The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But is this lower extremity of our intellective 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 31 : Section 31 31. But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said, possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there must be two such faculties. Now that is all very well as long as the two souls stand apart; but, when they are at one in us, what becomes of the two...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 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 st...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 28 : Section 28 28. Now to see what all this reasoning has established: Universally, what approaches as a good is a Form; Matter itself contains this good which is Form: are we to conclude that, if Matter had will, it would desire to be Form unalloyed? No: that would be desiring its own destructi...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul. But it has been observed that the Couplement, too- especially before our...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple:...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 29 : Section 29 29. Suppose, however, that pleasure did not result from the good but there were something preceding pleasure and accounting for it, would not this be a thing to be embraced? But when we say "to be embraced" we say "pleasure." But what if accepting its existence, we think of th...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We have to enquire into the existence of the Numbers in the Intellectual. Are they Ideas added to the other Ideas? Or are they no more than necessary concomitants to the Ideas? In the latter case, Being, as the first [in the Intellectual] would give us the conception of the Monad; then...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. What then must The Unity be, what nature is left for it? No wonder that to state it is not easy; even Being and Form are not easy, though we have a way, an approach through the Ideas. The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Yet, looking at another set of facts, reflection tells us that we are in sympathetic relation to each other, suffering, overcome, at the sight of pain, naturally drawn to forming attachments; and all this can be due only to some unity among us. Again, if spells and other forms of magic...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 26 : Section 26 26. Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of that double nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the body...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. Admitted, then- it will be said- for the nobler forms of life; but how can the divine contain the mean, the unreasoning? The mean is the unreasoning, since value depends upon reason and the worth of the intellective implies worthlessness where intellection is lacking. Yet how can there...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. 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 interlinked, and in general what the Living-Being is. On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 37 : Section 37 37. Those ascribing Intellection to the First have not supposed him to know the lesser, the emanant- though, indeed, some have thought it impossible that he should not know everything. But those denying his knowing of the lesser have still attributed self-knowing to him, because they...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it is the Soul's design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence. But what is this escape? "In attaining Likeness to God," we read. And this is explained as "becoming just and holy, living by wisdom," the entire nature...
The Fifth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But individuals are brought into being by the union of the Reason-Principles of the parents, male and female: this seems to do away with a definite Reason-Principle for each of the offspring: one of the parents- the male let us say- is the source; and the offspring is determined not by...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. And as regards vegetal forms? Are we to imagine beneath the leading principle [the "Nature" phase] some sort of corporeal echo of it, something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them? Or are we to think that, while the earth [which nourishes them] contains...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. Since we are not entitled to make desire the test by which to decide on the nature and quality of the good, we may perhaps have recourse to judgement. We would apply the opposition of things- order, disorder; symmetry, irregularity; health, illness; form, shapelessness; real-being...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We undertook to discuss the question whether sight is possible in the absence of any intervening medium, such as air or some other form of what is known as transparent body: this is the time and place. It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. Nor can we, on the other hand, think that matter is simply Absolute Magnitude. Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-Principle: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 23 : Section 23 23. The Motion which acts upon Sensible objects enters from without, and so shakes, drives, rouses and thrusts its participants that they may neither rest nor preserve their identity- and all to the end that they may be caught into that restlessness, that flustering excitability which is...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 35 : Section 35 35. But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter requires a more definite handling. How can there be a difference of power between one triangular configuration and another? How can there be the exercise of power from man to man; under what law, and within what limits...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. To pass to the consideration of beauty: If by beauty we mean the primary Beauty, the same or similar arguments will apply here as to goodness: and if the beauty in the Ideal-Form is, as it were, an effulgence [from that primary Beauty], we may observe that it is not identical in all...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between. But over this divine, there is still...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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 m...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of action ascribed to us. It must be founded in impulse or in some appetite, as when we act or omit in lust or rage or upon some calculation of advantage accompanied by desire. But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 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 itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering into Magnitude and not into Matter- is...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. It is infinite also by right of being a pure unity with nothing towards which to direct any partial content. Absolutely One, it has never known measure and stands outside of number, and so is under no limit either in regard to any extern or within itself; for any such determinati...
Next. Section 6 : Section 8 8. It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be impossible if the soul were any form of body. If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul's employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. The integral omnipresence of a unity numerically identical is in fact universally received; for all men instinctively affirm the god in each of us to be one, the same in all. It would be taken as certain if no one asked How or sought to bring the conviction to the test of reasoning;...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things. Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 24 : Section 24 24. There remains Situation, which like Possession is confined to a few instances such as reclining and sitting. Even so, the term is not used without qualification: we say "they are placed in such and such a manner, he is situated in such and such a position." The position is added...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. Now comes the question what sort of thing does the Intellectual-Principle see in seeing the Intellectual Realm and what in seeing itself? We are not to look for an Intellectual realm reminding us of the colour or shape to be seen on material objects: the intellectual antedates all such...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, 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...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to all living things. By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the perception: to be a part...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Still, this integral omnipresence admitted, why do not all things participate in the Intellectual Order in its entirety? Why has it a first participant, a second, and so on? We can but see that presence is determined by the fitness of the participant so that, while Being is...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Are we to think that a being knowing itself must contain diversity, that self-knowledge can be affirmed only when some one phase of the self perceives other phases, and that therefore an absolutely simplex entity would be equally incapable of introversion and of self-awareness? No:...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. (18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual? There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this, knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm. But...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the Intellectual against the sensible: better for the soul to dwell in the Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not being, through...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. For my part I am satisfied that anyone considering the mode in which Matter participates in the Ideas will be ready enough to accept this tenet of omnipresence in identity, no longer rejecting it as incredible or even difficult. This because it seems reasonable and imperative...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom 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 m...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. But, if the stars announce the future- as we hold of many other things also- what explanation of the cause have we to offer? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless the particular is included under some general principle of order, there can be no...
The Second Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. We are bound however to enquire under what mode unity is contained in Being. How is what is termed the "dividing" effected- especially the dividing of the genera Being and unity? Is it the same division, or is it different in the two cases? First then: In what sense, precisely, is...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. Imagine that beyond the heavenly system there existed some solid mass, and that from this sphere there was directed to it a vision utterly unimpeded and unrestricted: it is a question whether that solid form could be perceived by what has no sympathetic relation with it, since we have...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. The Human Soul, next; Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or cavern. Now this does not clash with the first theory [th...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. Could He then have made Himself otherwise than as He did? If He could we must deny Him the power to produce goodness for He certainly cannot produce evil. Power, There, is no producer of the inapt; it is that steadfast constant which is most decidedly power by inability to depart...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. If man were all of one piece- I mean, if he were nothing more than a made thing, acting 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 condemnation when he does...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 29 : Section 29 29. Qualities must be for this school distinct from Substrates. This in fact they acknowledge by counting them as the second category. If then they form a distinct category, they must be simplex; that is to say they are not composite; that is to say that as qualities, pure and simple...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. But how did this intruder find entrance? It had a certain aptitude and it grasped at that to which it was apt. In its nature it was capable of soul: but what is unfitted to receive soul entire- present entire but not for it- takes what share it may; such are the members of the animal...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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 th...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Does it all come down, then, to one phase of the self knowing another phase? That would be a case of knower distinguished from known, and would not be self-knowing. What, then, if the total combination were supposed to be of one piece, knower quite undistinguished from known, so th...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. How then did we come to place freedom in the will when we made out free action to be that produced- or as we also indicated, suppressed- at the dictate of will? If what we have been saying is true and our former statement is consistent with it, the case must stand thus: Virtue...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Possessed of such powers, how does it happen that we do not lay hold of them, but for the most part, let these high activities go idle- some, even, of us never bringing them in any degree to effect? The answer is that all the Divine Beings are unceasingly about their own act...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But some doubt arises when we consider the phenomena of hearing. Perhaps we are to understand the process thus: the air is modified by the first movement; layer by layer it is successively acted upon by the object causing the sound: it finally impinges in that modified form up...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification. Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the unclean loves filth...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Often for the purpose of exposition- as a help towards stating the nature of the produced multiplicity- we use the example of many lines radiating from one centre; but, while we provide for individualization, we must carefully preserve mutual presence. Even in the case of our circle we...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. How then do the four genera complete Substance without qualifying it or even particularizing it? It has been observed that Being is primary, and it is clear that none of the four- Motion, Stability, Difference, Identity- is distinct from it. That this Motion does not produce Quality...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises "On Matter" where the question is copiously treated. To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away with the Good as well, and even to deny the existence...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. But though not opposed, it is still different from Action and cannot belong to the same genus as activity; though if they are both Motion, it will so belong, on the principle that alteration must be regarded as qualitative motion. Does it follow that whenever alteration proceeds...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed for ever and will for ever endure: but simply to refer this perdurance to the Will of God, however true an explanation, is utterly inadequate. The elements of this sphere change; the living beings of earth pass away;...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Empedokles in identifying his "elements" with Matter is refuted by their decay. Anaxagoras, in identifying his "primal-combination" with Matter- to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all- withdraws in this way the very...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. To meet the difficulty we must make a close examination of the nature of Man in the Intellectual; perhaps, though, it is better to begin with the man of this plane lest we be reasoning to Man There from a misconception of Man here. There may even be some who deny the difference. We ask...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 26 : Section 26 26. Their knowledge of our prayers is due to what we may call an enlinking, a determined relation of things fitted into a system; so, too, the fulfillment of the petitions; in the art of magic all looks to this enlinkment: prayer and its answer, magic and its success, depend up...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that Matter tends to slip away from its form [the Idea]. Can we conceive it stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else envelops it? And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases rebels and sometimes not. For if...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 33 : Section 33 33. When therefore we name beauty, all such shape must be dismissed; nothing visible is to be conceived, or at once we descend from beauty to what but bears the name in virtue of some faint participation. This formless Form is beautiful as Form, beautiful in proportion as we strip away...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 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 quality. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it; for horse comes by horse...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 27 : Section 27 27. What view are we to take of that which is opposed to Motion, whether it be Stability or Rest? Are we to consider it as a distinct genus, or to refer it to one of the genera already established? We should, no doubt, be well advised to assign Stability to the Intellectual, and to look...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 31 : Section 31 31. Our problem embraces all act and all experience throughout the entire kosmos- whether due to nature, in the current phrase, or effected by art. The natural proceeds, we must hold, from the All towards its members and from the members to the All, or from member to other member:...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. It remains then to consider whether Being by its distinction produced Number or Number produced that distinction. It is certain that either Number was the cause of Being, movement, rest, identity and difference, or these the cause of Number. The first question is whether Number c...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 24 : Section 24 24. But ourselves- how does it touch us? We may recall what we have said of the nature of the light shining from it into Intellectual-Principle and so by participation into the soul. But for the moment let us leave that aside and put another question: Does The Good hold that nature...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Ninth Tractate : NINTH TRACTATE. AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF THE KOSMOS AND THE KOSMOS ITSELF TO BE EVIL: [GENERALLY QUOTED AS "AGAINST THE GNOSTICS"].
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle? Identity 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...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. Then Matter is simply Alienism [the Principle of Difference]? No: it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-Principles. So understood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence; for it is identical with...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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 powerful influence upon the thing brought into being: allow the stars...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. We must be more explicit: The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its quality, in other words that there be something in its likeness as the sun's rays tell...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 38 : Section 38 38. Whatever springs automatically from the All out of that distinctive life of its own, and, in addition to that self-moving activity, whatever is due to some specific agency- for example, to prayers, simple or taking the form of magic incantations- this entire range of production is...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. If the mind reels before something thus alien to all we know, we must take our stand on the things of this realm and strive thence to see. But, in the looking, beware of throwing outward; this Principle does not lie away somewhere leaving the rest void; to those of power to reach, it...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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 something for him, but if all the process has brought him no further vision, then...
Section 8. Part 1 : Section 8 8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to it, for example a harmony or accord? The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with some difference, comparable to the accord...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. In what sense, then, do we assert this Unity, and how is it to be adjusted to our mental processes? Its oneness must not be entitled to that of monad and point: for these the mind abstracts extension and numerical quantity and rests upon the very minutest possible, ending no doubt...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. Conferring- but how? As itself possessing them or not? How can it convey what it does not possess, and yet if it does possess how is it simplex? And if, again, it does not, how is it the source of the manifold? A single, unmanifold emanation we may very well allow- how even that c...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. It is suggested that multiplicity is a falling away from The Unity, infinity being the complete departure, an innumerable multiplicity, and that this is why unlimit is an evil and we evil at the stage of multiplicity. A thing, in fact, becomes a manifold when, unable to rem...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. It may be objected that our will towards living 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. How, then, do we ourselves come to be speaking of it? No doubt we deal with it, but we do not state it; we have neither knowledge nor intellection of it. But in what sense do we even deal with it when we have no hold upon it? We do not, it is true, grasp it by knowledge, but th...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. May we think that the mode of the soul's presence to body is that of the presence of light to the air? This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable thing, the air flows in and out; when the air...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 23 : Section 23 23. I explain: A living body is illuminated by soul: each organ and member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to itself; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle of the soul-faculty under which the function is performed; thus the seeing...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, 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 exists in those regions no...
The Fifth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Anything existing after The First must necessarily arise from that First, whether immediately or as tracing back to it through intervenients; there must be an order of secondaries and tertiaries, in which any second is to be referred to The First, any third to the second. Standing...
The Fourth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of as seal-impressions on soul or mind: accepting this statement, there is one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected. Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue of the lingering...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. This is Plato's conception: to him participation does not, in the case of Matter, comport any such presence of an Ideal-form in a Substance to be shaped by it as would produce one compound thing made up of the two elements changing at the same moment, merging into one another...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 30 : Section 30 30. We have declared acts of memory unnecessary to the stars, but we allow them perceptions, hearing as well as seeing; for we said that prayers to them were heard- our supplications to the sun, and those, even, of certain other men to the stars. It has moreover been the belief th...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 26 : Section 26 26. We may now take the various specific types of Motion, such as locomotion, and once again enquire for each one whether it is not to be divided on the basis of direction, up, down, straight, circular- a question already raised; whether the organic motion should be distinguished...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 25 : Section 25 25. It is in view, probably, of this difficulty that Plato, in the Philebus, makes pleasure an element in the Term; the good is not defined as a simplex or set in Intellectual-Principle alone; while he rightly refrains from identifying the good with the pleasant, yet he does not allow...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection th...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-Principle alleged to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon- a Principle which, acting through seminal Reason-Forms- Logoi Spermatikoi...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its vision? The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated by the most ancient philosophers:...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, 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 estrangement. No longer is there concord unbroken; hostility, too, has entered...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. How, then, are we to recognise Passivity, since clearly it is not to be found in the Act from outside which the recipient in turn makes his own? Surely we must look for it in cases where the patient remains without Act, the passivity pure. Imagine a case where an agent improves...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Are these planets to be thought of as soulless 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. Why is Quality, again, not included among the Primaries? Because like Quantity it is a posterior, subsequent to Substance. Primary Substance must necessarily contain Quantity and Quality as its consequents; it cannot owe its subsistence to them, or require them for its completion:...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. The elements in their totality, as they stand produced, may be thought of as one spheric figure; this cannot be the piecemeal product of many makers each working from some one point on some one portion. There must be one cause; and this must operate as an entire, not by part executing...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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...
The Second Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. But whence that circular movement? In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle. And does this movement belong to the material 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;...
The Second Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. This, however, raises a problem deserving investigation in itself: what has happened when a definite magnitude of water becomes air, and how do we explain the increase of volume? But for the present we must be content with the matter thus far discussed out of all the varied controversy...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. In what sense is the particular manifestation of Being a unity? Clearly, in so far as it is one thing, it forfeits its unity; with "one" and "thing" we have already plurality. No species can be a unity in more than an equivocal sense: a species is a plurality, so that the "unity"...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. "Our way of speaking"- for myths, if they are to serve their purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the unbegotten...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 25 : Section 25 25. There are those who lay down four categories and make a fourfold division into Substrates, Qualities, States, and Relative States, and find in these a common Something, and so include everything in one genus. Against this theory there is much to be urged, but particularly against...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. In order, then, to know what the Divine Mind is, we must observe soul and especially its most God-like phase. One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the body- yourself, that is, from your body- next to put aside that soul which moulded the body, and, very...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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 essentially offends our nature fall to the good while...
The Fifth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. In the case of twin birth among human beings how can we make out the Reason-Principles to be different; and still more when we turn to the animals and especially those with litters? Where the young are precisely alike, there is one Reason-Principle. But this would mean that after all...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. Now what in all these objects of desire is the fundamental making them good? We must be bold: Intellectual-Principle and that life are of the order of good and hold their desirability, even they, in virtue of belonging to that order; they have their goodness, I mean, because Life is...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. An Ideal-Principle approaches and leads Matter towards some desired dimension, investing this non-existent underlie with a magnitude from itself which never becomes incorporate- for Matter, if it really incorporated magnitude, would be a mass. Eliminate this Ideal-Form...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 34 : Section 34 34. For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the body of the All should be yielded to its action, we ought to make sure that we submit only within limits, realizing that the entire man is not thus bound to it: intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters but...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. But suppose that we identify alteration with Motion on the ground that Motion itself results in difference: how then do we proceed to define Motion? It may roughly be characterized as the passage from the potentiality to its realization. That is potential which can either pass ...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. "Atoms" or "elements"- it is in either case an absurdity, an impossibility, to hand over the universe and its contents to material entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order, reasoning, and the governing soul into being; but the atomic origin is, if we may...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common? Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum. The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there...
Next. Section 7 : Section 8 8. A. [sometimes appearing as 9] There are those who insist on the activities observed in bodies- warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing- and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. This ignores the double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such efficiency by...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. This matter need not be elaborated at present: it suffices to say that if the created were all, these ultimates [the higher] need not exist: but the Supreme does include primals, the primals because the producers. In other words, there must be, with the made, the making source;...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness? 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. What then is the veritable nature of Number? Is it an accompaniment upon each substance, something seen in the things as in a man we see one man, in a being one being and in the total of presentations the total of number? But how explain the dyad and triad? How comes the total to be...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the unity are distinct, yet in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when we have grasped Being we hold unity; Real Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, taking...
The Fourth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 27 : Section 27 27. But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All? Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared memories; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as one;...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. So much for the thing of sense; but it would appear that the prototype There of the living form, the universal horse, must look deliberately towards this sphere; and, that being so, the idea of horse must have been worked out in order there be a horse here? Yet what was that there...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. As with bodily pain and pleasure so with the bodily desires; their origin, also, must be attributed to what thus stands midway, to that Nature we described as the corporeal. Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 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 h...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 35 : Section 35 35. Such in this union is the soul's temper that even the act of Intellect, once so intimately loved, she now dismisses; Intellection is movement and she has no wish to move; she has nothing to say of this very Intellectual-Principle by means of which she has attained the vision, herself...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing line; its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own centre, the point to which it owes its rise. The soul's movement...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. We can scarcely do better, in fine, than follow Plato. Thus: In the universe as a whole there must necessarily 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...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Thus we have even here the means of knowing the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, though, seeing it more closely than anything else, we still see it at less than its worth. We know that it exists but its cause we do not see, or, if we do, we see that cause as something apart. We...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 28 : Section 28 28. We have already indicated that Activity and Passivity are to be regarded as motions, and that it is possible to distinguish absolute motions, actions, passions. As for the remaining so-called genera, we have shown that they are reducible to those which we have posited. With regard...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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 whatever may be due...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. This is the explanation of Plato's Triplicity, in the passage where he names as the Primals the Beings gathered about the King of All, and establishes a Secondary containing the Secondaries, and a Third containing the Tertiaries. He teaches, also, that there is an author of the Cause...
The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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 cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle [the diviner phase...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions- the divine sowing to birth, as opposed to a voluntary descent aiming at the completion of the universe; the judgement and the cave; necessity and free choice- in fact the necessity includes the choice-embodiment as an evil;...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. But how account, at this, for its extension over all the heavens and all living beings? There is no such extension. Sense-perception, by insistence upon which we doubt, tells of Here and There; but reason certifies that the Here and There do not attach to that principle; the extended...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Sense sees a man and transmits the impression to the understanding. What does the understanding say? It has nothing to say as yet; it accepts and waits; unless, rather, it questions within itself "Who is this?"- someone it has met before- and then, drawing on memory, says, "Socrates."...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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 individuals, serve according to their own capacities, as in a war...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. (16) What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a value, one in which there is a life self-springing and therefore not to be destroyed? This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in the mode of the heat in fire- for if heat is characteristic...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. If this principle is the Authentic Existent and holds unchanging identity, does not go forth from itself, is untouched by any process of becoming or, as we have said, by any situation in place, then it must be always self-gathered, never in separation, not partly here and partly there...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. The Supreme, as the Absolute Good and not merely a good being or thing, can contain nothing, since there is nothing that could be its good. Anything it could contain must be either good to it or not good; but in the supremely and primally Good there can be nothing not good; nor c...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars and their very shapes. No one will pretend that these forms are...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 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 possession of the Thought of the First Principle: thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise, would be...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. To Real Being we go back, all that we have and are; to that we return as from that we came. Of what is There we have direct knowledge, not images or even impressions; and to know without image is to be; by our part in true knowledge we are those Beings; we do not need to bring them...
The Fifth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; all things are its possession- running back, so to speak, to it- or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be. But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring: Whether light finally perishes or simply returns to its source. If it be a thing requiring to be caught and kept, domiciled within a recipient, we might think of it finally passing out of existence: if it be an Act not flowing out...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. It will be asked how act rising from desire can be voluntary, since desire pulls outward and implies need; to desire is still to be drawn, even though towards the good. Intellectual-Principle itself comes under the doubt; having a certain nature and acting by that nature can it be said...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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 coalesce. Take, for example, Shape...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. (20) Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to those asking for demonstration: those whose need is conviction by evidence of the more material order are best met from the abundant records relevant to the subject: there are also the oracles of the Gods ordering...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. The contemplating of God, we might answer. But to admit its knowing God is to be compelled to admit its self-knowing. It will know what it holds from God, what God has given forth or may; with this knowledge, it knows itself at the stroke, for it is itself one of those given things...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine;...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 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...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme is not to be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see. There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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 human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. The Ideal Principle possessing the Intellection [= Idea, Noesis] of Magnitude- assuming that this Intellection is of such power as not merely to subsist within itself but to be urged outward as it were by the intensity of its life- will necessarily realize itself in a Kind [= Matter]...
The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 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 m...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 31 : Section 31 31. But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. Intellectual-Principle w...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. If all this be true, we must at once admit signification, though, neither singly nor collectively, 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 24 : Section 24 24. The next question is whether perception is concerned only with need. The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with the body; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the body to which the sensations are due; it must be something brought about by associati...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. But how can that higher soul have sense-perception? It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul's perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this entity of ceaseless flux constituting the physical 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 29 : Section 29 29. Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance? Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold. [(And if...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But perhaps the explanation of every particular act or event is rather that they are determined 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...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But there is yet another way to this knowledge: Admiring the world of sense as we look out upon its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, thinking of the gods within it, seen and hidden, and the celestial spirits and all the life of animal and plant, let us mount...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 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...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. In all this there is no sin- there is only matter of discipline- but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God. As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God, or rather God in association with a nature of a lower power: when all...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 27 : Section 27 27. But what is that whose entry supplies every such need? Some Idea, we maintain. There is a Form to which Matter aspires: to soul, moral excellence is this Form. But is this Form a good to the thing as being apt to it, does the striving aim at the apt? No: the aptest would be the most...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. But, it may be said, length of time produces 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 acti...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 32 : Section 32 32. If we can trace neither to material agencies [blind elements] nor to any deliberate intention the influences from without which reach to us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general, what cause satisfactory to reason remains? The secret is: firstly, that this...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 24 : Section 24 24. With regard to locomotion: if ascending is to be held contrary to descending, and circular motion different [in kind] from motion in a straight line, we may ask how this difference is to be defined- the difference, for example, between throwing over the head and under the feet...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. Further: If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must acquire something by the incoming of the new state; it will either adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way different from what it was. Now upon this first incoming quality suppose a second to supervene;...
The Fourth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. With this prologue we come to our discussion of Memory. That the soul, or mind, having taken no imprint, yet achieves perception of what it in no way contains need not surprise us; or rather, surprising though it is, we cannot refuse to believe in this remarkable power. The Soul is...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. What does all this come to? What answer do we give to him who, with no opinion of his own to assert, asks us to explain this presence? And what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase? Of the modes...
The Fourth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. These reflections should show that there is nothing strange in that reduction of all souls to one. But it is still necessary to enquire into the mode and conditions of the unity. Is it the unity of origin in a unity? And if so, is the one divided or does it remain entire and yet...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. We have, of course, already seen that a secondary must follow upon the First, and that this is a power immeasurably fruitful; and we indicated that this truth is confirmed by the entire order of things since there is nothing, not even in the lowest ranks, void of the power...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. And there is the question How can the infinite have existence and remain unlimited: whatever is in actual existence is by that very fact determined numerically. But, first, if multiplicity holds a true place among Beings, how can it be an evil? As existent it possesses unity; it is...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by knowing nor by the Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence overpassing all knowledge. In knowing, soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 39 : Section 39 39. Since the Supreme has no interval, no self-differentiation what can have this intuitional approach to it but itself? Therefore it quite naturally assumes difference at the point where Intellectual-Principle and Being are differentiated. Intellect, to act at all, must inevitably...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. As for Relation, manifestly an offshoot, how can it be included among primaries? Relation is of thing ranged against thing; it is not self-pivoted, but looks outward. Place and Date are still more remote from Being. Place denotes the presence of one entity within another, so that it...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Since there is a Soul which reasons upon the right and good- for reasoning is an enquiry into the rightness and goodness of this rather than that- there must exist some permanent Right, the source and foundation of this reasoning in our soul; how, else, could any such discussion be...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 23 : Section 23 23. As for Possession, if the term is used comprehensively, why are not all its modes to be brought under one category? Possession, thus, would include the quantum as possessing magnitude, the quale as possessing colour; it would include fatherhood and the complementary relationships...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Sixth Tractate : SIXTH TRACTATE. THAT THE PRINCIPLE TRANSCENDING BEING HAS NO INTELLECTUAL ACT. WHAT BEING HAS INTELLECTION PRIMALLY AND WHAT BEING HAS IT SECONDARILY.
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 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...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being from outside itself: this is no case of a self-originating substance being annihilated by an external; it rose on the ruin of something else, and thus in its own...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 27 : Section 27 27. On other grounds also, it is indefensible not to have reserved the high place for the true first-principle of things but to have set up in its stead the formless, passive and lifeless, the irrational, dark and indeterminate, and to have made this the source of Being. In this theory...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. But it is not, in our view, as an attribute that this freedom is present in the First. In the light of free acts, from which we eliminate the contraries, we recognise There self-determination, self-directed and, failing more suitable terms, we apply to it the lesser terms brought over...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Enough upon that side of the question. But how does the perfection [goodness] of numbers, lifeless things, depend upon their particular unity? Just as all other inanimates find their perfection in their unity. If it should be objected that numbers are simply non-existent, we should...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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...
The Second Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. The truth may be resumed in this way: There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe: another phase possesses sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned with the objects of sensation: this higher...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 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...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 25 : Section 25 25. Now comes the question, equally calling for an answer, whether those souls that have quitted the places of earth retain memory of their lives- all souls or some, of all things, or of some things, and, again, for ever or merely for some period not very long after their withdrawal...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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 "Happiness." And even pleasure, though it exist...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. It is inevitably necessary to think of all as contained within one nature; one nature must hold and encompass all; there cannot be as in the realm of sense thing apart from thing, here a sun and elsewhere something else; all must be mutually present within a unity. This is the very...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 28 : Section 28 28. Thus much established, we may return on our path: we have to discuss the seat of the passionate element in the human being. Pleasures and pains- the conditions, that is, not the perception of them- and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a determined thing...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. But why, after all, should it not be such a manifold as long as it remains one substantial existence, having the multiplicity not of a compound being but of a unity with a variety of activities? Now, no doubt, if these various activities are not themselves substantial existences- but...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. "But, given Magnitude and the properties 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...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. In the two orders of things- those whose existence is that of process and those in whom it is Authentic Being- there is a variety of possible relation to Cause. Cause might conceivably underly all the entities in both orders or none in either. It might underly some, only, in each order...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 36 : Section 36 36. The Universe is immensely varied, the container of all the Reason-Principles and of infinite and diverse efficacies. In man, we are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied powers, and so with each separate part of hand and of foot; and there is no member or org...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. We have to ascertain whether there is not to every quality a contrary. In the case of virtue and vice, even the mean appears to be contrary to the extremes. But when we turn to colours, we do not find the intermediates so related. If we regard the intermediates as blendings...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. But would this mean that if there were no Matter nothing would exist? Precisely as in the absence of a mirror, or something of similar power, there would be no reflection. A thing whose very nature is to be lodged in something else cannot exist where the base is lacking- and it is...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 23 : Section 23 23. That which soul must quest, that which sheds its light upon Intellectual-Principle, leaving its mark wherever it falls, surely we need not wonder that it be of power to draw to itself, calling back from every wandering to rest before it. From it came all, and so there is nothing...
The Fifth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We have to examine the question whether there exists an ideal archetype of individuals, in other words whether I and every other human being go back to the Intellectual, every [living] thing having origin and principle There. If Socrates, Socrates' soul, is external then the Authentic...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish what is this thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme possesses it, is in the nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue. We must first...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 43 : Section 43 43. And the Proficient [the Sage], how does he stand with regard to magic and philtre-spells? In the soul he is immune from magic; his reasoning part cannot be touched by it, he cannot be perverted. But there is in him the unreasoning element which comes from the [material] All...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 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 characteristically the inferior. Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the Universe...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. We have told how this vision is to be procured, whether by the mode of separation or in identity: now, seen in either way, what does it give to report? The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labour...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a Contemplation: we may now take the matter up to the higher Soul; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. But if these considerations are sound, why has Quality more than one species? What is the ground for distinguishing between habit and disposition, seeing that no differentia of Quality is involved in permanence and non-permanence? A disposition of any kind is sufficient to constitute...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. The above considerations- to which others, doubtless, might be added- suffice to show that these five are primary genera. But that they are the only primary genera, that there are no others, how can we be confident of this? Why do we not add unity to them? Quantity? Quality? Relati...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. Stirred to the Supreme by what has been told, a man must strive to possess it directly; then he too will see, though still unable to tell it as he would wish. One seeing That as it really is will lay aside all reasoning upon it and simply state it as the self-existent; such that if...
The Second Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. The explanation by lesser angle of vision has been elsewhere dismissed; one point, however, 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...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We are told that number is Quantity in the primary sense, number together with all continuous magnitude, space and time: these are the standards to which all else that is considered as Quantity is referred, including motion which is Quantity because its time is quantitative- though...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. When each of the entities bound up with the pseudo-substance is taken apart from the rest, the name of Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing- for example...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. That Life, the various, the all-including, the primal and one, who can consider it without longing to be of it, disdaining all the other? All other life is darkness, petty and dim and poor; it is unclean and polluting the clean for if you do but look upon it you no longer see n...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 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...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. Time, again, has been described as some sort of a sequence upon Movement, but we learn nothing from this, nothing is said, until we know what it is that produces this sequential thing: probably the cause and not the result would turn out to be Time. And, admitting such a thing, there...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. But are we to think of this Authentic Being as, itself, present, or does it remain detached, omnipresent in the sense only that powers from it enter everywhere? Under the theory of presence by powers, souls are described as rays; the source remains self-locked and these are flung forth...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Souls that descend, souls that change their state- these, then, may be said to have memory, which deals with what has come and gone; but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to remain unchanged? The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Let us begin with virtue and vice in the Soul. What has really occurred when, as we say, vice is present? In speaking of extirpating evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to replace a former ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the Soul. Now when we make...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We may be told that nothing prevents an identity being thus multiple. But there must be a unity underlying the aggregate: a manifold is impossible without a unity for its source or ground, or at least, failing some unity, related or unrelated. This unity must be numbered as first...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But, soul reached, why need we look higher; why not make this The First? A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once something other and something more powerful than Soul and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is certainly not true...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. The Ineluctable, the Kosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural principle under which each several entity is overruled to go, duly and in order, towards that place and Kind to which it characteristically tends, that is towards the image of its primal choice and constitution. In th...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Enough on that point: we come now to the question of memory of the personality? There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that the contemplator is the self- Socrates, for example- or that it is Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in mind th...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. Various considerations explain why the Souls going forth from the Intellectual proceed first to the heavenly regions. The heavens, as the noblest portion of sensible space, would border with the least exalted of the Intellectual, and will, therefore, be first ensouled first...
The Third Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. "The Intellectual-Principle" [= the Divine Mind]- we read [in the Timaeus]- "looks upon the Ideas indwelling in that Being which is the Essentially Living [= according to Plotinus, the Intellectual Realm], "and then"- the text proceeds- "the Creator judged that all the content of th...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. the Intellectual Essence, wholly of the order of Ideal-form, must be taken as impassive has been already established. But Matter also is an incorporeal, though after a mode of its own; we must examine, therefore, how this stands, whether it is passive, as is commonly held, a thing th...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature...
The First Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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 Intellectual-Principle. Everything has something of the Good, by virtue of possessing a certain degree of unity and a certain degree...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. The very heavens, patently multiple, cannot be thought to disdain any form of life since this universe holds everything. Now how do these things come to be here? Does the higher realm contain all of the lower? All that has been shaped by Reason-Principle and conforms to Idea. But...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. It follows that we must allow contrariety to Quantity: whenever we speak of great and small, our notions acknowledge this contrariety by evolving opposite images, as also when we refer to many and few; indeed, "few" and "many" call for similar treatment to "small" and "great." "Many...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Let us consider once more how it is possible for an identity to extend over a universe. This comes to the question how each variously placed entity in the multiplicity of the sense order can have its share in one identical Principle. The solution is in the reasons given for refusing...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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 comm...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 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 human wickedness either by force...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searching...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. The "category of Action": The quantum has been regarded as a single genus on the ground that Quantity and Number are attributes of Substance and posterior to it; the quale has been regarded as another genus because Quality is an attribute of Substance: on the same principle it is...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. Movement Time cannot be- whether a definite act of moving is meant or a united total made up of all such acts- since movement, in either sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any movement not in Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. This then is Beauty primally: it is entire and omnipresent as an entirety; and therefore in none of its parts or members lacking in beauty; beautiful thus beyond denial. Certainly it cannot be anything [be, for example, Beauty] without being wholly that thing; it can be nothing which...
The Second Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Now, in general anything that has a potentiality 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 assert to be the potentiality of all things, cannot be said to be actually any one being among...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. We may thus distinguish two phases of Intellect, in one of which it may be taken as having no contact whatever with particulars and no Act upon anything; thus it is kept apart from being a particular intellect. In the same way science is prior to any of its constituent species...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end- and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 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 successive order of Primals, Secondaries, Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that nothing is to be...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature repugnant...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. How then do we go to work? Let us begin by distinguishing Matter, Form, the Mixture of both, and the Attributes of the Mixture. The Attributes may be subdivided into those which are mere predicates, and those serving also as accidents. The accidents may be either inclusive or included;...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. Lovable, very love, the Supreme is also self-love in that He is lovely no otherwise than from Himself and in Himself. Self-presence can hold only in the identity of associated with associating; since, in the Supreme, associated and associating are one, seeker and sought one...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being, the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire? This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside of body, or that- no soul being within body- the thing described as the soul...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. A first point demanding consideration: Bodies- those, for example, of animals and plants- are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely; it is supported by Theologians and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an already...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Thus we have here one identical Principle, the Intellect, which is the universe of authentic beings, the Truth: as such it is a great god or, better, not a god among gods but the Godhead entire. It is a god, a secondary god manifesting before there is any vision of that other...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent; there must exist that which transcends it, that Being [the Absolute], to which all our discussion has been leading. In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The Intellectual-Principle is a number [= the expressi...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. If, then, the Intellection is an act upon the inner content [of a perfect unity], that content is at once the Idea [as object: eidos] and the Idea itself [as concept: idea]. What, then, is that content? An Intellectual-Principle and an Intellective Essence, no concept distinguishable...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are the work of Nature, but that, since there is wisdom within the All, there must be also, by the side of such natural operation, acts of reasoning and of memory. But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. 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 unequal by the fact of becoming separate. We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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 before 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 presentment of the Soul...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. But we are digressing: we must resume our enquiry into the cause of dissimilarity among relations. Yet we must first be informed what reality, common to all cases, is possessed by this Existence derived from mutual conditions. Now the common principle in question cannot be a body...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. We must repeat: The Collective Being, the Authentic, There, is at once Being and Intellectual-Principle and the Complete Living Form; thus it includes the total of living things; the Unity There is reproduced by the unity of this living universe in the degree possible to it...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. Are we to rest all on pursuit and on the soul? Is it enough to put faith in the soul's choice and call that good which the soul pursues, never asking ourselves the motive of its choice? We marshal demonstration as to the nature of everything else; is the good to be dismissed...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. It may be suggested that the decad is nothing more than so many henads; admitting the one henad why should we reject the ten? As the one is a real existence why not the rest? We are certainly not compelled to attach that one henad to some one thing and so deprive all the rest...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. But if in the soul thing follows thing, if there is earlier and later in its productions, if it engenders or creates in time, then it must be looking towards the future; and if towards the future, then towards the past as well? No: prior and past are in the things its produces;...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Now as to the arts and crafts and their productions: The imitative arts- painting, sculpture, dancing, pantomimic gesturing- are, largely, earth-based; on an earthly base; they follow models found in sense, since they copy forms and movements and reproduce seen symmetries; they...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Consider the act of ocular vision: There are two elements here; there is the form perceptible to the sense and there is the medium by which the eye sees that form. This medium is itself perceptible to the eye, distinct from the form to be seen, but the cause of the seeing; it is...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. But Matter, it may be contended, is the source of existence to the Sensible things implanted in it. From what source, then, we retort, does Matter itself derive existence and being? That Matter is not a Primary we have established elsewhere. If it be urged that other things can have no...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an accidental from outside grafted upon that Nature: it is native to it, integral to it. It is discerned as present essentially in that Nature like everything else that we can predicate There- all immanent, springing from that Essence...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. We come to the same result by examining the sense of pain. We say there is pain in the finger: the trouble is doubtless in the finger, but our opponents must admit that the sensation of the pain is in the centre of consciousness. The suffering member is one thing, the sense...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. To "live at ease" is There; and, to these divine beings, verity is mother and nurse, existence and sustenance; all that is not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in all: for all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 40 : Section 40 40. That there can be no intellection in the First will be patent to those that have had such contact; but some further confirmation is desirable, if indeed words can carry the matter; we need overwhelming persuasion. It must be borne in mind that all intellection rises in some principle...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body- whether it be set above it or actually within it- since the association of 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 th...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We have examined the proposed "ten genera": we have discussed also the theory which gathers the total of things into one genus and to this subordinates what may be thought of as its four species. The next step is, naturally, to expound our own views and to try to show the agreement...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul? The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the heavens are ensouled- a teaching...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. We have to ask ourselves whether there are not certain Acts which without the addition of a time-element will be thought of as imperfect and therefore classed with motions. Take for instance living and life. The life of a definite person implies a certain adequate period, just as his...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. But this Unoriginating, what is it? We can but withdraw, silent, hopeless, and search no further. What can we look for when we have reached the furthest? Every enquiry aims at a first and, that attained, rests. Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the nature...
The Second Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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 Animate, the Couplement. But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if our...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 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...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. With regard to Date: If "yesterday, to-morrow, last year" and similar terms denote parts of time, why should they not be included in the same genus as time? It would seem only reasonable to range under time the past, present and future, which are its species. But time is referred...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established- some self-evident, others brought out by our treatment above: All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. This is why Zeus, although the oldest of the gods and their sovereign, advances first [in the Phaidros myth] towards that vision, followed by gods and demigods and such souls as are of strength to see. That Being appears before them from some unseen place and rising loftily over them...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 41 : Section 41 41. The prayer is answered by the mere fact that part and other part are wrought to one tone like a musical string which, plucked at one end, vibrates at the other also. Often, too, the sounding of one string awakens what might pass for a perception in another, the result of their being...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 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 of the End of life. The one proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all- not as in a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds many branches and items...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. There is a principle having intellection of the external and another having self-intellection and thus further removed from duality. Even the first mentioned is not without an effort towards the pure unity of which it is not so capable: it does actually contain its object, though...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into beings, or rather into a certain order of beings, would be making the best beginning if they established, first of all, what precisely Evil is, what constitutes its Nature. At once we should know whence it comes, where it has its native se...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. In that realm it has also vision, through the Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance- and, indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. How are we to explain the omnipresence of the soul? Does it depend upon the definite magnitude of the material universe coupled with some native tendency in soul to distribute itself over material mass, or is it a characteristic of soul apart from body? In the latter case, soul will...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle- Time- a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other- a Principle, then, whose Act is sequent. But let us...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. 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] behave unjustly, commit sin? And how comes misery if neither sin nor injustice exists? Again, if all our...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain- and then either come to a stand or pass beyond- has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. But in what mode are these secondaries, and Intellectual-Principle itself, within the First? They are not in the Filling Principle; they are not in the filled since before that moment it did not contain them. Giving need not comport possessing; in this order we are to think...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. How are we to classify the straight line? Shall we deny that it is a magnitude? The suggestion may be made that it is a qualified magnitude. May we not, then, consider straightness as a differentia of "line"? We at any rate draw on Quality for differentiae of Substance. The straight...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. In considering Relation we must enquire whether it possesses the community of a genus, or whether it may on other grounds be treated as a unity. Above all, has Relation- for example, that of right and left, double and half- any actuality? Has it, perhaps, actuality in some cases only...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the Reason-Principle applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual Principle- then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic 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 Philosophy and Dialectic is closer. And in Morals, too...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Herein lies its greatness, not in mass; mass is limited and may be whittled down to nothingness; in that order no such paring off is possible- nor, if it were, could there be any falling short. Where limitation is unthinkable, what fear can there be of absence at any point? Nowhere c...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But are we really obliged to posit the existence of such genera? Take Substance, for Substance must certainly be our starting-point: what are the grounds for regarding Substance as one single genus? It has been remarked that Substance cannot be a single entity common to both...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. Another method of division is possible: substances may be classed as hot-dry, dry-cold, cold-moist, or however we choose to make the coupling. We may then proceed to the combination and blending of these couples, either halting at that point and going no further than the compound...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. For Intellectual-Principle is not a simplex, nor is the soul that proceeds from it: on the contrary things include variety in the degree of their simplicity, that is to say in so far as they are not compounds but Principles and Activities;- the activity of the lowest is simple...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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 removed from Matter, is made anterior to Matter. No...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. And again: the multiple must be always seeking its identity, desiring self-accord and self-awareness: but what scope is there within what is an absolute unity in which to move towards its identity or at what term may it hope for self-knowing? It holds its identity in its very essence...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase of the Soul. This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude [physical extension] they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even plunge...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. What is this other place and how it is accessible? It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose...
The Third Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. (A)... How, then, does Unity give rise to Multiplicity? By its omnipresence: there is nowhere where it is not; it occupies, therefore, all that is; at once, it is manifold- or, rather, it is all things. If it were simply and solely everywhere, all would be this one thing alone: but it...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of its own- so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some individuality- or whether all it has is this Nature we have been speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with it. Certainly...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. Everything brought into being under some principle not itself is contained either within its maker or, if there is any intermediate, within that: having a prior essential to its being, it needs that prior always, otherwise it would not be contained at all. It is the order of nature:...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered? And what is the garden? We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to explain Zeus...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 45 : Section 45 45. From this discussion it becomes perfectly clear that the individual member of the All contributes to that All in the degree of its kind and condition; thus it acts and is acted upon. In any particular animal each of the limbs and organs, in the measure of its kind and purpose, aids...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. We may here adduce the pregnant words of Plato: "Inasmuch as Intellect perceives the variety and plurality of the Forms present in the complete Living Being...." The words apply equally to Soul; Soul is subsequent to Intellect, yet by its very nature it involves Intellect in itself...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. But if this Reason-Principle [Nature] is in act- and produces by the process indicated- how can it have any part in Contemplation? To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative act...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. So much for one of the genera- the "Substance," so called, of the Sensible realm. But what are we to posit as its species? how divide this genus? The genus as a whole must be identified with body. Bodies may be divided into the characteristically material and the organic: the material...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. We may be told that neither Act nor Motion requires a genus for itself, but that both revert to Relation, Act belonging to the potentially active, Motion to the potentially motive. Our reply is that Relation produces relatives as such, and not the mere reference to an external...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body- the manner and the process- a question certainly of no minor interest. The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms. Firstly, there is the entry- metensomatosis- of a soul present in body by change from one [wholly...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. 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 understand 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. It can be demonstrated that soul must, necessarily, be of just this nature and that there can be no other soul than such a being, one neither wholly partible but both at once. If it had the nature of body it would consist of isolated members each unaware of the conditions of every...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. The Intellectual-Principle, the veritably and essentially intellective, can this be conceived as ever falling into error, ever failing to think reality? Assuredly no: it would no longer be intelligent and therefore no longer Intellectual-Principle: it must know unceasingly- and never...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. But how can the unextended reach over the defined extension of the corporeal? How can it, so, maintain itself as a unity, an identity? This is a problem often raised and reason calls vehemently for a solution of the difficulties involved. The fact stands abundantly evident, but there...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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 different entity formed from both. The Soul in turn- apart from the nature of the Animate- must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or where we must abide our doubt- with, at least, the gain of recognizing the problem that confronts us- this is matter well worth attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time required by minute...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. What, then, are the several entities observable in this plurality? We have found Substance [Essence] and life simultaneously present in Soul. Now, this Substance is a common property of Soul, but life, common to all souls, differs in that it is a property of Intellect also. Having thus...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. Or consider it another way: We hold the universe, with its content entire, to be as all would be if the design of the maker had so willed it, elaborating it with purpose and prevision by reasonings amounting to a Providence. All is always so and all is always so reproduced: therefore...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. What definition are we to give to Eternity? Can it be identified with the [divine or] Intellectual Substance itself? This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of Heavens and Earth- an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its adherents. No doubt we conceive, we...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We have now explained our conception of Reality [True Being] and considered how far it agrees with the teaching of Plato. We have still to investigate the opposed principle [the principle of Becoming]. There is the possibility that the genera posited for the Intellectual sphere will...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or whether something of us passes over to dissolution and destruction, while something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever- this question will be answered here for those willing to investigate our nature...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But let us leave the arts and consider those works produced by Nature and admitted to be naturally beautiful which the creations of art are charged with imitating, all reasoning life and unreasoning things alike, but especially the consummate among them, where the moulder and maker h...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. But what of the Infinite Number we hear of; does not all this reasoning set it under limit? And rightly so if the thing is to be a number; limitlessness and number are in contradiction. How, then, do we come to use the term? Is it that we think of Number as we think of an infinite...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. These problems at any rate all serve to show that, while in general it is necessary to look for differences by which to separate things from each other, to hunt for differences of the differences themselves is both futile and irrational. We cannot have substances of substances...
The Second Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But we must enquire into Quality in itself: 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 sometimes a constituent of Reality- not...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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 declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject...
Section 8 : Section 8 8. E. (13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire how it is applied to soul. It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body- not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe. When under the name of Zeus we are considering...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. But, we need not record in memory all we see; mere incidental concomitants need not occupy the imagination; when things vividly present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete form, it is not necessary- unless for purposes of a strictly practical administration- to pass...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and vegetable forms stand to it? Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them? Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil? And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but Vice? A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its divergence from the line...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. Are we to think of the indivisible phase of the soul and the divided as making one thing in a coalescence; or is the indivisible in a place of its own and under conditions of its own, the divisible being a sequent upon it, a separate part of it, as distinct as the reasoning phase is...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be opposed in faculty, and in quality to the forces that enter and act upon it. Thus where heat is present, the change comes by something that chills, where damp by some drying agency: we say a subject is modified when...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. It cannot reasonably be thought that the notion of unity is derived from the object since this is physical- man, animal, even stone, a presentation of that order is something very different from unity [which must be a thing of the Intellectual]; if that presentation were unity...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. If in such a partition of the unity, that which entered into each participant were an entire- always identical with the first- then, in the progressive severance, the firsts would become numerous, each particular becoming a first: and then what prevents these many firsts...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal- for the secondary can never be simplex- that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity. Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. just as the goodness...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. Our enquiry obliges us to use terms not strictly applicable: we insist, once more, that not even for the purpose of forming the concept of the Supreme may we make it a duality; if now we do, it is merely for the sake of conveying conviction, at the cost of verbal accuracy. If, then...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We assert, then, a plurality of Existents, but a plurality not fortuitous and therefore a plurality deriving from a unity. But even admitting this derivation from a unity- a unity however not predicated of them in respect of their essential being- there is, surely, no reason why each...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and mine and another's? May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to some individual, but to belong on the higher to that other sphere? At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 42 : Section 42 42. Faced by the difficulty of placing these powers, you must in reason allocate to the secondaries what you count august: secondaries must not be foisted upon the First, or tertiaries upon the secondaries. Secondaries are to be ranged under the First, tertiaries under the secondaries:...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt- whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature- indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences- those characters th...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? Predilections, reasons, they will say; that is all very well, but these already contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to body which is one...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. These are incontrovertible facts in regard to the pseudo-substance of the Sensible realm: if they apply also in some degree to the True Substance of the Intellectual, the coincidence is, doubtless, to be attributed to analogy and ambiguity of terms. We are aware that "the first" is so...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Now the Principle this stated, all good and beauty, and everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its law; and it is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato- finely, and by no...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. We return to our statement that The First remains intact even when other entities spring from it. In the case of numbers, the unit remains intact while something else produces, and thus number arises in dependence on the unit: much more then does the unit, The One, remain intact...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an Absolute-Soul differing from Soul and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. It must be...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. The division into elements must, in short, be abandoned, especially in regard to Sensible Substance, known necessarily by sense rather than by reason. We must no longer look for help in constituent parts, since such parts will not be substances, or at any rate not sensible substances...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. C. (11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form, one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into soul by growing finer under that new condition. This is absurd at the start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has been...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question, are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between soul and soul is due to the mere fact that all spring from that self-same soul [the next to Divine Mind] from which springs the Soul of the All. We...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. If it be urged that Motion is but imperfect Act, there would be no objection to giving priority to Act and subordinating to it Motion with its imperfection as a species: Act would thus be predicated of Motion, but with the qualification "imperfect." Motion is thought of as imperfect...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. So that we are left wondering whence it came, from within or without; and when it has gone, we say, "It was here. Yet no; it was beyond!" But we ought not to question whence; there is no whence, no coming or going in place; now it is seen and now not seen. We must not run after it, but...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle of all that exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the supreme Intellect; but being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch Soul, be in Soul, [as the next lower principle]. For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 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 doctrine before joining our circle and, strangely, still cling to it...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 44 : Section 44 44. Contemplation alone stands untouched by magic; no man self-gathered falls to a spell; for he is one, and that unity is all he perceives, so that his reason is not beguiled but holds the due course, fashioning its own career and accomplishing its task. In the other way of life, it is...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all th...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter 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...
The First Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity the Good can be other than the natural Act expressing 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Another consideration is that if The Good [and First] is simplex and without need, it can neither need the intellective act nor possess what it does not need: it will therefore not have intellection. (Interpolation or corruption: It is without intellection because, also, it contains no...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it is thus immune from the beginning? Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil:...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. Thus it comes about that this kosmos, lit with many lights, gleaming in its souls, receives still further graces, gifts from here and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other Intellectual-Principles whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably the secret...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We will have to examine this Nature, the Intellectual, which our reasoning identifies as the authentically existent and the veritable essential: but first we must take another path and make certain that such a principle does necessarily exist. Perhaps it is ridiculous to set out...
The Third Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2.... For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last...
Untitled : THE SIX ENNEADS BY PLOTINUS Translated By Stephen MacKenna And B. S. Page [1917-1930] Title Page Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work THE FIRST ENNEAD THE FIRST ENNEAD THE FIRST ENNEAD: FIRST TRACTATE FIRST TRACTATE Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4 Section 5...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence? Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is; failing...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future; and these have everything to do with fixing worth of place. Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But how explain beings by the side of Being, and the variety of intelligences and of souls, when Being has the unity of omnipresent identity and not merely that of a species, and when intellect and soul are likewise numerically one? We certainly distinguish between the soul of the All...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. But perhaps we should rather speak of some single category, embracing Intellectual Substance, Matter, Form, and the Composite of Matter and Form. One might refer to the family of the Heraclids as a unity in the sense, not of a common element in all its members, but of a common origin:...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Passing to Quantity and the quantum, we have to consider the view which identifies them with number and magnitude on the ground that everything quantitative is numbered among Sensible things or rated by the extension of its substrate: we are here, of course, discussing not Quantity...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Or take it another way: Since in our view this universe stands to that as copy to original, the living total must exist There beforehand; that is the realm of complete Being and everything must exist There. The sky There must be living and therefore not bare of stars, here known...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also, implies a beginning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a changeful Being who turns from this to that. Those that so think must be...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. The Spheral Circuit, then, performed in Time, indicates it: but when we come to Time itself there is no question of its being "within" something else: it must be primary, a thing "within itself." It is that in which all the rest happens, in which all movement and rest exist smoothly...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. The nature of the Reason-Principle is adequately expressed in its Act and, therefore, the wider its extension the nearer will its productions approach to full contrariety: hence the world of sense is less a unity than is its Reason-Principle; it contains a wider multiplicity...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already and not like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of himself 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...
Porphyry. On The Life Of Plotinus : PORPHYRY: ON THE LIFE OF PLOTINUS AND THE ARRANGEMENT OF HIS WORK from "Plotinus: The Enneads" translated by Stephen MacKenna Typed by Owlsmirror/crows -- January 2004 1. Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. But even there we are not to remain always, in that beauty of the multiple; we must make haste yet higher, above this heaven of ours and even that; leaving all else aside we ask in awe "Who produced that realm and how?" Everything There is a single Idea in an individual impressi...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. How far is it true that equality and inequality are characteristic of Quantity? Triangles, it is significant, are said to be similar rather than equal. But we also refer to magnitudes as similar, and the accepted connotation of similarity does not exclude similarity or dissimilarity...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Now if we do not mean anything by Relation but are victims of words, none of the relations mentioned can exist: Relation will be a notion void of content. Suppose however that we do possess ourselves of objective truth when in comparing two points of time we pronounce one pri...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can scarcely be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surface-knowing; it is of later origin than the objects since it is a reflection from them: but on the other...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing. We ascend from air, light, sun- or, moon and light and sun- in detail, to these things as constituting a total- though a total of degrees, primary, secondary...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement: the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the judgement resides in the Soul, and is distinct from the state- for, if it is not distinct...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the Supreme becomes effective in us? At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as their object; what they have not been able to achieve by the direct path, they hope to come at by the circuit. Further: suppose they succeed; they desired...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. Similarly any one, unable to see himself, but possessed by that God, has but to bring that divine- within before his consciousness and at once he sees an image of himself, himself lifted to a better beauty: now let him ignore that image, lovely though it is, and sink into a perfect...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 40 : Section 40 40. But magic spells; how can their efficacy be explained? By the reigning sympathy and by the fact in Nature that there is an agreement of like forces and an opposition of unlike, and by the diversity of those multitudinous powers which converge in the one living universe. There is much...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme. In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the Supernal Beings- not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents- they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations...
The Second Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. 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 because they must be drawn together for vision and the light...
The Second Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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 Actualization there, each and every member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also has place...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself [Divine-Mind]. This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 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 begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. If then we do not propose to divide Quality in this [fourfold] manner, what basis of division have we? We must examine whether qualities may not prove to be divisible on the principle that some belong to the body and others to the soul. Those of the body would be subdivided according...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. We have said that all must be brought back to a unity: this must be an authentic unity, not belonging to the order in which multiplicity is unified by participation in what is truly a One; we need a unity independent of participation, not a combination in which multiplicity holds...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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- Resource- at Aphrodite's birth feast. But...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. It should however be added that if the Idea of man exists in the Supreme, there must exist the Idea of reasoning man and of man with his arts and crafts; such arts as are the offspring of intellect Must be There. It must be observed that the Ideas will be of universals; not...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being? The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered: In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. In asserting that Being is not a unity, we do not mean to imply a definite number of existences; the number may well be infinite: we mean simply that it is many as well as one, that it is, so to speak, a diversified unity, a plurality in unity. It follows that either the unity so...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly, the difficulty of soul in body as against soul not embodied. We might be led...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Consider the universe: we are agreed that its existence and its nature come to it from beyond itself; are we, now, to imagine that its maker first thought it out in detail- the earth, and its necessary situation in the middle; water and, again, its position as lying upon the earth; all...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or form of soul; their "pneuma" [finer-body or spirit] is intelligent, and they speak of an "intellectual fire"; this "fire" and "spirit" they imagine to be...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. What, then, we have to ask, is the constant element in the first three entities? What is it that identifies them with their inherent Substance? Is it the capacity to serve as a base? But Matter, we maintain, serves as the base and seat of Form: Form, thus, will be excluded...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Now comes the question whether, in all this discussion, we are not merely helping to make out a case for some other order of Beings and talking of matters alien to ourselves. But how could that be? What understanding can there be failing some point of contact? And what contact could...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. We may be told that unity and monad have no real existence, that the only unity is some definite object that is one thing, so that all comes to an attitude of the mind towards things considered singly. But, to begin with, why at this should not the affirmation of Being pass equally...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. The light of our world can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass of known position, but conceive an immaterial entity, independent of body as being of earlier nature than all body, a nature firmly self-based or, better, without need of base: such a principle...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement: Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the soul- for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity of the soul, and springs from soul- and, since time is a thing of divisi...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. But there will still be some to deny that it is through this Matter that we ourselves become evil. 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it has left the body. Reasoning is for this sphere; it is the act of the soul fallen into perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength:...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a "presence" which acts by changing the object- for good or for ill- as we see in the case of bodies, especially where there is...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a living unit: there is the action determined by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. But Zeus- ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the kosmos...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. But here we may be questioned about these numbers which we describe as the primal and authentic: "Where do you place these numbers, in what genus among Beings? To everyone they seem to come under Quantity and you have certainly brought Quantity in, where you say that discrete...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. With Quality we have undertaken to group the dependent qualia, in so far as Quality is bound up with them; we shall not however introduce into this category the qualified objects [qua objects], that we may not be dealing with two categories at once; we shall pass over the objects...
The Second Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being 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...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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 overtake 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 eternity, then...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. It remains, then, poised in wisdom within itself; it could not enter into any other; those others look to it and in their longing find it where it is. This is that "Love Waiting at the Door," ever coming up from without, striving towards the beautiful, happy when to the utmost of its...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a coalescence. Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How c...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. But must it not draw on some source external to its essence, if it is to be conditioned, not only by Being, but by being an entity of a particular character? But if it is conditioned by a particular character, and this character is external to its essence, its essence does not comprise...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. We maintain, and it is evident truth, that the Supreme is everywhere and yet nowhere; keeping this constantly in mind let us see how it bears on our present enquiry. If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He "happened to be"; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in entirety:...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. What, then, can this be, this something in virtue of which we declare the entire divine Realm to be Eternal, everlasting? We must come to some understanding of this perpetuity with which Eternity is either identical or in conformity. It must at once, be at once something in the nature...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. In the proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness:...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. 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 essentially in each of these respects? These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. 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 Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. How then does the universal Intellect produce the particulars while, in virtue of its Reason-Principle, remaining a unity? In other words, how do the various grades of Being, as we call them, arise from the four primaries? Here is this great, this infinite Intellect, not given...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 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...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. The pleasure demanded for the 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...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. The Academy and the Lyceum are places, and parts of Place, just as "above, below, here" are species or parts of Place; the difference is of minuter delimitation. If then "above, below, the middle" are places- Delphi, for example, is the middle [of the earth]- and "near-the-middle" is...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. "A Number, a Measure, belonging to Movement?" This, at least, is plausible since Movement is a continuous thin; but let us consider. To begin with, we have the doubt which met us when we probed its identification with extent of Movement: is Time the measure of any and every Movement...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. Let us, then, make a mental picture of our universe: each member shall remain what it is, distinctly apart; yet all is to form, as far as possible, a complete unity so that whatever comes into view shall show as if it were the surface of the orb over all, bringing immediately with it...
The Second Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. But failure There? What can defensive horns serve to There? To sufficiency as living form, to completeness. That principle must be complete as living form, complete as Intellect, complete as life, so that if it is not to be one thing it may be another. Its characteristic difference...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. It has been remarked that the continuous is effectually distinguished from the discrete by their possessing the one a common, the other a separate, limit. The same principle gives rise to the numerical distinction between odd and even; and it holds good that if there are differentiae...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Philosophy at a very early stage investigated the number and character of the Existents. Various theories resulted: some declared for one Existent, others for a finite number, others again for an infinite number, while as regards the nature of the Existents- one, numerically finite...
The Fourth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. But why does not one same soul enter more than one body? Because any second body must approach, if it might; but the first has approached and received and keeps. Are we to think that this second body, in keeping its soul with a like care, is keeping the same soul as the first? Why not:...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But whence does this science derive its own initial laws? The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. But it leaves that conjunction; it cannot suffer that unity; it falls in love with its own powers and possessions, and desires to stand apart; it leans outward so to speak: then, it appears to acquire a memory of itself. In this self-memory a distinction is to be made; the memory...
Title Page : THE SIX ENNEADS 250 AD BY PLOTINUS Translated By Stephen MacKenna And B. S. Page London, P.L. Warner, Publisher To The Medici Society [1917-1930] HTML formatting by J.B. Hare, December 2003. This text is in the public domain. These files may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. The punishment justly overtaking the wicked must therefore be ascribed to the kosmic order which leads all in accordance with the right. But what of chastisements, poverty, illness, falling upon the good outside of all justice? These events, we will be told, are equally interwoven...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the Intellectual. Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them elect to abide by that order and, their life throughout, make its concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. If this reasoning is valid, The Good has no scope whatever for intellection which demands something attractive from outside. The Good, then, is without Act. What Act indeed, could be vested in Activity's self? No activity has yet again an activity; and whatever we may add to such...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter and the things believed to be based upon it; investigation will show us that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected. Matter must be bodiless- for body is a later production, a compound made by Matter...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. If this be so, how do we explain the teaching 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...
The First Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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 Wh...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Well but can they not tell themselves that yesterday, or last year, they moved round the earth, that they lived yesterday or at any given moment in their lives? Their living is eternal, and eternity is an unchanging unity. To identify a yesterday or a last year in their movement would...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. For the moment let us define the nature of the Good as far as the immediate purpose demands. 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 Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear- are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the Soul? This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp contradicti...
The Fifth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Thus there is the primally intellective and there is that in which intellection has taken another mode; but this indicates that what transcends the primarily intellective has no intellection; for, to have intellection, it must become an Intellectual-Principle, and, if it is to become...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. This Intellectual-Principle, if the term is to convey the truth, must be understood to be not a principle merely potential and not one maturing from unintelligence to intelligence- that would simply send us seeking, once more, a necessary prior- but a principle which is intelligence...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the "More than is present"; the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire; no number has been or could be omitted to make additi...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. This procedure, if approved, will entail a distinction between psychic and bodily qualities, the latter belonging specifically to body. If we decide to refer all souls to the higher, we are still at liberty to perform for Sensible qualities a division founded upon the senses...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. On the nature of the Intellectual-Principle we get light from its manifestations; they show that it demands such diversity as is compatible with its being a monad. Take what principle you will, that of plant or animal: if this principle were a pure unity and not a specifically varied...
The First Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. What art is there, what method, what discipline 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...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 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 ceaselessly produced, in mutual relationship. The animals devour each other: men attack each other: all is war...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. To this end we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity, unwavering Life, undivided totality, limitless, knowing no divagation, at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet: or at least it did not exist for the Eternal Beings, though its being was implicit...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Side by side exist the Authentic All and its counterpart, the visible universe. The Authentic is contained in nothing, since nothing existed before it; of necessity anything coming after it must, as a first condition of existence, be contained by this All, especially since it depends...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. As regards Quality, the source of what we call a "quale," we must in the first place consider what nature it possesses in accordance with which it produces the "qualia," and whether, remaining one and the same in virtue of that common ground, it has also differences whereby it...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. We cannot indeed escape positing these three, Being, Motion, Stability, once it is the fact that the Intellect discerns them as separates; and if it thinks of them at all, it posits them by that very thinking; if they are thought, they exist. Things whose existence is bound up with...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not attempt. He is, Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all things; or rather He is within, at the innermost depth; the outer, circling round Him, so to speak...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. 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 another person altogether; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of mingled...
The Second Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. A distinction is made between things existing 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]...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 42 : Section 42 42. It follows that, for the purposes which have induced this discussion, the stars have no need of memory or of any sense of petitions addressed to them; they give no such voluntary attention to prayers as some have thought: it is sufficient that, in virtue simply of the nature of parts...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. The God fettered [as in the Kronos Myth] to an unchanging identity leaves the ordering of this universe to his son (to Zeus), for it could not be in his character to neglect his rule within the divine sphere, and, as though sated with the Authentic-Beauty, seek a lordship too recent...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it cared to listen and to speak: "It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever comes...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Granted, it may be urged, that these observations upon the nature of Substance are sound, we have not yet arrived at a statement of its essence. Our critic doubtless expects to see this "Sensible": but its essence, its characteristic being, cannot be seen. Do we infer that fire...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. This Ever-Being is realized when upon examination of an object I am able to say- or rather, to know- that in its very Nature it is incapable of increment or change; anything that fails by that test is no Ever-Existent or, at least, no Ever-All-Existent. But is perpetuity enough...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral excellence, nothing of all that is noble. There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity enables it to grasp an object...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. All that comes to be, work of nature or of craft, some wisdom has made: everywhere a wisdom presides at a making. No doubt the wisdom of the artist may be the guide of the work; it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom exhibited in the arts; but the artist himself goes back, after...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 41 : Section 41 41. Intellection seems to have been given as an aid to the diviner but weaker beings, an eye to the blind. But the eye itself need not see Being since it is itself the light; what must take the light through the eye needs the light because of its darkness. If, then, intellection is...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul- that is whether a distinction is to be made between Soul and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in itself]. * * All matter shown in brackets is added by the transl...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. There are other questions calling for consideration: First: Are both Acts and motions to be included in the category of Action, with the distinction that Acts are momentary while Motions, such as cutting, are in time? Or will both be regarded as motions or as involving Moti...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a kosmos, the soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and contains, it too, all things in itself? We have indicated that a thing may enter and dwell at the same time in various places; this ought to be...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false happening can be supposed to have come about, taking it that it did, and haw the happening, then, is not universally prevalent. If there is to be a natural scheme at all, it must be admitted that this happening does not...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. All, then, that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the Supreme. But what is not present as Idea, does not. Thus of things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not contained in the arts; lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. All this, however, we may leave to individual judgement: to proceed: This produced reality is an Ideal form- for certainly nothing springing from the Supreme can be less- and it is not a particular form but the form of all, beside which there is no other; it follows that The First must...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of Love. The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, "wine yet not existing"; Love is born before the realm of sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the lower...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but that here the later of order is converted into a later of time- bringing in all these doubts? Is it because in us the governing and the answering...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. When it takes lot with multiplicity, Being becomes Number by the fact of awakening to manifoldness;- before, it was a preparation, so to speak, of the Beings, their fore-promise, a total of henads offering a stay for what was to be based upon them. Here with us a man will say "I wish...
The Second Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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- "Repentance" when it has undergone a change of purpose; "Impressions" when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their...
The Second Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. 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 Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. It follows that in the cases specified above- agent, knowledge and the rest- the relation must be considered as in actual operation, and the Act and the Reason-Principle in the Act must be assumed to be real: in all other cases there will be simply participation in an Ideal-Form...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. To the argument touching relation we have an answer surely legitimate: The Unity is not of a nature to lose its own manner of being only because something else stands in a state which it does not itself share; to stray from its unity it must itself suffer division into duality...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 18 : Section 18 18. But in what way is the content of Intellectual-Principle participant in good? Is it because each member of it is an Idea or because of their beauty or how? Anything coming from The Good carries the image and type belonging to that original or deriving from it, as anything going back...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. What, then, is the content- inevitably separated by our minds- of this one Intellectual-Principle? For there is no resource but to represent the items in accessible form just as we study the various articles constituting one science. This universe is a living thing capable of including...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the universe and the principle known as Nature? This Wisdom is a first [within the All-Soul] while Nature is a last: for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul, possesses only the last...
The Third Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects [the Ideas] outside of the Intellectual-Principle, treating them as impressions of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and so make its objects unknowable and non-existent and in the end annul the Intellectual-Principle itself...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. From this basis we proceed: In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself- the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating...
The Fourth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony. The theory that it is some final development, some entelechy, we pass by, holding this to be neither true as presented nor practically definitive. No...
The Fifth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this Principle must be the source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly? The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes...
The Fifth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But of what nature is this sovereign principle? If material, then definitely it must fall apart; for every material entity, at least, is something put together. If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new substance must be investigated in the same way or by some more...
The Third Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Eternity and Time; two entirely separate things, we explain "the one having its being in the everlasting Kind, the other in the realm of Process, in our own Universe"; and, by continually using the words and assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to think...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Our first observations must be directed to what passes in the Sensible realm for Substance. It is, we shall agree, only by analogy that the nature manifested in bodies is designated as Substance, and by no means because such terms as Substance or Being tally with the notion of bodies...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. Another approach: Everything to which existence may be attributed is either one with its essence or distinct from it. Thus any given man is distinct from essential man though belonging to the order Man: a soul and a soul's essence are the same- that is, in case of soul pure...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. To this our first answer is that to place certain things under one identical class- by admitting an identical range of operation- is to make them of one common species, and puts an end to all mention of part; the reasonable conclusion would be, on the contrary, that there is one...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. If we had to ascertain the nature of body and the place it holds in the universe, surely we should take some sample of body, say stone, and examine into what constituents it may be divided. There would be what we think of as the substrate of stone, its quantity- in this case...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are contained by a recipient, 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 Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. To return: How is that Power present to the universe? As a One Life. Consider the life in any living thing; it does not reach only to some fixed point, unable to permeate the entire being; it is omnipresent. If on this again we are asked How, we appeal to the character of this power...
The First Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Ninth Tractate : 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 definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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.
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 30 : Section 30 30. Whether pleasure must enter into the good, so that life in the contemplation of the divine things and especially of their source remains still imperfect, is a question not to be ignored in any enquiry into the nature of the good. Now to found the good upon the Intellect and upon th...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. And we must remember that what comes from the supernals does not enter into the recipients as it left the source; fire, for instance, will be duller; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in ugly forms of the passion; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 25 : Section 25 25. But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception of any kind: there must be a state of the soul inclining it towards the sphere of sense. Now it is the soul's character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere, and even though it were apt to sense-perception, this...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. But if it is by becoming evil and inferior that the soul produces the animal nature, the making of ox or horse was not at the outset in its character; the reason-principle of the animal, and the animal itself, must lie outside of the natural plan? Inferior, yes; but outside of nature...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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 peculiar character in each keeping them...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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 eternity; it remains to show how this strict permanence of the individual identity- the actual item eternally...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 28 : Section 28 28. Is memory vested in the faculty by which we perceive and learn? Or does it reside in the faculty by which we set things before our minds as objects of desire or of anger, the passionate faculty? This will be maintained on the ground that there could scarcely be both a first faculty...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother [to be "born into the Universe"] affect it neither for better nor for worse. Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata- which it would be...
The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. What, then, is the spirit [guiding the present 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 th...
Next. Section 8 : Section 8 8. B. (10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire body-mass, still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing. Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its efficacy, the soul too could no...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. (19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life: so...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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 inferior? We cannot complain about the lower in the higher; rather, we must be grateful to the higher...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Thus we have shown that there exists that which in the strictest sense possesses self-knowing. This self-knowing agent, perfect in the Intellectual-Principle, is modified in the Soul. The difference is that, while the soul knows itself as within something else...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 16 : Section 16 16. But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul's entry or presence to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something reducing us to nothingness: 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 Divine...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. But how comes the soul not to keep that ground? Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the time of vision unbroken, the self hindered no longer by any hindrance of body. Not that those hindrances beset that in us which has veritably seen; it is the other phase...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. The Intellectual Beings, thus, are multiple and one; in virtue of their infinite nature their unity is a multiplicity, many in one and one over many, a unit-plurality. They act as entire upon entire; even upon the partial thing they act as entire; but there is the difference th...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves. What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. We return, then, to the question whether there could be light if there were no air, the sun illuminating corporeal surfaces across an intermediate void which, as things are, takes the light accidentally by the mere fact of being in the path. Supposing air to be the cause of the rest...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Are we, however, to make freedom and self-disposal exclusive to Intellectual-Principle as engaged in its characteristic Act, Intellectual-Principle unassociated, or do they belong also to soul acting under that guidance and performing act of virtue? If freedom is to be allowed to soul...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 30 : Section 30 30. With regard to States: It may seem strange that States should be set up as a third class- or whatever class it is- since all States are referable to Matter. We shall be told that there is a difference among States, and that a State as in Matter has definite characteristics...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Now the reasoning faculty which undertakes this problem is not a unity but a thing of parts; it brings the bodily nature into the enquiry, borrowing its principles from the corporeal: thus it thinks of the Essential Existence as corporeal and as a thing of parts; it baulks at the unity...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object; eyes for one kind, ears for another: similarly some things, we must believe, are to be known by the Intellectual-Principle in us. We must not confuse intellection with hearing or seeing; this would be trying to look with the ears...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that, while we may well enquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the light leading progressively to the illumined object, then, by the very hypothesis, one intervening substance, the light, is indispensable: but if the illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to wh...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. We begin with the soul, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating. The sense-principle in it we may at once decide, takes cognisance only of the external; even in any awareness of events within the body it occupies...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. Think of a sound passing through the air and carrying a word; an ear within range catches and comprehends; and the sound and word will strike upon any other ear you may imagine within the intervening void, upon any that attends; from a great distance many eyes look to the one object...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. (15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material: besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it tangible. But there are other proofs. Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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. But what is the cause...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. 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...
The First Ennead. First Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 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...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing 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...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. Anaxagoras, again, in his assertion of a Mind pure and unmixed, affirms a simplex First and a sundered One, though writing long ago he failed in precision. Heraclitus, with his sense of bodily forms as things of ceaseless process and passage, knows the One as eternal and intellectual...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 32 : Section 32 32. But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all that the better sort of man may reasonably remember? All these, the one [the lower man] retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from which...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. That this is the phase of the human being in which desire takes its origin is shown by observation of the different stages of life; in childhood, youth, maturity, the bodily desires differ; health or sickness also may change them, while the [psychic] faculty is of course the same...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. According to Plato, lots and choice play a part [in the determination of human conditions] 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 34 : Section 34 34. No longer can we wonder that the principle evoking such longing should be utterly free from shape. The very soul, once it has conceived the straining love towards this, lays aside all the shape it has taken, even to the Intellectual shape that has informed it. There is no vision, no...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being, fount of Good, root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme lessening it as if it were a thing of mass. At that the emanants would be perishable; but...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 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 for visibility, earth...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. What then is there to prevent man having been the object of planning There? No: all stands in that likeness, nothing to be added or taken away; this planning and reasoning is based only on an assumption; things are taken to be in process and this suggests planning and reasoning; insist...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter? How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case? The secret is Indetermination. Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, ...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 21 : Section 21 21. The claim of Motion to be established as a genus will depend upon three conditions: first, that it cannot rightly be referred to any other genus; second, that nothing higher than itself can be predicated of it in respect of its essence; third, that by assuming differences it will...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 37 : Section 37 37. We must not rob the universe of any factor in its being. If any of our theorists of to-day seek to explain the action of fire- or of any other such form, thought of as an agent- they will find themselves in difficulties unless they recognize the act to be the object's functi...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 15 : Section 15 15. Now the objects attracting the sun-rays to themselves- illuminated by a fire of the sense-order- are necessarily of the sense-order; there is perceptibility because there has been a union of things at once external to each other and continuous, contiguous, in direct contact, two...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. That light known, then indeed we are stirred towards those Beings in longing and rejoicing over the radiance about them, just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the Beauty manifested upon it. Every one of those Beings exists for itself but becomes an object...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues: 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...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without quality? Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal; 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the fact that it is present entire at every point of the body- the sign of veritable unity- not some part of it here and another part there. In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and so...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 24 : Section 24 24. Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it go? It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings. This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Granted, then, that there exist, apart from things, a unity absolute and a decad absolute in other words, that the Intellectual beings, together with their characteristic essence have also their order, Henads, Dyads, Triads, what is the nature of these numerical entities and how does...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, 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:...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 29 : Section 29 29. But- keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by soul and not merely illuminated by it- how is it that when the higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle? For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away immediately up...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. Thus The One is in truth beyond all statement: any affirmation is of a thing; but the all-transcending, resting above even the most august divine Mind, possesses alone of all true being, and is not a thing among things; we can give it no name because that would imply predication: we...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 9. If we cannot but speak of Happening we must not halt at the word but look to the intention. And what is that? That the Supreme by possession of a certain nature and power is the Principle. Obviously if its nature were other it would be that other and if the difference were...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. We turn to ask why Quantity is not included among the primary genera, and Quality also. Quantity is not among the primaries, because these are permanently associated with Being. Motion is bound up with Actual Being [Being-in-Act], since it is its life; with Motion, Stability too...
The Second Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Some enquiry must be made into what is known as the complete transfusion of material substances. Is it possible that fluid be blended with fluid in such a way that each penetrate the other through and through? or- a difference of no importance if any such penetration occurs- that one...
The Second Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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 influence 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...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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 produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 9 : Section 9 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 th...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 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 combat in the one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine; what wonder...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 26 : Section 26 26. But the error in this theory is fundamental. To set Matter the potential above everything, instead of recognising the primacy of actuality, is in the highest degree perverse. If the potential holds the primacy among the Existents, its actualization becomes impossible; it certainly...
The First Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 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 h...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 22 : Section 22 22. Passivity, thus, implies the existence within of a motion functioning somehow or other in the direction of alteration. Action too implies motion within, whether the motion be aimless or whether it be driven by the impulse comported by the term "Action" to find its goal in an external...
The Third Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. To make the existence and coherent structure 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. And- if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of a personal conviction clashing with the general view- even our human soul has not sunk entire; something of it is continuously in the Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of sense, hold...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. Why are not beauty, goodness and the virtues, together with knowledge and intelligence, included among the primary genera? If by goodness we mean The First- what we call the Principle of Goodness, the Principle of which we can predicate nothing, giving it this name only because we...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to the scheme of things: There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows immediately...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but without being the cause direct of all that happens, has been elsewhere affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject demands more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one view rather...
The Fifth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. If the Intellectual-Principle were the engendering Source, then the engendered secondary, while less perfect than the Intellectual-Principle, would be close to it and similar to it: but since the engendering Source is above the Intellectual-Principle, the secondary can only be th...
The Fourth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. But if perception does not go by impression, what is the process? The mind affirms something not contained within it: this is precisely the characteristic of a power- not to accept impression but, within its allotted sphere, to act. Besides, the very condition of the mind being able...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. Here a question rises to which we must find an answer: whether these and the other powers which we call "parts" of the Soul are situated, all, in place; or whether some have place and standpoint, others not; or whether again none are situated in place. The matter is difficult: if we...
The Fourth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. How then can a multitude of essential beings be really one? Obviously either the one essence will be entire in all, or the many will rise from a one which remains unaltered and yet includes the one- many in virtue of giving itself, without self-abandonment, to its own multiplicati...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 17. But what can it be which is loftier than that existence- a life compact of wisdom, untouched by struggle and error, or than this Intellect which holds the Universe with all there is of life and intellect? If we answer "The Making Principle," there comes the question, "making by wh...
The First Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. What, then, of the "Number of the Infinite"? To begin with, how is Number consistent with infinity? Objects of sense are not unlimited and therefore the Number applying to them cannot be so. Nor is an enumerator able to number to infinity; though we double, multiply over and over ag...
The Sixth Ennead. Ninth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are not here addressing them but only such as accept another nature than body and have some conception of soul. Soul...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 38 : Section 38 38. And yet this "He Is" does not truly apply: the Supreme has no need of Being: even "He is good" does not apply since it indicates Being: the "is" should not suggest something predicated of another thing; it is to state identity. The word "good" used of him is not a predicate asserting...
The Third Ennead. First Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 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...
The Fifth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle, exists within the Soul here, the Soul which once for all stands linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy. Bringing itself close to the divine Intellect, becoming, as it were, one with this, it seeks still...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this Privation is lodged? Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it...
The First Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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;...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 26 : Section 26 26. Any conscious being, if the good come to him, will know the good and affirm his possession of it. But what if one be deceived? In that case there must be some resemblance to account for the error: the good will be the original which the delusion counterfeited and whenever the true...
The Sixth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 25 : Section 25 25. The nature of integration and disintegrations calls for scrutiny. Are they different from the motions above mentioned, from coming-to-be and passing-away, from growth and decay, from change of place and from alteration? or must they be referred to these? or, again, must some of these...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 33 : Section 33 33. The Circuit does not go by chance but under the Reason-Principle of the living whole; therefore there must be a harmony between cause and caused; there must be some order ranging things to each other's purpose, or in due relation to each other: every several configuration with...
The Third Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 11 : Section 11 11. I think, in fact, that Plato had this in mind where he justly speaks of the Images of Real Existents "entering and passing out": these particular words are not used idly: he wishes us to grasp the precise nature of the relation between Matter and the Ideas. The difficulty on this...
The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; 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...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 39 : Section 39 39. We cannot, then, refer all that exists to Reason-Principles inherent in the seed of things [Spermatic Reasons]; the universe is to be traced further back, to the more primal forces, to the principles by which that seed itself takes shape. Such spermatic principles cannot be...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of body. An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. Man, thus, must be some Reason-Principle other than soul. But why should he not be some conjoint- a soul in a certain Reason-Principle- the Reason-Principle being, as it were, a definite activity which however could not exist without that which acts? This is the case with...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 27 : Section 27 27. If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things- or retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal principle in them- at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing: this...
The Third Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life. This Principle on the thither side...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 32 : Section 32 32. Where, then? where exists the author of this beauty and life, the begetter of the veritable? You see the splendour over the things of the universe with all the variety begotten of the Ideas; well might we linger here: but amid all these things of beauty we cannot but ask whence they...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 13 : Section 13 13. Of phenomena of this sphere some derive 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 consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle...
The Sixth Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 8 : Section 8 8. As then there is a Life-Form primal- which therefore is the Life-Form Absolute- and there is Intellectual-Principle or Being, Authentic Being, these, we affirm, contain all living things and all Number, and Absolute Justice and Beauty and all of that order; for we ascribe an existence...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 7. Soul becomes free when it moves, through Intellectual-Principle, towards The Good; what it does in that spirit is its free act; Intellectual-Principle is free in its own right. That principle of Good is the sole object of desire and the source of self-disposal to the rest, to soul when...
The Fourth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But there is the question of the linked light that must relate the visual organ to its object. Now, firstly: since the intervening air is not necessary- unless in the purely accidental sense that air may be necessary to light- the light that acts as intermediate in vision will be...
The Fifth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other hand every being is in identity with its prior as long as it holds that contact. In the case...
The Sixth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. Then consider this god [in man] whom we cannot think to be absent at some point and present at another. All that have insight into the nature of the divine beings hold the omnipresence of this god and of all the gods, and reason assures us that so it must be. Now all-pervasion is...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 7 : Section 7 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 felicity: but they do serve towards the integrity of his being, while...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 20 : Section 20 20. The difficulty will be raised that God would seem to have existed before thus coming into existence; if He makes Himself, then in regard to the self which He makes He is not yet in being and as maker He exists before this Himself thus made. The answer is that we utterly must not...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general- to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. There is, then a Providence, which permeates the Kosmos from first to last, not everywhere 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 functi...
The Sixth Ennead. First Tractate. Section 28 : Section 28 28. Many as are the objections to this theory, we pass on for fear of the ridicule we might incur by arguing against a position itself so manifestly ridiculous. We may be content with pointing out that it assigns the primacy to the Non-existent and treats it as the very summit...
The Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But we, too, are king when we are moulded to the Intellectual-Principle. That correspondence may be brought about in two ways: either the radii from that centre are traced upon us to be our law or we are filled full of the Divine Mind, which again may have become to us a thing seen...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 14 : Section 14 14. But, admitting this one soul at every point, how is there a particular soul of the individual and how the good soul and the bad? The one soul reaches to the individual but nonetheless contains all souls and all intelligences; this, because it is at once a unity and an infinity; it...
The First Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, 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...
The Sixth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. We may be told that an image need not be thus closely attached to its archetype, that we know images holding in the absence of their archetype and that a warmed object may retain its heat when the fire is withdrawn. To begin with the image and archetype: If we are reminded...
The Fourth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 12 : Section 12 12. (17) A further consideration is that if every soul is to be held dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be: if it is pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is mortal, and another, that of the All, let us suppose, is immortal, we demand to know...
The Third Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. What is our answer? All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts- strictly "included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them. The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions...
The Fourth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 6 : Section 6 6. Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried, shapeless within that unbroken whole: none of the real beings [of the Intellectual Kosmos] would exist if that unity remained at halt within itself: the plurality of these beings, offspring of the unity...
The Sixth Ennead. Second Tractate. Section 19 : Section 19 19. Having established our four primary genera, it remains for us to enquire whether each of them of itself alone produces species. And especially, can Being be divided independently, that is without drawing upon the other genera? Surely not: the differentiae must come from outside...
The Sixth Ennead. Eighth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 3. All this calls for examination; the enquiry must bring us close to the solution as regards the gods. We have traced self-disposal to will, will to reasoning and, next step, to right reasoning; perhaps to right reasoning we must add knowledge, for however sound opinion and act may be...
The Fifth Ennead. Fifth Tractate. Section 10 : Section 10 10. Still, do not, I urge you, look for The Good through any of these other things; if you do, you will see not itself but its trace: you must form the idea of that which is to be grasped cleanly standing to itself not in any combination, the unheld in which all have hold: for no other...
The First Ennead. Sixth Tractate. Section 3 : Section 3 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. Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 1 : Section 1 1. God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the light and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch. But...
The Second Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 2 : Section 2 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 undetermined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks...
The Second Ennead. First Tractate. Section 4 : Section 4 4. But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our present problem. We are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system exposed to any such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration corresponding...
The Second Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 17 : Section 17 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 visi...
The Sixth Ennead. Seventh Tractate. Section 36 : Section 36 36. We need not carry this matter further; we turn to a question already touched but demanding still some brief consideration. Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the all-important: this- we read- is the grand learning, the learning we are to understand, not of looking towards...
The Fourth Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 23 : Section 23 23. A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the quality of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them. This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated, self-acting...
The Third Ennead. Fourth Tractate. Section 5 : Section 5 5. But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by the Soul in the overworld, how can anything be left to our independent action here? The answer is that very choice in the over-world is merely an allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a total...
The Fourth Ennead. Third Tractate. Section 30 : Section 30 30. But what of the memory of mental acts: do these also fall under the imaging faculty? If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained...