, even this
brings something to the general service: it acts
as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways
even, produces good; thus, by setting men face
to face with the ways and consequences of in-
iquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the

deeper mind and sets the understanding to
work; by the contrast of the evil under which
wrong-doers labour it displays the worth of the
right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but,
as we have indicated, once the wrong has come
to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to
good ends; and, precisely, the proof of the
mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble
nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the
material of unknown forms.

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 ineradi-
cable: 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.

6. As for the disregard of desert the good
afflicted, the unworthy thriving it is a sound
explanation no doubt that to the good nothing
is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still
the question remains why should what essen-
tially offends our nature fall to the good while
the wicked enjoy all it demands? How can
such an allotment be approved ?

No doubt since pleasant conditions add noth-
ing to true happiness and the unpleasant do
not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions
matter little: as well complain that a good man
happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome.

Still, under such a dispensation, there would
surely be a propriety, a reasonableness, a re-
gard to merit which, as things are, do not ap-
pear, though this would certainly be in keep-
ing with the noblest Providence: even though
external conditions do not affect a man's hold
upon good or evil, none the less it would seem
utterly unfitting that the bad should be the
masters, be sovereign in the state, while hon-
ourable men are slaves: a wicked ruler may
commit the most lawless acts; and in war the
worst men have a free hand and perpetrate
every kind of crime against their prisoners.

We are forced to ask how such things can be,
under a Providence. Certainly a maker must
consider his work as a whole, but none the less
he should see to the due ordering of all the parts,
especially when these parts have Soul, that is,
are Living and Reasoning Beings: the Provi-
dence must reach to all the details; its func-
tioning must consist in neglecting no point*

PLOTINUS

Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that
the Universe lies under an Intellectual Princi-
ple whose power has touched every existent, we
cannot be absolved from the attempt to show
in what way the detail of this sphere is just.

7. A preliminary observation: in looking for
excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kos-
mos, we cannot require all that is implied in
the excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to
ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this
Universe contains body, we must allow for
some bodily influence upon the total and be
thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing
of what its nature allowed it to receive from
the Divine Reason.

Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the
finest type of the human being as known here,
we would certainly not demand that he prove
identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect;
we would think it enough in the Creator to
have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve
and bone under Reason as to give grace to these
corporeal elements and to have made it possible
for Reason to have contact with Matter.

Our progress towards the object of our in-
vestigation 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.

We begin with evil acts entirely dependent
upon the Souls which perpetrate them the
harm, for example, which perverted Souls do
to the good and to each other. Unless the f ore-
planning power alone is to be charged with the
vice in such Souls, we have no ground of ac-
cusation, no claim to redress: the blame lies on
the Soul exercising its choice. Even a Soul, we
have seen, must have its individual movement;
it is not abstract Spirit; the first step towards
animal life has been taken and the conduct will
naturally be in keeping with that character.

It is not because the world existed that Souls
are here: before the world was, they had it in
them to be of the world, to concern themselves
with it, to presuppose it, to administer it: it
was in their nature to produce it by whatever
method, whether by giving forth some emana-
tion while they themselves remained above, or
by an actual descent, or in both ways together,
some presiding from above, others descending;
for we are not at the moment concerned about
the mode of creation but are simply urging
that, however the world was produced, no
blame falls on Providence for what exists with-
in it.

There remains the other phase of the ques-

tion the distribution of evil to the opposite
classes of men: the good go bare while the
wicked are rich: all that human need demands,
the least deserving have in abundance; it is
they that rule; peoples and states are at their
disposal. Would not all this imply that the di-
vine power does not reach to earth?

That it does is sufficiently established by the
fact that Reason rules in the lower things: ani-
mals and plants have their share in Reason,
Soul and Life.

Perhaps, then, it reaches to earth but is not
master over all?

We answer that the universe is one living
organism: as well maintain that while human
head and face are the work of nature and of
the ruling reason-principle, the rest of the
frame is due to other agencies accident or
sheer necessity and owes its inferiority to this
origin, or to the incompetence of unaided Na-
ture. And even granting that those less noble
members are not in themselves admirable it
would still be neither pious nor even reverent
to censure the entire structure.

8. Thus we come to our enquiry as to the
degree of excellence found in things of this
Sphere, and how far they belong to an ordered
system or in what degree they are, at least, not
evil.

Now in every living being the upper parts
head, face are the most beautiful, the mid
and lower members inferior. In the Universe
the middle and lower members are human be-
ings; above them, the Heavens and the Gods
that dwell there; these Gods with the entire
circling expanse of the heavens constitute the
greater part of the Kosmos: the earth is but a
central point, and may be considered as simply
one among the stars. Yet human wrong-doing
is made a matter of wonder; we are evidently
asked to take humanity as the choice member
of the Universe, nothing wiser existent!

But humanity, in reality, is poised midway
between gods and beasts, and inclines now to
the one order, now to the other; some men
grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the
greater number stand neutral. But those that
are corrupted to the point of approximating to
irrational animals and wild beasts pull the mid-
folk about and inflict wrong upon them; the
victims are no doubt better than the wrong-
doers, but are at the mercy of their inferiors
in the field in which they themselves are in-
ferior, where, that is, they cannot be classed
among the good since they have not trained
themselves in self-defence.

THIRD ENNEAD II. 9

A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in
that respect inferior to the intermediate class,
but in good physical training, attack and throw
another set, trained neither physically nor mor-
ally, and make off with their food and their
dainty clothes. What more is called for than a
laugh?

And surely even the lawgiver would be right
in allowing the second group to suffer this
treatment, the penalty of their sloth and self-
indulgence: the gymnasium lies there before
them, and they, in laziness and luxury and
listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall
like fat-loaded sheep, a prey to the wolves.

But the evil-doers also have their punish-
ment: first they pay in that very wolfishness, in
the disaster to their human quality: and next
there is laid up for them the due of their Kind:
living ill here, they will not get off by death;
on every precedent through all the line there
waits its sequent, reasonable and natural
worse to the bad, better to the good.

This at once brings us outside the gymna-
sium with its fun for boys; they must grow up,
both kinds, amid their childishness and both
one day stand girt and armed. Then there is a
finer spectacle than is ever seen by those that
train in the ring. But at this stage some have
not armed themselves and the duly armed
win the day.

Not even a God would have the right to deal
a blow for the un warlike: the law decrees that
to come safe out of battle is for fighting men,
not for those that pray. The harvest comes home
not for praying but for tilling; healthy days
are not for those that neglect their health: we
have no right to complain of the ignoble get-
ting the richer harvest if they are the only
workers in the fields, or the best.

Again: it is childish, while we carry on all
the affairs of our life to our own taste and not
as the Gods would have us, to expect them to
keep all well for us in spite of a life that is lived
without regard to the conditions which the
Gods have prescribed for our well-being. Yet
death would be better for us than to go on Hy-
ing lives condemned by the laws of the Uni-
verse. If things took the contrary course, if all
the modes of folly and wickedness brought no
trouble in life then indeed we might com-
plain of the indifference of a Providence leav-
ing the victory to evil.

Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled:
and this is just; the triumph of weaklings
would not be just.

9. It would not be just, because Providence

cannot be a something reducing us to nothing-
ness: to think of Providence as everything, with
no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the
Universe; such a providence could have no field
of action; nothing would exist except the Di-
vine. As things are, the Divine, of course, ex-
ists, but has reached forth to something other
not to reduce that to nothingness but to pre-
side over it; thus in the case of Man, for in-
stance, the Divine presides as the Providence,
preserving the character of human nature, that
is the character of a being under the provi-
dential law, which, again, implies subjection
to what that law may enjoin.

And that law enjoins that those who have
made themselves good shall know the best of
life, here and later, the bad the reverse. But the
law does not warrant the wicked in expecting
that their prayers should bring others to sacri-
fice themselves for their sakes; or that the gods
should lay aside the divine life in order to di-
rect their daily concerns; or that good men,
who have chosen a path nobler than all earthly
rule, should become their rulers. The perverse
have never made a single effort to bring the
good into authority, nor do they take any
steps to improve themselves; they are all spite
against anyone that becomes good of his own
motion, though if good men were placed in
authority the total of goodness would be in-
creased.

In sum: Man has come into existence, a liv-
ing being but not a member of the noblest or-
der; he occupies by choice an intermediate
rank; still, in that place in which he exists,
Providence does not allow him to- be reduced
to nothing; on the contrary he is ever being led
upwards by all those varied devices which the
Divine employs in its labour to increase the
dominance of moral value. The human race,
therefore, is not deprived by Providence of its
rational being; it retains its share, though
necessarily limited, in wisdom, intelligence, ex-
ecutive power and right doing, the right doing,
at least, of individuals to each other and even
in wronging others people think they are do-
ing right and only paying what is due.

Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect
as the scheme allows; a part, no doubt, in the
fabric of the All, he yet holds a lot higher than
that of all the other living things of earth.

Now, no one of any intelligence complains
of these others, man's inferiors, which serve to
the adornment of the world; it would be feeble
indeed to complain of animals biting man, as
if we were to pass our days asleep. No: the ani-

PLOTINUS

mal, too, exists of necessity, and is serviceable
in many ways, some obvious and many pro-
gressively discovered so that not one lives
without profit to itself and even to humanity.
It is ridiculous, also, to complain that many of
them are dangerous there are dangerous men
abroad as well and if they distrust us, and in
their distrust attack, is that anything to wonder
at? ^

10. But: if the evil in men is involuntary, if
their own will has not made them what they
are, how can we either blame wrong-doers or
even reproach their victims with suffering
through their own fault?

If there is a Necessity, bringing about hu-
man wickedness either by force of the celestial
movement or by a rigorous sequence set up by
the First Cause, is not the evil a thing rooted
in Nature? And if thus the Reason-Principle of
the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is
injustice?

No: Men are no doubt involuntary sinners in
the sense that they do not actually desire to sin;
but this does not alter the fact that wrong-
doers, of their own choice, are, themselves, the
agents; it is because they themselves act that
the sin Is in their own; if they were not agents
they could not sin.

The Necessity [held to underlie human
wickedness] is not an outer force [actually
compelling the individual], but exists only in
the sense of a universal relationship.

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 Prin-
ciple, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevita-
bly completed; but each and every principle
contributes towards the sequence. Now Men
are Principles, or, at least, tiiey are moved by
their characteristic nature towards all that is
good, and that nature is a Principle, a freely
acting cause.

11. Are we, then, to conclude that particular
things are determined by Necessities rooted in
Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that
everything is as good as anything can be?

No: the Reason-Principle is the sovereign,
making all: it wills things as they are and, in
its reasonable act, it produces even what we
know as evil: it cannot desire all to be good: an
artist would not make an animal all eyes; and

in the same way, the Reason-Principle would
not make all divine; it makes Gods but also
celestial spirits, the intermediate order, then
men, then the animals; all is graded succession,
and this in no spirit of grudging but in the ex-
pression of a Reason teeming with intellectual
variety.

We are like people ignorant of painting who
complain that the colours are not beautiful
everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has
laid on the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we
are censuring a drama because the persons are
not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic
and some scurrilous clown; yet take away the
low characters and the power of the drama is
gone; these are part and parcel of it.

12. Suppose this Universe were the direct
creation of the Reason-Principle applying it-
self, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining,
that is, the hostility to partition which it de-
rives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle
then, this its product, so produced, would be
of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But
the Reason-Principle could not be a thing of
entire identity or even of closely compact di-
versity; and the mode in which it is here mani-
fested is no matter of censure since its function
is to be all things, each single thing in some
distinctive way.

But has it not, besides itself entering Matter,
brought other beings down? Has it not for ex-
ample brought Souls into Matter and, in adapt-
ing them to its creation, twisted them against
their own nature and been the ruin of many of
them? And can this be right?

The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair
sense, members of this Reason-Principle and
that it has not adapted them to the creation by
perverting them, but has set them in the place
here to which their quality entitles them.

13. And we must not despise the familiar ob-
servation that there is something more to be
considered than the present. There are the
periods of the past and, again, those in the fu-
ture; and these have everything to do with fix-
ing worth of place.

Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a
slave because he abused his power and because
the fall is to his future good. Those that have
money will be made poor and to the good
poverty is no hindrance. Those that have un-
justly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as re-
gards the murderer but justly as regards the
victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown
into the path of those that administer the mer-
ited treatment.

THIRD ENNEAD II. 15

It Is not an accident that makes a man a
slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every
bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once
did what he now suffers. A man that murders
his mother will become a woman and be mur-
dered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman
will become a woman, to be wronged.

Hence arises that awesome word "Adrasteia"
[the Inevadable Retribution] ; for in very truth
this ordinance is an Adrasteia, Justice itself and
a wonderful wisdom.

We cannot but recognize from what we ob-
serve in this universe that some such principle
of order prevails throughout the entire of ex-
istence 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 little-
ness as one would think Providence must dis-
dain: the varied workmanship of wonder in
any and every animal form; the world of vege-
tation, too; the grace of fruits and even of
leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diver-
sity 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.

In all the changing, there is no change by
chance: there is no taking of new forms but to
desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine
Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of
its quality; its quality is the expression of its
essential Being: and this essential Being in the
Divine is the Being whose activities produce
as one thing the desirable and the just for i
the good and the just are not produced there,
where, then, have they their being?

14. The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in
keeping with the Intellectual Principle. True,
no reasoning went to its creation, but it so
stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder
since no reasoning could be able to make it
otherwise at the spectacle before it, a product
which, even in the Kinds of the partial and par-
ticular Sphere, displays the Divine Intelligence
to a degree in which no arranging by reason
could express it. Every one of the ceaselessly re-
current types of being manifests a creating Rea-
son-Principle above all censure. No fault is to
be found unless on the assumption that every-
thing ought to corne into being with all the per-
fection of those that have never known such a
coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of
the Intellectual realm and things- of the realm
of sense must remain one unbroken identity
for ever.

In this demand for more good than exists,
there is implied a failure to recognize that the
form allotted to each entity is sufficient in it-
self; it is like complaining because one kind of
animal lacks horns. We ought to understand
both that the Reason-Principle must extend to
every possible existent and, at the same time,
that every greater must include lesser things,
that to every whole belong its parts., and that
all cannot be equality unless all part is to be
absent.

This is why in the Over- World each entity is
all, while here, below, the single thing is not
ail [is not the Universe but a "Self"]- Thus
too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a
part, is not Humanity complete: but whereso-
ever there is associated with the parts some-
thing that is no part [but a Divine, an Intellec-
tual Being], this makes a whole of that in
which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing,
cannot be required to have attained to the very
summit of goodness: if he had, he would have
ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there
is any grudging in the whole towards the part
that grows in goodness and dignity; such an
increase in value is a gain to the beauty of the
whole; the lesser grows by being made over in
the likeness of the greater, by being admitted,
as it were, to something of that greatness, by
sharing in that rank, and thus even from this
place of man, from man's own self, something
gleams forth, as the stars shine in the divine
firmament, so that all appears one great and
lovely figure living or wrought in the fur-
naces of craftsmanship with stars radiant not
only in the ears and on the brow but on the
breasts too, and wherever else they may be dis-
played in beauty.

15. These considerations apply very well to
things considered as standing alone: but there
is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we
think of all these forms, permanent and cease-
lessly produced, in mutual relationship.

The animals devour each other: men attack
each other: all is war without rest, without
truce: this gives new force to the question how
Reason can be author of the plan and how all
can be declared well done.

This new difficulty is not met by the former
answer; that all stands as weH as die nature of
things allows; that the blame for their condi-
tion falls on Matter dragging them down; that,
given the plan as we know it, evil cannot be
eliminated and should not be; that the Matter
making its presence felt is still not supreme but
remains an element taken in from outside to

contribute to a definite total, or rather to be it-
self brought to order by Reason.

The Divine Reason is the beginning and the
end; all that comes into being must be rational
and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme
reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the
necessity of this bandit war of man and beast?

This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary
as the means to the transmutation of living
things which could not keep form for ever
even though no other killed them: what griev-
ance is it that when they must go their despatch
Is so planned as to be serviceable to others?

Still more, what does it matter when they
are devoured only to return in some new form?
It comes to no more than the murder of one of
the personages in a play; the actor alters his
make-up and enters in a new role. The actor,
of course, was not really killed; but if dying is
but changing a body as the actor changes a cos-
tume, or even an exit from the body like the
exit of the actor from the boards when he has
no more to, say or do, what is there so very
dreadful in this transformation of living beings
one into another?

Surely it is much better so than if they had
never existed: that way would mean the bleak
quenching of life, precluded from passing out-
side itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copi-
ously throughout a Universe, engendering the
universal things and weaving variety into their
being, never at rest from producing an endless
sequence of comeliness and shapeliness, a liv-
ing pastime*

Men directing their weapons against each
other under doom of death yet neatly lined
up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of
their sport this is enough to tell us that all hu-
man intentions are but play, that death is noth-
ing terrible, that to die in a war or in a fight is
but to taste a little beforehand what old age
has in store, to go away earlier and come back
the sooner. So for misfortunes that may ac-
company life, the loss of property, for instance;
the loser will see that there was a time when it
was not his, that its possession is but a mock
boon to the robbers, who will in their turn lose
it to others, and even that to retain property is
a greater loss than to forfeit it.

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduc-
tion and sacking of cities, all must be to us just
such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a
play; all is but the varied incident of a plot,
costume on and off, acted grief and lament.
For on earth, in all the succession o life, it is
not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of

PLOTINUS

the authentic man, that grieves and complains
and acts out the plot on this world stage which
men have dotted with stages of their own con-
structing. All this is the doing of man knowing
no more than to live the lower and outer life,
and never perceiving that, in his weeping and
in his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to
handle austere matters austerely is reserved for
the thoughtful: the other kind of man is him-
self a futility. Those incapable of thinking
gravely read gravity into frivolities which cor-
respond to their own frivolous Nature, Anyone
that joins in their trifling and so comes to look
on life with their eyes must understand that by
lending himself to such idleness he has laid
aside his own character. If Socrates himself
takes part in the trifling, he trifles in the outer
Socrates.

We must remember, too, that we cannot take
tears and laments as proof that anything is
wrong; children cry and whimper where there
is nothing amiss.

1 6. But if all this is true, what room is left
for evil? Where are we to place wrong-doing
and sin?

How explain that in a world organized in
good, the efficient agents [human beings] be-
have unjustly, commit sin? And how comes
misery if neither sin nor injustice exists?

Again, if all our action is determined by a
natural process, how can the distinction be
maintained between behaviour in accordance
with nature and behaviour in conflict with it?

And what becomes of blasphemy against the
divine? The blasphemer is made what he is:
a dramatist has written a part insulting and
maligning himself and given it to an actor to
play.

These considerations oblige us to state the
Logos [the Reason-Principle of the Universe]
once again, and more clearly, and to justify its
nature.

This Reason-Principle, then let us dare the
definition in the hope of conveying the truth
this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle
unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect;
nor does it descend from the pure Soul alone;
it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense,
it is a radiation from both those divine Hy-
postases; the Intellectual Principle and the Soul
the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual
Principle engender this Logos which is a Life
holding restfully a certain measure of Reason.

Now all life, even the least valuable, is an
activity, and not a blind activity like that of
flame; even where there is not sensation the ac*

THIRD ENNEAD II. 17

tivity of life is no mere haphazard play of
Movement: any object in which life is present,
and object which participates in Life, is at once
enreasoned in the sense that the activity pecu-
liar to life is formative, shaping as it moves.

Life, then, aims at pattern as does the pan-
tomimic dancer with his set movements; the
mime, in himself, represents life, and, besides,
his movements proceed in obedience to a pat-
tern designed to symbolize life.

Thus far to give us some idea of the nature
of Life in general.

But this Reason-Principle which emanates
from the complete unity, divine Mind, and the
complete unity Life [=Soul] is neither a
uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete di-
vine Mind, nor does it give itself whole and all-
including to its subject. [By an imperfect com-
munication ] it sets up a conflict of part against
part: it produces imperfect things and so en-
genders and maintains war and attack, and
thus its unity can be that only of a sum-total
not of a thing undivided. At war with itself in
the parts which it now exhibits, it has the un-
ity, or harmony, of a drama torn with struggle.
The drama, o course, brings the conflicting
elements to one final harmony, weaving the en-
tire story of the clashing characters into one
thing; while in the Logos the conflict of the
divergent elements rises within the one ele-
ment, the Reason-Principle: the comparison
therefore is rather with a harmony emerging
directly from the conflicting elements them-
selves, and the question becomes what intro-
duces clashing elements among these Reason-
Principles.

Now in the case of music, tones high and low
are the product of Reason-Principles which, by
the fact that they are Principles of harmony,
meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute
Harmony, a more comprehensive Principle,
greater than they and including them as its
parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we
find contraries white and black, hot and cold,
winged and wingless, footed and footless, rea-
soning and unreasoning but all these ele-
ments are members of one living body, their
sum-total; the Universe is a self-accordant en-
tity, its members everywhere clashing but the
total being the manifestation of a Reason-
Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then,
must be the unification of conflicting Reason-
Principles whose very opposition is the sup-
port of its coherence and, almost, of its Being.

And indeed, if it were not multiple, it could
not be a Universal Principle, it could not even

be at all a Reason-Principle; in the fact of its
being a Reason-Principle is contained the fact
of interior difference. Now the maximum of
difference is contrariety; admitting that this
differentiation exists and creates, it will create
difference in the greatest and not in the least
degree; in other words, the Reason-Principle,
bringing about differentiation to the uttermost
degree, will of necessity create contrarieties: it
will be complete only by producing itself not in
merely diverse things but in contrary things.

17. The nature of the Reason-Principle is
adequately expressed in its Act and, therefore,
the wider its extension the nearer will its pro-
ductions approach to full contrariety: hence
the world of sense is less a unity than is its Rea-
son-Principle; it contains a wider multiplicity
and contrariety: its partial members will, there-
fore, be urged by a closer intention towards
fullness of life, a warmer desire for unification.

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

Thus, with the good we have the bad: we
have the opposed movements of a dancer
guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his
steps the good as against the bad, and see that
in the opposition lies the merit of the design.

But, thus, the wicked disappear?

No: their wickedness remains; simply, their
rfile is not of their own planning.

But, surely, this excuses them?

No; excuse lies with the Reason-Principle
and the Reason-Principle does not excuse them.

No doubt all are members of this Principle
but one is a good man, another is bad the
larger class, this and it goes as in a play; the
poet while he gives each actor a part is also
using them as they are in their own persons:
he does not himself rank the men as leading
actor, second, third; he simply gives suitable
words to each, and by that assignment fixes
each man's standing.

Thus, every man has his place, a place that
fits the good man, a place that fits the bad: each
within the two orders of them makes his way,
naturally, reasonably, to the place, good or bad,
that suits him, and takes the position he has
made his own. There he talks and acts, in blas-
phemy and crime or in all goodness: for the
actors bring to this play what they were before
it was ever staged.

In the dramas of human art, the poet pro-
vides the words but the actors add their own

PLOTINUS

quality, good or bad for they have more to do
than merely repeat the author's words in the
truer drama which dramatic genius imitates in
its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part as-
signed by the creator of the piece.

As the actors of our stages get their masks
and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a
Soul is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphaz-
ard but always under a Reason: it adapts itself
to the fortunes assigned to it, attunes itself,
ranges itself righdy to the drama, to the whole
Principle of the piece: then it speaks out its
business, exhibiting at the same time all that a
Soul can express of its own quality, as a singer
in a song. A voice, a bearing, naturally fine or
vulgar, may increase the charm of a piece; on
the other hand, an actor with his ugly voice
may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the
drama stands as good a work as ever: the dram-
atist, taking the action which a sound criti-
cism suggests, disgraces one, taking his part
from him, with perfect justice: another man
he promotes to more serious roles or to any
more important play he may have, while the
first is cast for whatever minor work there may
be.

Just so the Soul, entering this drama of the
Universe, making itself a part of the Play,
bringing to its acting its personal excellence or
defect, set in a definite place at the entry and
accepting from the author its entire role
superimposed upon its own character and con-
duct just so, it receives in the end its punish-
ment and reward.

But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dig-
nity: they act in a vaster place than any stage:
the Author has made them masters of all this
world; they have a wide choice of place; they
themselves determine the honour or discredit
in which they are agents since their place and
part are in keeping with their quality: they
therefore fit into the Reason-Principle of the
Universe, each adjusted, most legitimately, to
the appropriate environment, as every string of
the lyre is set in the precisely right position, de-
termined by the Principle directing musical ut-
terance, for the due production of the tones
within its capacity. All is just and good in the
Universe in which every actor is set in his own
quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in
the Darkness and in Tartarus the dreadful
sounds whose utterance there is well.

This Universe is good not when the indi-
vidual is a stone, but when everyone throws in
Ms own. voice towards a total harmony, singing
out a life thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be.

The Syrinx does not utter merely one pure
note; there is a thin obscure sound which
blends in to make the harmony of Syrinx
music: the harmony is made up from tones of
various grades, all the tones differing, but the
resultant of all forming one sound.

Similarly the Reason-Principle entire is One,
but it is broken into unequal parts: hence the
difference of place found in the Universe, bet-
ter spots and worse; and hence the inequality
of Souls, finding their appropriate surround-
ings amid this local inequality. The diverse
places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal
grade and unlike conduct, are well exempli-
fied by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or
any other instrument: there is local difference,
but from every position every string gives forth
its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once, to
its particular place and to the entire plan.

What is evil in the single Soul will stand a
good thing in the universal system; what in the
unit offends nature will serve nature in the
total event and still remains the weak and
wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes
nothing from the worth of the whole, just as,
in another order of image, the executioner's
ugly office does not mar the well-governed
state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the
corresponding moral type is often serviceable;
thus, even as things are, all is well.

1 8. Souls vary in worth; and the difference
is due, among other causes, to an almost initial
inequality; it is in reason that, standing to the
Reason-Principle, as parts, they should be un-
equal by the fact of becoming separate.

We must also remember that every Soul has
its second grade and its third, and that, there-
fore, its expression may take any one of three
main forms. But this point must be dealt with
here again: the matter requires all possible elu-
cidation.

We may perhaps think of actors having the
right to add something to the poet's words: the
drama as it stands is not perfectly filled in, and
they are to supply where the Author has left
blank spaces here and there; the actors are to
be something else as well; they become parts of
the poet, who on his side has a foreknowledge
of the word they will add, and so is able to bind
into one story what the actors bring in and
what is to follow.

For, in the All, the sequences, including
what follows upon wickedness, become Rea-
son-Principles, and therefore in right reason.
Thus: from adultery and the violation of pris-
oners the process of nature will produce fine

THIRD ENNEAD III. 3

children, to grow, perhaps, into fine men; and
where wicked violence has destroyed cities,
other and nobler cities may rise in their place.

But does not this make it absurd to intro-
duce Souls as responsible causes, some acting
for good and some for evil? If we thus exon-
erate the Reason-Principle from any part in
wickedness do we not also cancel its credit for
the good? Why not simply take the doings of
these actors for representative parts of the
Reason-Principle as the doings of stage-actors
are representative parts of the stage-drama?
Why not admit that the Reason-Principle it-
self includes evil action as much as good action,
and inspires the precise conduct of all its repre-
sentatives? Would not this be all the more
plausible in that the universal drama is the
completer creation and that the Reason-Prin-
ciple is the source of all that exists?

But this raises the question: "What motive
could lead the Logos to produce evil?"

The explanation, also, would take away all
power in the Universe from Souls, even those
nearest to the divine; they would all be mere
parts of a Reason-Principle.

And, further unless all Reason-Principles
are Souls why should some be souls and
others exclusively Reason-Principles when the
All is itself a Soul?

THIRD TRACTATE
ON PROVIDENCE (2)

i. What is our answer?

All events and things, good and evil alike,
are included under the Universal Reason-Prin-
ciple of which they are parts strictly "in-
cluded" for this Universal Idea does not en-
gender them but encompasses them.

The Reason-Principles are acts or expres-
sions of a Universal Soul; its parts [i.e., events
good and evil] are expressions of these Soul-
parts.

This unity, Soul, has different parts; the
Reason-Principles, correspondingly, will also
have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates
of the system, all that they bring into being.

The Souls are in harmony with each other
and so, too, are their acts and effects; but it is
harmony in the sense of a resultant unity built
out of contraries. All things, as they rise from
a unity, come back to unity by a sheer need
of nature; differences unfold themselves, con-
traries are produced, but all is drawn into one
organized system by the unity at the source.

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 en-
vy: so all the others within the unity of their
Kind; and so humanity.

All these types, again, can be ranged under
the one Kind, that of living things; objects
without life can be thought of under their spe-
cific types and then be resumed under the one
Kind of the "non-living"; if we choose to go
further yet, living and non-living may be in-
cluded under the one Kind, "Beings," and,
further still, under the Source of Being.

Having attached all to this source, we turn
to move down again in continuous division:
we see the Unity fissuring, as it reaches out in-
to Universality, and yet embracing all in one
system so that with all its differentiation it is
one multiple living thing an organism in
which each member executes the function of
its own nature while it still has its being in that
One Whole; fire burns; horse does horse work;
men give, each the appropriate act of the pecu-
liar personal quality and upon the several par-
ticular Kinds to which each belongs follow the
acts, and the good or evil of the life.

2. Circumstances are not sovereign over the
good of life, for they are themselves moulded
by their priors and come in as members of a
sequence. The Leading-Principle holds all the
threads while the minor agents, the individu-
als, serve according to their own capacities, as
in a war the generalissimo lays down the plan
and his subordinates do their best to its fur-
therance. The Universe has been ordered by a
Providence that may be compared to a general;
he has considered operations, conditions and
such practical needs as food and drink, arms
and engines of war; all the problem of reconcil-
ing these complex elements has been worked
out beforehand so as to make it probable that
the final event may be success. The entire
scheme emerges from the general's mind with
a certain plausible promise, though it cannot
cover the enemy's operations, and there is no
power over the disposition of the enemy's
forces: but where the mighty general is in
question whose power extends over all that is,
what can pass unordered, what can fail to fit
into the plan?

3. For, even though the I is sovereign in
choosing, yet by the fact of the choice the thing
done takes its place in the ordered total. Your
personality does not come from outside into
the universal scheme; you are a part of it, you
and your personal disposition.

PLOTINUS

But what is the cause of this initial personal-
ity?

This question resolves itself into two: are we
to make the Creator, if Creator there is, the
cause of the moral quality of the individual or
does the responsibility lie with the creature?

Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility?
After all, none is charged in the case of plants
brought into being without the perceptive fac-
ulties; no one is blamed because animals are
all that men are which would be like

not

complaining that men are not all that gods are.
Reason acquits plant and animal and, their
maker; how can it complain because men do
not stand above humanity?

If the reproach simply means that Man
might improve by bringing from his own stock
something towards his betterment we must al-
low that the man failing in this is answerable
for his own inferiority: but if the betterment
must come not from within the man but from
without, from his Author, it is folly to ask more
than has been given, as foolish in the case of
man as in plant and animal.

The question is not whether a thing is in-
ferior to something else but whether in its own
Kind it suffices to its own part; universal equal-
ity there cannot be.

Then the Reason-Principle has measured
things out with the set purpose of inequality?

Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by
the nature of things: the Reason-Principle of
this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul;
the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual
Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not
one among the things of the Universe but is all
things; in all things, there is implied variety
of things; where there is variety and not iden-
tity there must be primals, secondaries, tertia-
ries and every grade downward. Forms of life,
then, there must be that are not pure Soul but
the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage
of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in
the Reason-Principle constituting a living be-
ing, but it is another Soul [a lesser phase] , not
that [the Supreme Soul] from which the Rea-
son-Principle itself derives; and this combined
vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards
matter, and what it engenders is still more de-
ficient. Consider how far the engendered stands
from its origin and yet, what a marvel I

In sum nothing can secure to a thing of proc-
ess the quality of the prior order, loftier than
all that is product and amenable to no charge
in regard to it: the wonder is, only, that it
reaches and gives to the lower at all, and that

the traces o its presence should be so noble.
And if its outgiving is greater than the lower
can appropriate, the debt is the heavier; all the
blame must fall upon the unreceptive creature,
and Providence be the more exalted.

4. If man were all of one piece I mean, if
he were nothing more than a made thing, act-
ing and acted upon according to a fixed nature
he could be no more subject to reproach and
punishment than the mere animals. But as the
scheme holds, man is singled out for condem-
nation when he does evil; and this with justice.
For he is no mere thing made to rigid plan; his
nature contains a Principle apart and free.

This does not, however, stand outside of
Providence or of the Reason of the All; the
Over- World cannot be dependent upon the
World of Sense. The higher shines down up-
on the lower, and this illumination is Provi-
dence in its highest aspect: The Reason-Prin-
ciple has two phases, one which creates the
things of process and another which links them
with the higher beings: these higher beings
constitute the over-providence on which de-
pends that lower providence which is the sec-
ondary Reason-Principle inseparably united
with its primal: the two the Major and Minor
Providence acting together produce the uni-
versal woof, the one all-comprehensive Provi-
dence.

Men possess, then, a distinctive Principle: but
not all men turn to account all that is in their
Nature; there are men that live by one Prin-
ciple and men that live by another or, rather,
by several others, the least noble. For all these
Principles are present even when not acting up-
on the man though we cannot think of them
as lying idle; everything performs its function.

"But," it will be said, "what reason can there
be for their not acting upon the man once they
are present; inaction must mean absence?"

We maintain their presence always, nothing
void of them.

But surely not where they exercise no ac-
tion? I they necessarily reside in all men, sure-
ly they must be operative in all this Principle
of free action, especially.

First of all, this free Principle is not an ab-
solute possession of the animal Kinds and is
not even an absolute possession to all men.

So this Principle is not the only effective
force in all men?

There is no reason why it should not be.
There are men in whom it alone acts, giving
its character to the life while all else is but Ne-
cessity [and therefore outside of blame].

THIRD ENNEAD III. 5

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 de-
sires have gained control, we are compelled to
attribute the guilt to the substratum [some-
thing 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 im-
plies, 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 sov-
ereign within us.

The quality now manifested may be prob-
ably referred to the conduct of a former life;
we may suppose that previous actions have
made the Reason-Principle now governing
within us inferior in radiance to that which
ruled before; the Soul which later will shine
out again is for the present at a feebler power.

And any Reason-Principle may be said to
include within itself the Reason-Principle of
Matter which therefore it is able to elaborate to
its own purposes, either finding it consonant
with itself or bestowing upon it the quality
which makes it so. The Reason-Principle of an
ox does not occur except in connection with
the Matter appropriate to the ox-Kind. It must
be by such a process that the transmigration,
of which we read takes place; the Soul must
lose its nature, the Reason-Principle be trans-
formed; thus there comes the ox-soul which
once was Man.

The degradation, then, is just.

Still, how did the inferior Principle ever
come into being, and how does the higher fall
to it?

Once more not all things are Firsts; there
are Secondaries and Tertiaries, of a nature in-
ferior to that of their Priors; and a slight tilt is
enough to determine the departure from the
straight course. Further, the linking of any one
being with any other amounts to a blending
such as to produce a distinct entity, a com-
pound of the two; it is not that the greater and
prior suffers any diminution of its own nature;
the lesser and secondary is such from its very

beginning; it is in its own nature the lesser
thing it becomes, and if it suffers the conse-
quences, such suffering is merited: all our rea-
sonings on these questions must take account
of previous living as the source from which the
present takes its rise.

5. There is, then a Providence, which per-
meates the Kosmos from first to last, not every-
where equal, as in a numerical distribution,
but proportioned, differing, according to the
grades of place just as in some one animal,
linked from first to last, each member has its
own function, the nobler organ the higher ac-
tivity while others successively concern the
lower degrees of the life, each part acting of it-
self, and experiencing what belongs to its own
nature and what comes from its relation with
every other. Strike, and what is designed for
utterance gives forth the appropriate volume
of sound while other parts take the blow in
silence but react in their own especial move-
ment; the total of all the utterance and action
and receptivity constitutes what we may call
the personal voice, life and history of the living
form. The parts, distinct in Kind, have dis-
tinct functions: the feet have their work and
the eyes theirs; the understanding serves to one
end, the Intellectual Principle to another.

But all sums to a unity, a comprehensive
Providence. From the inferior grade down-
wards is Fate: the upper is Providence alone:
for in the Intellectual Kosmos all is Reason-
Principle or its Priors Divine Mind and un-
mingled Soul and immediately upon these
follows Providence which rises from Divine
Mind, is the content of the Unmingled Soul,
and, through this Soul, is communicated to the
Sphere of living things.

This Reason-Principle comes as a thing of
unequal parts, and therefore its creations are
unequal, as, for example, the several members
of one Living Being. But after this allotment
of rank and function, all act consonant with the
will of the gods keeps the sequence and is
included under the providential government,
for the Reason-Principle of providence is god-
serving.

All such right-doing, then, is linked to Provi-
dence; but it is not therefore performed by it:
men or other agents, living or lifeless, are causes
of certain things happening, and any good that
may result is taken up again by Providence. In
the total, then, the right rules and what has
happened amiss is transformed and corrected.
Thus, to take an example from a single body,
the Providence of a living organism implies its

PLOTINUS

health; let it be gashed or otherwise wounded,
and that Reason-Principle which governs it
sets to work to draw it together, knit it anew,
heal it, and put the affected part to rights.

In sum, evil belongs to the sequence of
things, but it comes from necessity. It origi-
nates in ourselves; it has its causes no doubt,
but we are not, therefore, forced to it by Provi-
dence: some of these causes we adapt to the
operation of Providence and of its subordinates,
but with others we fail to make the connec-
tion; the act instead of being ranged under the
will of Providence consults the desire of the
agent alone or of some other element in the
Universe, something which is either itself at
variance with Providence or has set up some
such state of variance in ourselves.

The one circumstance does not produce the
same result wherever it acts; the normal opera-
tion will be modified from case to case: Helen's
beauty told very differently on Paris and on
Idomeneus; bring together two handsome peo-
ple of loose character and two living honour-
ably and the resulting conduct is very different;
a good man meeting a libertine exhibits a dis-
tinct phase of his nature and, similarly, the dis-
solute answer to the society of their betters.

The act of the libertine is not done by Provi-
dence or in accordance with Providence; nei-
ther is the action of the good done by Provi-
dence jt is done by the man but it is done
in accordance with Providence, for it is an act
consonant with the Reason-Principle. Thus a
patient following his treatment is himself an
agent and yet is acting in accordance with the
doctor's method inspired by the art concerned
with the causes of health and sickness: what
one does against the laws of health is one's act,
but an act conflicting with the Providence of
medicine.

6. But, if all this be true, how can evil fall
within the scope of seership? The predictions
of the seers are based on observation of the
Universal Circuit: how can this indicate the
evil with the good?

Clearly the reason is that all contraries coa-
lesce. Take, for example, Shape and Matter:
the living being [of the lower order] is a coa-
lescence of these two; so that to be aware of the
Shape and the Reason-Principle is to be aware
of the Matter on which the Shape has been im-
posed.

The living-being of the compound order is
not present [as pure and simple Idea] like the
living being of the Intellectual order: in the
compound entity, we are aware, at once, of the

Reason-Principle and of the inferior element
brought under form. Now the Universe is such
a compound living thing: to observe, therefore,
its content is to be aware not less of its lower
elements than of the Providence which oper-
ates within it.

This Providence reaches to all that comes in-
to being; its scope therefore includes living
things with their actions and states, the total of
their history at once overruled by the Reason-
Principle and yet subject in some degree to
Necessity.

These, then, are presented as mingled both
by their initial nature and by the continuous
process of their existence; and the Seer is not
able to make a perfect discrimination setting
on the one side Providence with all that hap-
pens under Providence and on the other side
what the substrate communicates to its prod-
uct. Such discrimination is not for a man, not
for a wise man or a divine man: one may say
it is the prerogative of a god. Not causes but
facts lie in the Seer's province; his art is the
reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell
of the ordered and never condescend to the dis-
orderly; the movement of the Universe utters
its testimony to him and, before men and
things reveal themselves, brings to light what
severally and collectively they are.

Here conspires with There and There with
Here, elaborating together the consistency and
eternity of a Kosmos and by their correspond-
ences revealing the sequence of things to the
trained observer f or every form of divination
turns upon correspondences. Universal inter-
dependence, there could not be, but universal
resemblance there must. This probably is the
meaning of the saying that Correspondences
maintain the Universe.

This is a correspondence of inferior with in-
ferior, of superior with superior, eye with eye,
foot with foot, everything with its fellow and,
in another order, virtue with right action and
vice with unrighteousness. Admit such corre-
spondence in the All and we have the possibil-
ity of prediction. If the one order acts on the
other, the relation is not that of maker to thing
made the two are coeval it is the interplay
of members of one living being; each in its own
place and way moves as its own nature de-
mands; to every organ its grade and task, and
to every grade and task its effective organ.

7. And since the higher exists, there must be
the lower as well. The Universe is a thing of
variety, and how could there be an inferior
without a superior or a superior without an in-

THIRD ENNEAD IV. 2

ferior? We cannot complain about the lower
in the higher; rather, we must be grateful to
the higher for giving something of itself to the
lower.

In a word, those that would like evil driven
out from the All would drive out Providence
itself.

What would Providence have to provide for?
Certainly not for itself or for the Good: when
we speak of a Providence above, we mean an
act upon something below.

That which resumes all under a unity is a
Principle in which all things exist together and
the single thing is AIL From this Principle,
which remains internally unmoved, particular
things push forth as from a single root which
never itself emerges. They are a branching in-
to part, into multiplicity, each single outgrowth
bearing its trace of the common source. Thus,
phase by phase, there in finally the production
into this world; some things close still to the
root, others widely separate in the continuous
progression until we have, in our metaphor,
bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one
side all is one point of unbroken rest, on the
other is the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit, all
the things of process carrying ever within
themselves the Reason-Principles of the Upper
Sphere, and striving to become trees in their
own minor order and producing, if at all,- only
what is in, strict gradation from themselves.

As for the abandoned spaces in what corre-
sponds to the branches these two draw upon
the root, from which, despite all their variance,
they also derive; and the branches again oper-
ate upon their own furthest extremities: oper-
ation is to be traced only from point to next
point, but, in the fact, there has been both in-
flow and outgo [of creative or modifying
force] at the very root which, itself again, has
its priors.

The things that act upon each other are
branchings from a far-off beginning and so
stand distinct; but they derive initially from
the one source: all interaction is like that of
brothers, resemblant as drawing life from the
same parents.

FOURTH TRACTATE
OUR TUTELARY SPIRIT

i. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intel-
lectual-Principle] remain at rest while their
Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into be-
ing; but, in our view, the Soul generates by its
motion, to which is due the sensitive faculty

that in any of its expression-forms Nature
and all forms of life down to the vegetable or-
der. Even as it is present in human beings the
Soul carries its Expression-form [Hypostasis]
with it, but is not the dominant since it is not
the whole man (humanity including the Intel-
lectual Principal, as well) : in the vegetable or-
der it is the highest since there is nothing to
rival it; but at this phase it is no longer repro-
ductive, or, at least, what it produces is of quite
another order; here life ceases; all later produc-
tion is lifeless.

What does this imply?

Everything the Soul engenders down to this
point comes into being shapeless, and takes
form by orientation towards its author and sup-
porter: therefore the thing engendered on the
further side can be no image of the Soul, since
it is not even alive; it must be an utter Inde-
termination. No doubt even in things of the
nearer order there was indetermination, but
within a form; they were undetermined not
utterly but only in contrast with their perfect
state: at this extreme point we have the utter
lack of determination. Let it be raised to its
highest degree and it becomes body by taking
such shape as serves its scope; then it becomes
the recipient of its author and sustainer: this
presence in body is the only example of the
boundaries of Higher Existents running into
the boundary of the Lower.

2, It is of this Soul especially that we read
"All Soul has care for the Soulless" though
the several Souls thus care in their own degree
and way. The passage continues "Soul passes
through the entire heavens in forms varying
with the variety of place" the sensitive form,
the reasoning form, even the vegetative form
and this means that in each "place" the phase
of the soul there dominant carries out its own
ends while the rest, not present there, is idle.

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 sensa-
tion, and in large part even by the merely veg-
etative principle, for the body grows and prop-
agates: all the graded phases are in a collabora-
tion, 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.

This is why we must break away towards the
High: we dare not keep ourselves set towards
the sensuous principle, following the images of

PLOTINUS

sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent
upon the gratifications of eating and procrea-
tion; our life must be pointed towards the In-
tellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, to-
wards God.

Those that have maintained the human level
are men once more. Those that have lived
wholly to sense become animals correspond-
ing in species to the particular temper of the
life ferocious animals where the sensuality
has been accompanied by a certain measure of
spirit, gluttonous and lascivious animals where
all has been appetite and satiation of appetite.
Those who in their pleasures have not even
lived by sensation, but have gone their way
in a torpid grossness become mere growing
things, for this lethargy is the entire act of the
vegetative, and such men have been busy be-
treeing themselves. Those, we read, that, other-
wise untainted, have loved song become vocal
animals; kings ruling unreasonably but with
no other vice are eagles; futile and flighty
visionaries ever soaring skyward, become high-
flying birds; observance of civic and secular vir-
tue makes man again, or where the merit is
less marked, one of the animals of communal
tendency, a bee or the like.

3. What, then, is the spirit [guiding the pres-
ent life and determining the future] ?

The Spirit of here and now.

And the God?

The God of here and now.

Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts
every life; for, even here and now, it is the
dominant of our Nature.

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 individ-
ual spirit; it presides inoperative while its sec-
ondary 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 Ra-
tional Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still
higher Being, not direcdy operative but assent-
ing to the working principle. The words "You
shall yourselves choose" are true, then; for by
our life we elect our own loftier.

But how does this spirit come to be the de-
terminant of our fate?

It is not when the life is ended that it con-
ducts 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.

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 lead-
ing 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 un-
til he has attained the height.

For the Soul is many things, is all, is the
Above and the Beneath to the totality of life:
and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos,
linked to this world by what is lowest in us,
but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intel-
lect: by all that is intellective we are perma-
nently in that higher realm, but at the fringe
of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower;
it is as if we gave forth from it some emana-
tion towards that lower, or, rather some Act,
which however leaves our diviner part not in
itself diminished.

4. But is this lower extremity of our intellec-
tive phase fettered to body for ever?

No: if we turn, this turns by the same act.

And the Soul of the All are we to think
that when it turns from this sphere its lower
phase similarly withdraws?

No: for it never accompanied that lower
phase of itself; it never knew any coming, and
therefore never came down; it remains un-
moved above, and the material frame of the
Universe draws close to it, and, as it were, takes
light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way
troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it.

But has the Universe, then, no sensation?
"It has no Sight," we read, since it has no eyes,
and obviously it has not ears, nostrils, or
tongue. Then has it perhaps such a conscious-
ness as we have of our own inner conditions?

No: where all is the working out of one na-
ture, there is nothing but still rest; there is not
even enjoyment. Sensibility is present as the
quality of growth is, unrecognized. But the
Nature of the World will be found treated
elsewhere; what stands here is all that the
question of the moment demands.

5. But if the presiding Spirit and the condi-
tions of life are chosen by the Soul in the over-
world, how can anything be left to our inde-
pendent action here?

The answer is that that very choice in the

THIRD ENNEAD IV. 6

over-world is merely an allegorical statement
of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a
total character which it must express wherever
it operates.

But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-
force and, in the Soul, the dominant is that
phase which has been brought to the fore by a
previous history, then the body stands acquitted
of any bad influence upon it? The Soul's qual-
ity exists before any bodily life; it has exacdy
what it chose to have; and, we read, it never
changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the
good man nor the bad is the product of this
life?

Is the solution, perhaps, that man is poten-
tially both good and bad but becomes the one
or the other by force of act?

But what if a man temperamentally good
happens to enter a disordered body, or if a per-
fect body falls to a man naturally vicious?

The answer is that the Soul, to whichever
side it inclines, has in some varying degree the
power of working the forms of body over to
its own temper, since outlying and accidental
circumstances cannot overrule the entire de-
cision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the
casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited
with the casual circumstances attending them
and that the choice is made upon vision, in ac-
cordance with the individual temperament, we
are given to understand that the real deter-
mination lies with -the Souls, who adapt the
allotted conditions to their own particular
quality.

The Tim&us indicates the relation of this
guiding spirit to ourselves: it is not entirely
outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our
nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs
to us as belonging to our Soul, but not in so
far as we are particular human beings living^ a
life to which it is superior: take the passage in
this sense and it is consistent; understand this
Spirit otherwise and there is contradiction.
And the description of the Spirit, moreover, as
"the power which consummates the chosen
life," is r also, in agreement with this interpreta-
tion; for while its presidency saves us from fall-
ing much, deeper into evil, the only direct agent
within us is some thing neither above it nor
equal to it but under it: Man cannot cease to be
characteristically Man.

6. What, then, is the achieved Sage?

One whose Act is determined by the higher
phase of the Soul.

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have
only this Spirit [equivalent in all men] as co-

operator in the life: the acting force in the Sage
is the Intellective Principle [the diviner phase
of the human Soul] which therefore is itself
his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding
spirit of its own, no other than the very Divin-
ity.

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual
Principle as possessing for presiding spirit the
Prior to the Intellectual Principle: how then
does it come about that he was not, from the
very beginning, all that he now is ?

The failure is due to the disturbance caused
by birth though, before all reasoning, there
exists the instinctive movement reaching out
towards its own.

On instinct which the Sage finally rectifies
in every respect?

Not in every respect: the Soul is so consti-
tuted that its life-history and its general tend-
ency will answer not merely to its own nature
but also to the conditions among which it acts.

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting
a Soul to the Underworld ceases to be its
guardian except when the Soul resumes [in
its later choice] the former state of life.

But, meanwhile, what happens to it?

From the passage [in the PJuzdo] which
tells how it presents the Soul to judgement we
gather that after the death it resumes the form
it had before the birth, but that then, beginning
again, it is present to the Souls in their punish-
ment during the period of their renewed life
a time not so much of living as of expiation.

But the Souls that enter into brute bodies,
are they controlled by some thing less than this
presiding Spirit? No: theirs is still a Spirit, but
an evil or a foolish one.

And the Souls that attain to the highest?

Of these higher Souls some live in the world
of Sense, some above it: and those in the world
of Sense inhabit the Sun or another of the
planetary bodies; the others occupy the fixed
Sphere [above the planetary] holding the place
they have merited through having lived here
the superior life of reason.

We must understand that, while our Souk
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 differ-
ent powers, parallel to those of the World Soul:
each must give out its own special act; released,
each will inhabit there a star consonant witk

100

PLOTINUS

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.

But here some further precision is needed.

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

FIFTH TRACTATE

ON LOVE

i. What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a
state of mind? Or is it, perhaps, sometimes to
be thought of as a God or Spirit and sometimes
merely as an experience? And what Is it es-
sentially in each of these respects ?

These important questions make it desirable

ail mat DCIOH^O iu uua VL&J.UI*- vw.^^, *.~~ * / *. * . . .

have taken up with them that Hypostasis of to review prevailing opinions on the matter,
the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is -~ ~^' ' - K ~v,H an rf.
vested. This Hypostasis may be described as
the distributable Soul, for it is what enters
bodily forms and multiplies itself by this divi-
sion 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 Hying
things animal or vegetal produce their con-
stant 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 orig-
inals are. In some cases it communicates its
force by permanent presence the life princi-
ple in plants for instance in other cases it vile act. But this generally admitted distinction
withdraws after imparting its virtue for in- opens a new question: we need a philosophical

* " investigation into the origin of the two phases

the philosophical treatment it has received and,
especially, the theories of the great Plato who
has many passages dealing with Love, from a
point of view entirely his own.

Plato does not treat of it as simply a state ob-
served in Souls; he also makes it a Spirit-being
so that we read of the birth of Eros, under def-
inite circumstances and by a certain parentage.

Now everyone recognizes that the emotional
state for which we make this "Love" responsi-
ble rises in souls aspiring to be knit in the clos-
est union with some beautiful object, and that
this aspiration takes two forms, that of the good
whose devotion is for beauty itself, and that
other which seeks its consummation in some
vile act. But this generally admitted distinction

stance where from the putridity of dead ani-
mal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth
is produced from one organism.

A power corresponding to this in the Ail
must reach down and co-operate in the life of
our world in fact the very same power.

If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds it-
self under the same Spirit or a new, according
to the life it is to live. With this Spirit it em-
barks in the skiff of the universe: the "spindle
of Necessity" then takes control and appoints
the seat for the voyage, the seat of the lot in life.

The Universal circuit is like a breeze, and
the voyager, still or stirring, is carried forward
by it. He has a hundred varied experiences,
fresh sights, changing circumstances, all sorts
of events. The vessel itself furnishes incident,
tossing as it drives on. And the voyager also
acts of himself in virtue of that individuality
which he retains because he is on the vessel in
his own person and character. Under identical
circumstances individuals answer very differ-
ently in their movements and acts: hence it
comes about that, be the occurrences and condi-
tions of life similar or dissimilar, the result may
differ from, man to man, as on the other hand
a similar result may be produced by dissimilar
conditions: this (personal answer to incident)
it is that constitutes destiny.

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source
of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure
beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an
unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation.
The vile and ugly is in clash, at once, with Na-
ture and with God: Nature produces by look-
ing to the Good, for it looks towards Order
which has its being in the consistent total of
the good, while the unordered is ugly, a mem-
ber of the system of evil and besides Nature
itself, clearly, springs from the divine realm,
from Good and Beauty; and when anything
brings delight and the sense of kinship, its very
image attracts.

Reject this explanation, and no one can tell
how the mental state rises and where are its
causes: it is the explanation of even copulative
love which is the will to beget in beauty; Na-
ture seeks to produce the beautiful and there-
fore by all reason cannot desire to procreate in
the ugly.

Those that desire earthly procreation are sat-
isfied with the beauty found on earth, the beau-
ty of image and of body; it is because they are
strangers to the Archetype, the source of even
the attraction they feel towards what is lovely
here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty
is a leading to the memory of that in the higher

THIRD ENNEAD V. 2

roi

realm and these love the earthly as an image;
those that have not attained to this memory
do not understand what is happening within
them, and take the image for the reality. Once
there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to en-
joy the beauty of earth; where appreciation de-
generates into carnality, there is sin.

Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether
there is Reminiscence or not; -but there are
those that feel, also, a desire of such immortal-
ity as lies within mortal reach; and these are
seeking Beauty in their demand for perpetuity,
the desire of the eternal; Nature teaches them
to sow the seed and to beget in beauty, to sow
towards eternity, but in beauty through their
own kinship with the beautiful. And indeed
the eternal is of the one stock with the beauti-
ful, the Eternal-Nature is the first shaping of
beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from
it.

The less the desire for procreation, the great-
er is the contentment with beauty alone, yet
procreation aims at the engendering -of beauty;
it is the expression of a lack; the subject is con-
scious o insufficiency and, wishing to produce
beauty, feels that the way is to beget in a beau-
tiful form. Where the procreative desire is law-
less or against the purposes of nature, the first
inspiration has been natural, but they have di-
verged from the way, they have slipped and
fallen, and they grovel; they neither under-
stand whither Love sought to lead them nor
have they any instinct to production; they have
not mastered the right use of the images of
beauty; they do not know what the Authentic
Beauty is.

Those that love beauty of person without
carnal desire love for beauty's sake; those that
have for women, of course the copulative
love, have the further purpose of self-perpetua-
tion: as long as they are led by these motives,
both are on die right path, though the first have
taken the nobler way. But, even in the right,
there is the difference that the one set, wor-
shipping the beauty of earth, look no further,
while the others, those of recollection, venerate
also the beauty of the other world while they,
still, have no contempt for this in which they
recognize, as it were, a last outgrowth, an at-
tenuation of the higher. These, in sum, are in-
nocent frequenters of beauty, not to be con-
fused with the class to whom it becomes an
occasion of fall into the ugly for the aspira-
tion towards a good degenerates into an evil
often.

So much for love, the state.

Now we have to consider Love, the God.

2. The existence of such a being is no de-
mand of the ordinary man, merely; it is sup-
ported by Theologians and, over and over
again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of
Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, in-
citer of human souls towards the supernal
beauty or quickener of an already existing im-
pulse thither. All this requires philosophical
examination. A cardinal passage is that in the
Symposium where we are told Eros was not a
child of Aphrodite but born on the day of
Aphrodite's birth, Penia, Poverty, being the
mother, and Poros, Possession, the father.

The matter seems to demand some discus-
sion of Aphrodite, since in any case Eros is de-
scribed as being either her son or in some asso-
ciation with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and
in what sense is Love either her child or born
with her or in some way both her child and
her birth-fellow?

To us Aphrodite is twofold; there is the
heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Ouranos or
Heaven: and there is the other the daughter of
Zeus and Dione, this is the Aphrodite who pre-
sides over earthly unions; the higher was not
born of a mother and has no part in marriages
for in Heaven there is no marrying.

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kro-
nos who is no other than the Intellectual Prin-
ciple must be the Soul at its divinest: un-
mingled as the immediate emanation of the un-
mingled; remaining ever Above, as neither
desirous nor capable of descending to this
sphere, never having developed the downward
tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof,
so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have
no part with Matter and therefore mythically
"the unmothered" justly called not Celestial
Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture,
gathered cleanly within itself.

Any Nature springing directly from the In-
tellectual Principle must be itself also a clean
thing: it will derive a resistance of its own
from its nearness to the Highest, for all its
tendency, no less than its fixity, centres upon
its author whose power is certainly sufficient
to maintain it Above.

Soul then could never fall from its sphere; it
is closer held to the divine Mind than the very
sun could hold the light it gives forth to radiate
about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly
to it, still.

But following upon Kronos or, if you will,
upon Heaven, the father of Kronos the Soul
directs its Act towards him and holds closely

102

PLOTINUS

to him and in that love brings forth the Eros
through whom it continues to look towards
him. This Act of the Soul has produced an
Hypostasis, a Real-Being; and the mother and
this Hypostasis her offspring, noble Love
gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus,
is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and
exists to be the medium between desire and
that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer;
by its power what loves is enabled to see the
loved thing. But it is first; before it becomes the
vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight;
it is first, therefore, and not even in the same
order for desire attains to vision only through
the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own
Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing
immediately above it.

3. That Love is a Hypostasis [a "Person"] a
Real-Being sprung from a Real-Being lower
than the parent but authentically existent is
beyond doubt.

For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung
directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that
ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent
in the Real-Being of all that authentically is
In the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards
the very Highest. That was the first object of
its vision; it looked towards it as towards its
good, and it rejoiced in the looking; and the
quality of what it saw was such that the con-
templation could not be void of effect; in virtue
of that rapture, of its position in regard to its
object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul con-
ceived and brought forth an offspring worthy
of itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a stren-
uous activity of contemplation in the Soul; there
is an emanation towards it from the object con-
templated; and Eros is born, the Love which is
an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its
image with it; Eros taking its name, probably,
from the fact that its essential being is due to
this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an
emotion, will take its name from Love, the
Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior
to what lacks this reality. The mental state will
be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis,
though it is no more than a particular act di-
rected towards a particular object; but it must
not be confused with the Absolute Love, the
Divine Being, The Eros that belongs to the
supernal Soul must be of one temper with it;
it must itself look aloft as being of the house-
hold of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its
very offspring; and therefore caring for noth-
ing but the contemplation of the Gods.

Once that Soul which is the primal source of

light to the heavens is recognized as an Hypos-
tasis standing distinct and aloof, it must be
admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof
though not, perhaps, so loftily celestial a being
as the Soul. Our own best we conceive as inside
ourselves and yet something apart; so, we must
think of this Love as essentially resident
where the unmingling Soul inhabits.

But besides this purest Soul, there must be
also a Soul of the All: at once there is another
Love the eye with which this second Soul
looks upwards like the supernal Eros en-
gendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the
secondary Soul, is of this Universe not Soul
unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giv-
ing birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with
the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding
over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the
upward desire; and, in the degree of that striv-
ing, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the
young and every Soul with which it is incor-
porated in so far as there is a natural tendency
to remembrance of the divine. For every Soul
is striving towards The Good, even the min-
gling Soul and that of particular beings, for
each holds directly from the divine Soul, and
is its offspring.

4. Does each individual Soul, then, contain
within itself such a Love in essence and sub-
stantial reality?

Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that
of the Universe contain such a Love, it would
be difficult to explain why our personal Soul
should not. It must be so, even, with all that
has life.

This indwelling love is no other than the
Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every
being, the affection dominant in each several
nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the
particular Soul, strained towards its own nat-
ural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the
guiding spirit realizing its worth and the qual-
ity of its Being.

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 em-
braced 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

THIRD ENNEAD V. 6

103

in these its partial phases and revealing itself
at its will.

In the same way we must conceive many
Aphrodites in the All, Spirits entering it to-
gether with Love, all emanating from an Aph-
rodite of the All, a train of particular Aphro-
dites dependent upon the first, and each with
the particular Love in attendance: this multi-
plicity cannot be denied, if Soul be the mother
of Love, and Aphrodite mean Soul, and Love
be an act of a Soul seeking good.

This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to
The Good, is twofold: the Love in the loftier
Soul would be a god ever linking the Soul to
the divine; the Love in the mingling Soul will
be a celestial spirit.

5. But what is the Nature of this Spirit of
the Supernals in general?

The Spirit-Kind is treated in the Symposium
where, with much about the others, we learn
of Eros Love born to Penia Poverty and
Poros Possession who is son of Metis Re-
source at Aphrodite's birth feast.

But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this
Universe and not simply the Love native
within it involves much that is self-contra-
dictory.

For one thing, the universe is described as a
blissful god and as self-sufficing, while this
"Love" is confessedly neither divine nor self-
sufficing but in ceaseless need.

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body
and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul
itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily
be a constituent part of Eros, dominant mem-
ber! A man is the man's Soul, if the world is,
similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphrodite,
the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos!
And why should this one spirit, Love, be the
Universe to the exclusion of all the others,
which certainly are sprung from the same Es-
sential-Being? Our only escape would be to
make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.

Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beau-
tiful children: does this apply to the Universe?
Love is represented as homeless, bedless and
barefooted: would not that be a shabby de-
scription of the Kosmos and quite out of the
truth?

6. What then, in sum, is to be thought of
Love and of his "birth" as we are told of it?

Clearly we have to establish the significance,
here, of Poverty and Possession, and show in
what way the parentage is appropriate: we
have also to bring these two into line with the
other Supernals since one spirit nature, one

spirit essence, must characterize all unless they
are to have merely a name in common.