science

Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily, will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a course in Dialectic and made an adept in the SCIENCE. Enneads I,3,

But this SCIENCE, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it? It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of things – what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings. Enneads I,3,

Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the particulars that fall under each, and of what is the Eternal and what the not Eternal – and of these, it must be understood, not by seeming-knowledge (“sense-knowledge”) but with authentic SCIENCE. Enneads I,3,

Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that sphere, it is no longer busy about many things: it has arrived at Unity and it contemplates: it leaves to another SCIENCE all that coil of premisses and conclusions called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the art of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it considers necessary – to clear the ground – but it makes itself the judge, here as in everything else; where it sees use, it uses; anything it finds superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of learning or practice may turn that matter to account. Enneads I,3,

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

Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions – collections of words – but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other SCIENCE may care for such exercises. Enneads I,3,

The cause of a visit to the centre of affairs will be that one thinks it necessary to see some person or to receive a debt, or, in a word, that one has some definite motive or impulse confirmed by a judgement of expediency. Sometimes a condition may be referred to the arts, the recovery of health for instance to medical SCIENCE and the doctor. Wealth has for its cause the discovery of a treasure or the receipt of a gift, or the earning of money by manual or intellectual labour. The child is traced to the father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of favourable outside circumstances such as a particular diet or, more immediately, a special organic aptitude or a wife apt to childbirth. Enneads: III I

Suppose the atoms to exist: These atoms are to move, one downwards – admitting a down and an up – another slant-wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the outcome, this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws of the SCIENCE – what SCIENCE can operate where there is no order? – or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated. Enneads: III I

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 teeming fullness, have caused it – in itself, all one object of Vision – to produce another Vision (that of the Kosmos): it is just as a given SCIENCE, complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor SCIENCE in the student who attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul. Enneads III,8,

…. 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 detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme. Enneads III,8,

Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the sense in which we speak of some single proposition as a part of the SCIENCE entire. Enneads IV,3,

The theorem is separate, but the SCIENCE stands as one undivided thing, the expression and summed efficiency (energy) of each constituent notion: this is partition without severance; each item potentially includes the whole SCIENCE, which itself remains an unbroken total. Enneads IV,3,

May we, perhaps, compare it to the SCIENCE or skill that acts through its appropriate instruments – through a helm, let us say, which should happen to be a live thing – so that the soul effecting the movements dictated by seamanship is an indwelling directive force? No: the comparison breaks down, since the SCIENCE is something outside of helm and ship. Enneads IV,3,

If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then, too, the SCIENCE latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity. Enneads IV,7,

Again: the soul’s understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal SCIENCE, must itself be eternal. Enneads IV,7,

There is no reason for dismissing this explanation: we may think of a SCIENCE with its constituents standing as one total, the source of all those various elements: again, there is the seed, a whole, producing those new parts in which it comes to its division; each of the new growths is a whole while the whole remains undiminished: only the material element is under the mode of part, and all the multiplicity remains an entire identity still. Enneads IV,8,

It may be objected that in the case of SCIENCE the constituents are not each the whole. Enneads IV,8,

But even in the SCIENCE, while the constituent selected for handling to meet a particular need is present actually and takes the lead, still all the other constituents accompany it in a potential presence, so that the whole is in every part: only in this sense (of particular attention) is the whole SCIENCE distinguished from the part: all, we may say, is here simultaneously effected: each part is at your disposal as you choose to take it; the part invites the immediate interest, but its value consists in its approach to the whole. Enneads IV,8,

The detail cannot be considered as something separate from the entire body of speculation: so treated it would have no technical or scientific value; it would be childish divagation. The one detail, when it is a matter of SCIENCE, potentially includes all. Grasping one such constituent of his SCIENCE, the expert deduces the rest by force of sequence. Enneads IV,8,

We cannot therefore think that the divine Beings of that sphere, or the other supremely blessed There, need look to our apparatus of SCIENCE: all of that realm, all is noble image, such images as we may conceive to lie within the soul of the wise – but There not as inscription but as authentic existence. The ancients had this in mind when they declared the Ideas to be Beings, Essentials. Enneads V,8,

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

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

Geometry, the SCIENCE of the Intellectual entities, holds place There: so, too, philosophy, whose high concern is Being. Enneads V,8,

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, and the specific SCIENCE is prior to any of its component parts: being none of its particulars, it is the potentiality of all; each particular, on the other hand, is actually itself, but potentially the sum of all the particulars: and as with the specific SCIENCE, so with SCIENCE as a whole. The specific SCIENCEs lie in potentiality in SCIENCE the total; even in their specific character they are potentially the whole; they have the whole predicated of them and not merely a part of the whole. At the same time, SCIENCE must exist as a thing in itself, unharmed by its divisions. Enneads VI,2,

So with Intellect. Intellect as a whole must be thought of as prior to the intellects actualized as individuals; but when we come to the particular intellects, we find that what subsists in the particulars must be maintained from the totality. The Intellect subsisting in the totality is a provider for the particular intellects, is the potentiality of them: it involves them as members of its universality, while they in turn involve the universal Intellect in their particularity, just as the particular SCIENCE involves SCIENCE the total. Enneads VI,2,

The question may here be asked: “What deficiency has grammar compared with a particular grammar, and SCIENCE as a whole in comparison with a SCIENCE?” Grammar is certainly not posterior to the particular grammar: on the contrary, the grammar as in you depends upon the prior existence of grammar as such: the grammar as in you becomes a particular by the fact of being in you; it is otherwise identical with grammar the universal. Enneads VI,3,

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