sensible

The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of SENSIBLE objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other (of that in the Soul) which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms. Enneads I,1,

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our SENSIBLE music are not arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being. Enneads I,6,

Now this (the required faint image of Being) might be the SENSIBLE universe with all the impressions it engenders, or it might be something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense, or again, it might be the source of the sense-world or something of the same order entering into it to complete it. Enneads I,8,

In a word since Matter belongs only to the SENSIBLE world, vice in men is not the Absolute Evil; not all men are vicious; some overcome vice, some, the better sort, are never attacked by it; and those who master it win by means of that in them which is not material. Enneads I,8,

For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in SENSIBLE sounds? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of order observed in visible things? Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth – the very experience out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense – this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display – no one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other. Enneads: II VIII.

The (Universal) Soul – containing the Ideal Principles of Real-Beings, and itself an Ideal Principle – includes all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is complete and self-contained: it, therefore, sees these principles of SENSIBLE things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active power may choose to send. In what is thus sent, from the Reason-Principle in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained a degree of the partial object that is to be formed: in the image-making impulse within the Reason-Principle there is already a step (towards the lower manifestation) or we may put it that the downward movement from the Reason-Principle is a first form of the partial: utter absence of partition would mean no movement but (sterile) repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the Soul is: if it were so, it would belong to the Intellective Sphere. It must be all-recipient but not in that partless mode. It is to be the Place of all things, and it must therefore extend universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval: thus it will be a thing unconfined to any moment (of space or time) but laid out in submission to all that is to be. Enneads III,6,

If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the Soul’s tendency towards the production of the SENSIBLE universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how “Time” – as we read – “came into Being simultaneously” with this All: the Soul begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the Soul this Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the Universe is a content of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read also of the orbit of the Stars being Times”: but do not forget what follows; “the stars exist,” we are told, “for the display and delimitation of Time,” and “that there may be a manifest Measure.” No indication of Time could be derived from (observation of) the Soul; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore the Soul brings into being night and day; in their difference is given Duality – from which, we read, arises the concept of Number. Enneads III,7,

In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation, find in action their trace of vision and of reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation; they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize the vision; yet they long for it; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it visible and SENSIBLE to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of vision-attenuation if the doer was aiming only at the thing done; complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the mere work produced. Enneads III,8,

In that allocation we were distinguishing things as they fall under the Intellectual or the SENSIBLE, and we placed the soul in the former class; now, taking its membership of the Intellectual for granted, we must investigate by another path the more specific characteristics of its nature. Enneads IV,2,

So far we have the primarily indivisible – supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent – and we have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also another Kind, of earlier rank than the SENSIBLE yet near to it and resident within it – an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we may think of colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations. In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility. Enneads IV,2,

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 to participate as most apt; while what is of earth is at the very extremity of progression, least endowed towards participation, remotest from the unembodied. Enneads IV,3,

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

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

Now as long as it remains self-centred it cannot assimilate: a single point cannot assimilate itself to an external line: even line cannot adapt itself to line in another order, line of the intellectual to line of the SENSIBLE, just as fire of the intellectual and man of the intellectual remain distinct from fire and man of the SENSIBLE. Even Nature, the soul-phase which brings man into being, does not come to identity with the man it shapes and informs: it has the faculty of dealing with the SENSIBLE, but it remains isolated, and, its task done, ignores all but the intellectual as it is itself ignored by the SENSIBLE and utterly without means of grasping it. Enneads IV,4,

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the SENSIBLE alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap. Enneads IV,5,

Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue of the lingering of an impression which in fact was never made; the two things stand or fall together; either an impression is made upon the mind and lingers when there is remembrance, or, denying the impression, we cannot hold that memory is its lingering. Since we reject equally the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that the SENSIBLE object striking upon soul or mind makes a mark upon it, and that the retention of this mark is memory. Enneads IV,6,

Either this or, supposing the centre of consciousness to be a thing of quantity and extension, the SENSIBLE object will coincide with it point by point of their co-expansion so that any given point in the faculty will perceive solely what coincides with it in the object: and thus nothing in us could perceive any thing as a whole. Enneads IV,7,

This cannot be: the faculty entire must be a unity; no such dividing is possible; this is no matter in which we can think of equal sections coinciding; the centre of consciousness has no such relation of equality with any SENSIBLE object. The only possible ratio of divisibility would be that of the number of diverse elements in the impinging sensation: are we then to suppose that each part of the soul, and every part of each part, will have perception? Or will the part of the parts have none? That is impossible: every part, then, has perception; the (hypothetical) magnitude, of soul and each part of soul, is infinitely divisible; there will therefore be in each part an infinite number of perceptions of the object, and therefore an infinitude of representations of it at our centre of consciousness. Enneads IV,7,

If the sentient be a material entity sensation could only be of the order of seal-impressions struck by a ring on wax, in this case by SENSIBLE objects on the blood or on the intervenient air. Enneads IV,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 and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in turn whenever – instead of employing in its government only its safeguarded phase – it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the Supreme, and more clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost their direct antithesis. Where the faculty is incapable of knowing without contact, the experience of evil brings the dearer perception of Good. Enneads IV,8,

Above all, has Relation – for example, that of right and left, double and half – any actuality? Has it, perhaps, actuality in some cases only, as for instance in what is termed “posterior” but not in what is termed “prior”? Or is its actuality in no case conceivable? What meaning, then, are we to attach to double and half and all other cases of less and more; to habit and disposition, reclining, sitting, standing; to father, son, master, slave; to like, unlike, equal, unequal; to active and passive, measure and measured; or again to knowledge and sensation, as related respectively to the knowable and the SENSIBLE? Knowledge, indeed, may be supposed to entail in relation to the known object some actual entity corresponding to that object’s Ideal Form, and similarly with sensation as related to the sense-object. The active will perform some constant function in relation to the passive, as will the measure in relation to the measured. Enneads: VI I

Sensation may be regarded as a Form of double origin (determined both by the sense-organ and by the SENSIBLE object); and similarly with knowledge. Enneads: VI I

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 Motion? Secondly: Will all activities be related to passivity, or will some – for example, walking and speaking – be considered as independent of it? Thirdly: Will all those related to passivity be classed as motions and the independent as Acts, or will the two classes overlap? Walking, for instance, which is an independent, would, one supposes, be a motion; thinking, which also does not essentially involve “passivity,” an Act: otherwise we must hold that thinking and walking are not even actions. But if they are not in the category of Action, where then in our classification must they fall? It may perhaps be urged that the act of thinking, together with the faculty of thought, should be regarded as relative to the thought object; for is not the faculty of sensation treated as relative to the SENSIBLE object? If then, we may ask, in the analogue the faculty of sensation is treated as relative to the SENSIBLE object, why not the sensory act as well? The fact is that even sensation, though related to an external object, has something besides that relation: it has, namely, its own status of being either an Act or a Passion. Now the Passion is separable from the condition of being attached to some object and caused by some object: so, then, is the Act a distinct entity. Walking is similarly attached and caused, and yet has besides the status of being a motion. It follows that thought, in addition to its relationship, will have the status of being either a motion or an Act. Enneads: VI I

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

Suppose, however, a greater number of origins which by their mere totality comprised, without possessing any subordinates, the whole of Being; these would be first-principles but not genera: it would be as if one constructed the SENSIBLE world from the four elements – fire and the others; these elements would be first principles, but they would not be genera, unless the term “genus” is to be used equivocally. Enneads VI,2,

But we must begin by subtracting what is peculiar to body, its coming-to-be, its SENSIBLE nature, its magnitude – that is to say, the characteristics which produce isolation and mutual separation. It is an Intellectual Being we have to consider, an Authentic Existent, possessed of a unity surpassing that of any SENSIBLE thing. Enneads VI,2,

Observe also how in other things Motion or life is clearly separated from Being – a separation impossible, doubtless, in True Being, but possible in its shadow and namesake. In the portrait of a man much is left out, and above all the essential thing, life: the “Being” of SENSIBLE things just such a shadow of True Being, an abstraction from that Being complete which was life in the Archetype; it is because of this incompleteness that we are able in the Sensible world to separate Being from life and life from Being. Enneads VI,2,

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 any given particular called and known to be a unity? Secondly: Does unity as used of Being carry the same connotation as in reference to the Absolute? Unity is not identical in all things; it has a different significance according as it is applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual realms – Being too, of course, comports such a difference – and there is a difference in the unity affirmed among SENSIBLE things as compared with each other; the unity is not the same in the cases of chorus, camp, ship, house; there is a difference again as between such discrete things and the continuous. Nevertheless, all are representations of the one exemplar, some quite remote, others more effective: the truer likeness is in the Intellectual; Soul is a unity, and still more is Intellect a unity and Being a unity. Enneads VI,2,

There is the possibility that the genera posited for the Intellectual sphere will suffice for the lower also; possibly with these genera others will be required; again, the two series may differ entirely; or perhaps some of the SENSIBLE genera will be identical with their intellectual prototypes, and others different – “identical,” however, being understood to mean only analogous and in possession of a common name, as our results will make dear. Enneads VI,3,

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. Enneads VI,3,

What then can this “part” be? Matter may be suggested. But are we actually to maintain that the particular SENSIBLE substance consists of a conglomeration of qualities and Matter, while Sensible Substance as a whole is merely the sum of these coagulations in the uniform Matter, each one separately forming a quale or a quantum or else a thing of many qualities? Is it true to say that everything whose absence leaves subsistence incomplete is a part of the particular substance, while all that is accidental to the substance already existent takes independent rank and is not submerged in the mixture which constitutes this so-called substance? I decline to allow that whatever combines in this way with anything else is Substance if it helps to produce a single mass having quantity and quality, whereas taken by itself and divorced from this complementary function it is a quality: not everything which composes the amalgam is Substance, but only the amalgam as a whole. Enneads VI,3,

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

It is our way to limit Being to the sense-known and therefore to think of omnipresence in terms of the concrete; in our overestimate of the SENSIBLE, we question how that other Nature can reach over such vastness; but our great is small, and this, small to us, is great; it reaches integrally to every point of our universe – or, better, our universe, moving from every side and in all its members towards this, meets it everywhere as the omnipresent All ever stretching beyond. Enneads VI,4,

But would not this indicate that the Authentic is diverse, multiple? That diversity is simplex still; that multiple is one; for it is a Reason-Principle, which is to say a unity in variety: all Being is one; the differing being is still included in Being; the differentiation is within Being, obviously not within non-Being. Being is bound up with the unity which is never apart from it; wheresoever Being appears, there appears its unity; and the unity of Being is self-standing, for presence in the SENSIBLE does not abrogate independence: things of sense are present to the Intellectual – where this occurs – otherwise than as the Intellectual is present within itself; so, too, body’s presence to soul differs from that of knowledge to soul; one item of knowledge is present in a different way than another; a body’s presence to body is, again, another form of relation. Enneads VI,4,

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

The Intellectual giving is not an act of transmission; even in the case of corporeal objects, with their local separation, the mutual giving (and taking) is of things of one order and their communication, every effect they produce, is upon their like; what is corporeal in the All acts and is acted upon within itself, nothing external impinging upon it. Now if in body, whose very nature is partition, there is no incursion of the alien, how can there be any in the order in which no partition exists? It is therefore by identification that we see the good and touch it, brought to it by becoming identical with what is of the Intellectual within ourselves. In that realm exists what is far more truly a kosmos of unity; otherwise there will be two SENSIBLE universes, divided into correspondent parts; the Intellectual sphere, if a unity only as this sphere is, will be undistinguishable from it – except, indeed, that it will be less worthy of respect since in the nature of things extension is appropriate in the lower while the Intellectual will have wrought out its own extension with no motive, in a departure from its very character. Enneads VI,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 unitary and any particular number to be brought under unity? The theory offers a multiplicity of units, and no number is reducible to unity but the simple “one.” It might be suggested that a dyad is that thing – or rather what is observed upon that thing – which has two powers combined, a compound thing related to a unity: or numbers might be what the Pythagoreans seem to hold them in their symbolic system in which Justice, for example, is a Tetrad: but this is rather to add the number, a number of manifold unity like the decad, to the multiplicity of the thing which yet is one thing. Now it is not so that we treat the ten things; we bring them together and apply the figure ten to the several items. Or rather in that case we say ten, but when the several items form a unity we say decad. This would apply in the Intellectual as in the SENSIBLE. Enneads VI,6,

If, then, unity is more pronounced in the continuous, and more again where there is no separation by part, this is clearly because there exists, in real existence, something which is a Nature or Principle of Unity. There cannot be a greater and less in the non-existent: as we predicate Substance of everything in sense, but predicate it also of the Intellectual order and more strictly there – since we hold that the greater and more sovereign substantiality belongs to the Real Beings and that Being is more marked in Substance, even SENSIBLE Substance, than in the other Kinds – so, finding unity to exhibit degree of more and less, differing in sense-things as well as in the Intellectual, we must similarly admit that Unity exists under all forms though still by reference, only, to that primal Unity. Enneads VI,6,

As Substance and Real Being, despite the participation of the SENSIBLE, are still of the Intellectual and not the SENSIBLE order, so too the unity observed present in things of sense by participation remains still an Intellectual and to be grasped by an Intellectual Act. The mind, from a thing present to it, comes to knowledge of something else, a thing not presented; that is, it has a prior knowledge. By this prior knowledge it recognises Being in a particular being; similarly when a thing is one it can affirm unity as it can affirm also duality and multiplicity. Enneads VI,6,

Now what is the foundation of reasoned plan? Precedent planning, it may be; but still we are forced back to some thing or things determining it. What would these be here? Either sense-perception or intellect. But sense-perception it cannot in this case be: intellect is left; yet, starting from intellect, the conclusion will be knowledge, not therefore the handling of the SENSIBLE; what begins with the intellectual and proceeds to the intellectual can certainly not end in dealings with the SENSIBLE. Providence, then, whether over living beings or over any part of the universe was never the outcome of plan. Enneads VI,7,

What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into cognisance in a way of their own, since they are not material, while the SENSIBLE sense here – so distinguished as dealing with corporeal objects – is fainter than the perception belonging to that higher world; the man of this sphere has sense-perception because existing in a less true degree and taking only enfeebled images of things There – perceptions here are Intellections of the dimmer order, and the Intellections There are vivid perceptions. Enneads VI,7,