Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom. If other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given need, can this virtue hold its ground even in mere potentiality? And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope and province? Where, for example, Sophrosyne would allow certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action? The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give: thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work for the final Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the GOOD MAN – such as Civic Virtue commends – but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods. Enneads I,2,7
Secondly, the good does not derive from the act itself but from the inner disposition which prompts the noble conduct: the wise and GOOD MAN in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by what he is. Enneads I,5,10
But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter? On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity? So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a GOOD MAN who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul. Enneads I,6,3
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 wicked enjoy all it demands? How can such an allotment be approved? No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions matter little: as well complain that a GOOD MAN happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome. Enneads III,2,6
No doubt all are members of this Principle but one is a GOOD MAN, another is bad – the larger class, this – and it goes as in a play; the poet while he gives each actor a part is also using them as they are in their own persons: he does not himself rank the men as leading actor, second, third; he simply gives suitable words to each, and by that assignment fixes each man’s standing. Enneads III,2,17
Thus, every man has his place, a place that fits the GOOD MAN, a place that fits the bad: each within the two orders of them makes his way, naturally, reasonably, to the place, good or bad, that suits him, and takes the position he has made his own. There he talks and acts, in blasphemy and crime or in all goodness: for the actors bring to this play what they were before it was ever staged. Enneads III,2,17
The one circumstance does not produce the same result wherever it acts; the normal operation will be modified from case to case: Helen’s beauty told very differently on Paris and on Idomeneus; bring together two handsome people of loose character and two living honourably and the resulting conduct is very different; a GOOD MAN meeting a libertine exhibits a distinct phase of his nature and, similarly, the dissolute answer to the society of their betters. Enneads III,3,5
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
For the GOOD MAN, the giving and the taking and the changes of state go quite the other way; the particular tendencies of the nature, we may put it, transpose the cords (so that we are moved by that only which, in Plato’s metaphor of the puppets, draws towards the best). Enneads IV,4,45