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 good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of happiness; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That. Enneads I,4,16
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,8,3
But if Matter is devoid of quality how can it be evil? It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no nature; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil though not in the sense of quality? Quality qualifies something not itself: it is therefore an ACCIDENTAL; it resides in some other object. Matter does not exist in some other object but is the substratum in which the ACCIDENTAL resides. Matter, then, is said to be devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself possess this thing which is by nature an ACCIDENTAL. If, moreover, Quality itself be devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqualified, be said to have it? Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that Matter is without Quality and that it is evil: it is Evil not in the sense of having Quality but, precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and in its very Evil it would almost be a Form, whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to Form. Enneads I,8,10
No; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an ACCIDENTAL, for the Soul is not wholly apart from the Good. Enneads I,8,10
This is certainly the case when a quite different thing results from the actualization-statue, for example, the combination, is distinctly different from the bronze, the base; where the resultant is something quite new, the Potentiality has clearly not, itself, become what is now actualized. But take the case where a person with a capacity for education becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality, here, identical with actualization? Is not the potentially wise Socrates the same man as the Socrates actually wise? But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge because he is so potentially? Is he, in virtue of his non-essential ignorance, potentially an instructed being? It is not because of his ACCIDENTAL ignorance that he is a being of Knowledge: it is because, ignorant though he be by accident, his mind, apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may become so. Thus, in the case of the potentially instructed who have become so in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual; or, if we prefer to put it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the other, there is the power in actual possession of the form. Enneads II,5,2
On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a differentiation of Reality and sometimes not – a differentiation when it is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other thing, where it is not a constitutive element but an ACCIDENTAL. The distinction may be seen in the (constitutive) whiteness of a swan or of ceruse and the whiteness which in a man is an ACCIDENTAL. Enneads II,6,1
Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing changed its own nature according to whether it is present as a constituent or as an ACCIDENTAL. Enneads II,6,1
Finally, anything which is never Form but always ACCIDENTAL to something else is Quality unmixed and nothing more. Enneads II,6,3
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 to the sidereal circuit – therefore when the Soul has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary: so, too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of action. Enneads III,1,9
But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force and, in the Soul, the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it? The Soul’s quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life? Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but becomes the one or the other by force of act? But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious? The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and ACCIDENTAL circumstances cannot overrule the entire decision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted conditions to their own particular quality. Enneads III,4,5
In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the authentic Intellective Act and of the authentically knowable object – though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are not these in the absolute and not exclusively these – and hence our longing for absolute things: it is the expression of our intellective activities: if we sometimes care for the partial, that affection is not direct but ACCIDENTAL, like our knowledge that a given triangular figure is made up of two right angles because the absolute triangle is so. Enneads III,5,7
But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature, the base original must be transmuted: it can leave ugliness for beauty only by a change of substance. Matter, then, thus brought to order must lose its own nature in the supreme degree unless its baseness is an ACCIDENTAL: if it is base in the sense of being Baseness the Absolute, it could never participate in order, and, if evil in the sense of being Evil the Absolute, it could never participate in good. Enneads III,6,11
We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an ACCIDENTAL from outside grafted upon that Nature: it is native to it, integral to it. Enneads III,7,4
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 and under order; something following a definite order is necessary to exhibit it and to make it a subject of knowledge – though not to produce it – it is known by order whether in rest or in motion; in motion especially, for Movement better moves Time into our ken than rest can, and it is easier to estimate distance traversed than repose maintained. This last fact has led to Time being called a measure of Movement when it should have been described as something measured by Movement and then defined in its essential nature; it is an error to define it by a mere ACCIDENTAL concomitant and so to reverse the actual order of things. Possibly, however, this reversal was not intended by the authors of the explanation: but, at any rate, we do not understand them; they plainly apply the term Measure to what is in reality the measured and leave us unable to grasp their meaning: our perplexity may be due to the fact that their writings – addressed to disciples acquainted with their teaching – do not explain what this thing, measure, or measured object, is in itself. Enneads III,7,13
But what of chastisements, poverty, illness, falling upon the good outside of all justice? These events, we will be told, are equally interwoven into the world order and fall under prediction, and must consequently have a cause in the general reason: are they therefore to be charged to past misdoing? No: such misfortunes do not answer to reasons established in the nature of things; they are not laid up in the master-facts of the universe, but were merely ACCIDENTAL sequents: a house falls, and anyone that chances to be underneath is killed, no matter what sort of man he be: two objects are moving in perfect order – or one if you like – but anything getting in the way is wounded or trampled down. Or we may reason that the undeserved stroke can be no evil to the sufferer in view of the beneficent interweaving of the All or again, no doubt, that nothing is unjust that finds justification in a past history. Enneads IV,3,16
On the second point: circumstances, purely ACCIDENTAL, need not be present to the imaging faculty, and if they do so appear they need not be retained or even observed, and in fact the impression of any such circumstance does not entail awareness. Thus in local movement, if there is no particular importance to us in the fact that we pass through first this and then that portion of air, or that we proceed from some particular point, we do not take notice, or even know it as we walk. Similarly, if it were of no importance to us to accomplish any given journey, mere movement in the air being the main concern, we would not trouble to ask at what particular point of place we were, or what distance we had traversed; if we have to observe only the act of movement and not its duration, nothing to do which obliges us to think of time, the minutes are not recorded in our minds. Enneads IV,4,8
Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands clenched or spread; the colour is no such ACCIDENTAL but is more like, for example, sweetness: when a material substance breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception. Enneads IV,4,29
The will of any organic thing is one; but the distinct powers which go to constitute it are far from being one: yet all the several wills look to the object aimed at by the one will of the whole: for the desire which the one member entertains for another is a desire within the All: a part seeks to acquire something outside itself, but that external is another part of which it feels the need: the anger of a moment of annoyance is directed to something alien, growth draws on something outside, all birth and becoming has to do with the external; but all this external is inevitably something included among fellow members of the system: through these its limbs and members, the All is bringing this activity into being while in itself it seeks – or better, contemplates – The Good. Right will, then, the will which stands above ACCIDENTAL experience, seeks The Good and thus acts to the same end with it. When men serve another, many of their acts are done under order, but the good servant is the one whose purpose is in union with his master’s. Enneads IV,4,35
Thus, too, whatever is hurtful to man – the passionate spirit, for example, drawn by the medium of the gall into the principle seated in the liver – comes with no intention of hurt; it is simply as one transferring fire to another might innocently burn him: no doubt, since he actually set the other on fire he is a cause, but only as the attacking fire itself is a cause, that is by the merely ACCIDENTAL fact that the person to whom the fire was being brought blundered in taking it. Enneads IV,4,41
Why it should be especially requisite in the act of seeing would have to be explained: in general, an object passing through the air does not affect it beyond dividing it; when a stone falls, the air simply yields; nor is it reasonable to explain the natural direction of movement by resistance; to do so would bring us to the absurdity that resistance accounts for the upward movement of fire, which on the contrary, overcomes the resistance of the air by its own essentially quick energy. If we are told that the resistance is brought more swiftly into play by the very swiftness of the ascending body, that would be a mere ACCIDENTAL circumstance, not a cause of the upward motion: in trees the upthrust from the root depends on no such external propulsion; we, too, in our movements cleave the air and are in no wise forwarded by its resistance; it simply flows in from behind to fill the void we make. Enneads IV,5,2
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 unmodified: vision depends upon no modification whatever. This one intermediate, light, would seem to be necessary, but, unless light is corporeal, no intervening body is requisite: and we must remember that intervenient and borrowed light is essential not to seeing in general but to distant vision; the question whether light absolutely requires the presence of air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us: If, in the act of vision, that linked light becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding – which is what vision really is – then the intervening light is not a necessity: the process of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light; all that intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which the vision ranges. Enneads IV,5,4
If by the presence of such a body, then there will be vision though there be no intervenient; if the intervenient is the sole attractive agent, then we are forced to think of the visible object as being a Kind utterly without energy, performing no act. But so inactive a body cannot be: touch tells us that, for it does not merely announce that something is by and is touched: it is acted upon by the object so that it reports distinguishing qualities in it, qualities so effective that even at a distance touch itself would register them but for the ACCIDENTAL that it demands proximity. Enneads IV,5,4
Light is not an ACCIDENTAL to something else, requiring therefore to be lodged in a base; nor is it a modification, demanding a base in which the modification occurs: if this were so, it would vanish when the object or substance disappeared; but it does not; it strikes onward; so, too (requiring neither air nor object) it would always have its movement. Enneads IV,5,6
Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign (traceable to Matter) and is ACCIDENTAL to the soul in the course of its peculiar task. Enneads V,1,3
The Intellectual-Principle is established in multiplicity; its intellection, self-sprung though it be, is in the nature of something added to it (some ACCIDENTAL dualism) and makes it multiple: the utterly simplex, and therefore first of all beings, must, then, transcend the Intellectual-Principle; and, obviously, if this had intellection it would no longer transcend the Intellectual-Principle but be it, and at once be a multiple. Enneads V,3,11
On the other hand, line and surface and body are not called quantities; they are called magnitudes: they become known as quantities only when they are rated by number-two yards, three yards. Even the natural body becomes a quantity when measured, as does the space which it occupies; but this is quantity ACCIDENTAL, not quantity essential; what we seek to grasp is not ACCIDENTAL quantity but Quantity independent and essential, Quantity-Absolute. Three oxen is not a quantity; it is their number, the three, that is Quantity; for in three oxen we are dealing with two categories. So too with a line of a stated length, a surface of a given area; the area will be a quantity but not the surface, which only comes under that category when it constitutes a definite geometric figure. Enneads VI,1,4
Our task, thus, is to give full value to this elusive character of Relation, and, then to enquire what there is that is constant in all these particular cases and whether this constant is generic or ACCIDENTAL; and having found this constant, we must discover what sort of actuality it possesses. Enneads VI,1,7
Does it follow that if a man as he walks produces footprints, he cannot be considered to have performed an action? Certainly as a result of his existing something distinct from himself has come into being. Yet perhaps we should regard both action and Act as merely ACCIDENTAL, because he did not aim at this result: it would be as we speak of Action even in things inanimate – “fire heats,” “the drug worked.” Enneads VI,1,22
We inevitably conclude that Mass or Extension cannot be ranked as the first of things; Non-Extension and Unity must be prior. We must begin with the One and conclude with the Many, proceed to magnitude from that which is free from magnitude: a One is necessary to the existence of a Many, Non-Magnitude to that of Magnitude. Magnitude is a unity not by being Unity-Absolute, but by participation and in an ACCIDENTAL mode: there must be a primary and absolute preceding the ACCIDENTAL, or the ACCIDENTAL relation is left unexplained. Enneads VI,1,26
The manner of this relation demands investigation. Had this been undertaken, the thinkers of this school would probably have lighted upon that Unity which is not ACCIDENTAL but essential and underived. Enneads VI,1,26
For these and many other reasons we must abstain from positing a single genus, and especially because neither Being nor Substance can be the predicate of any given thing. If we do predicate Being, it is only as an ACCIDENTAL attribute; just as when we predicate whiteness of a substance, we are not predicating the Absolute Whiteness. Enneads VI,2,2
When we predicate Being of a particular, do we thereby predicate of it unity, and does the degree of its unity tally with that of its being? Such correspondence is ACCIDENTAL: unity is not proportionate to Being; less unity need not mean less Being. An army or a choir has no less Being than a house, though less unity. Enneads VI,2,11
If Motion is the Act of Substance, and Being and the Primaries in general are its Act, then Motion is not an ACCIDENTAL attribute: as the Act of what is necessarily actual (what necessarily involves Act), it is no longer to be considered as the complement of Substance but as Substance itself. For this reason, then, it has not been assigned to a posterior class, or referred to Quality, but has been made contemporary with Being. Enneads VI,2,15
But, in the first place, Matter does not possess or acquire Form as its life or its Act; Form enters it from without, and remains foreign to its nature. Secondly, Form in the Intellectual is an Act and a motion; in the Sensible Motion is different from Form and ACCIDENTAL to it: Form in relation to Matter approximates rather to Stability than to Motion; for by determining Matter’s indetermination it confers upon it a sort of repose. Enneads VI,3,2
There is, however, something in relation to which whatever turns Substance into qualified Substance is ACCIDENTAL: thus, the whole of fire is not Substance, but only a part of it – if the term “part” be allowed. Enneads VI,3,8
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,3,8
But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before there was any All? And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence of extension, extending over a universe? We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an ACCIDENTAL attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the move of accident? We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say sweetness or colour, for while these are actual states of the masses affected so that they show that quality at every point, none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of body and known only as in body; such quality is necessarily of a definite extension. Further, the colour at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence. Enneads VI,4,1
Now, in beings whose unity does not reproduce the entire nature of that principle, any presence is presence of an emanant power: even this, however, does not mean that the principle is less than integrally present; it is not sundered from the power which it has uttered; all is offered, but the recipient is able to take only so much. But in Beings in which the plenitude of these powers is manifested, there clearly the Authentic itself is present, though still as remaining distinct; it is distinct in that, becoming the informing principle of some definite thing, it would abdicate from its standing as the total and from its uttermost self-abiding and would belong, in some mode of accident, to another thing as well. Still it is not the property of what may seek to join with it; it chooses where it will and enters as the participant’s power may allow, but it does not become a chattel; it remains the quested and so in another sense never passes over. There is nothing disquieting in omnipresence after this mode where there is no appropriation: in the same ACCIDENTAL way, we may reasonably put it, soul concurs with body, but it is soul self-holding, not inbound with Matter, free even of the body which it has illuminated through and through. Enneads VI,4,3
Is this unity, then, connate and coexistent to the Beings? Suppose it coexistent merely as an ACCIDENTAL, like health in man, it still must exist of itself; suppose it present as an element in a compound, there must first exist unity and the unity absolute that can thus enter into composition; moreover if it were compounded with an object brought into being by its agency it would make that object only spuriously a unity; its entry would produce a duality. Enneads VI,6,5
Thus it is not the conception of movement that brings movement to be; movement absolute produces that conception; it produces itself as at once movement and the concept of movement, for movement as it exists There, bound up with Being, is a concept. It is movement absolute because it is the first movement – there can be none till this exist – and it is the authentic Movement since it is not ACCIDENTAL to something else but is the activity of actual Being in motion. Thus it is a real existent, though the notion of Being is different. Enneads VI,6,6
It is with Number as with Good. When we pronounce things to be good either we mean that they are in their own nature so or we affirm goodness as an ACCIDENTAL in them. Dealing with the primals, the goodness we have in mind is that First Hypostasis; where the goodness is an ACCIDENTAL we imply the existence of a Principle of Good as a necessary condition of the ACCIDENTAL presence; there must be some source of that good which is observed elsewhere, whether this source be an Absolute Good or something that of its own nature produces the good. Similarly with number; in attributing the decad to things we affirm either the truly existent decad or, where the decadhood is ACCIDENTAL, we necessarily posit the self-subsistent decad, decad not associated; if things are to be described as forming a decad, then either they must be of themselves the decad or be preceded by that which has no other being than that of decadhood. Enneads VI,6,10
It must be urged as a general truth that anything affirmed of a subject not itself either found its way in from outside or is the characteristic Act of that subject; and supposing the predicated attribute to show no variation of presence and absence but to be always present, then, if the subject is a Real Being so also is the ACCIDENTAL in an equal degree; or, failing Real Being, it at least belongs to the existents, it exists. In the case when the subject can be thought of as remaining without its Act, yet that Act is inbound with it even though to our minds it appears as a later; when on the contrary the subject cannot be conceived without the attribute-man, for example, without unity – then the attribute is either not later but concomitant or, being essential to the existence, is precedent. In our view, Unity and Number are precedent. Enneads VI,6,10
If by division the one identical mass can become a duality without loss of quantity, clearly the unity it possessed and by this destructive division lost was something distinct. What may be alternatively present and absent to the same subject must be classed among Real-Beings, regardless of position; an ACCIDENTAL elsewhere, it must have reality in itself whether it be manifested in things of sense or in the Intellectual – an ACCIDENTAL in the Laters but self-existent in the higher, especially in the First in its aspect of Unity developing into Being. We may be told that Unity may lose that character without change in itself, becoming duality by association with something else; but this is not true; unity does not become two things; neither the added nor what takes the addition becomes two; each remains the one thing it was; the duality is predicable of the group only, the unity remaining unchanged in each of those unchanged constituents. Enneads VI,6,14
But knowledge – must not this imply presence to the alien? No; knowledge, known and knower are an identity; so with all the rest; every member of Intellectual-Principle is therefore present to it primally; justice, for example, is not ACCIDENTAL to it as to soul in its character as soul, where these virtues are mainly potential becoming actual by the intention towards Intellectual-Principle and association with it. Enneads VI,6,15
Another approach: Everything to which existence may be attributed is either one with its essence or distinct from it. Thus any given man is distinct from essential man though belonging to the order Man: a soul and a soul’s essence are the same – that is, in case of soul pure and unmingled – Man as type is the same as man’s essence; where the thing, man, and the essence are different, the particular man may be considered as ACCIDENTAL; but man, the essence, cannot be so; the type, Man, has Real Being. Now if the essence of man is real, not chanced or ACCIDENTAL, how can we think That to be ACCIDENTAL which transcends the order man, author of the type, source of all being, a principle more nearly simplex than man’s being or being of any kind? As we approach the simplex, accident recedes; what is utterly simplex accident never touches at all. Enneads VI,8,14