Categoria: Tratado 26 (III,6)

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 recipient is no longer…

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 that can be twisted to every…

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 and the substratum ceases to be a thing of magnitude, or to appear so: the mass…

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, another judgement is demanded,…

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 choice: but…

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: this amounts to an affection…

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 in…

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 from…

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…

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 point is not…

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, modified each by the…

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 once it…

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…

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 extremes in one line. But the Reason-Principle operating…

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 Principle or of the All-Soul, desires expansion…

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) not having its…

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 foolish to confuse with…

THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK SIXTH. Of the Impassibility of Incorporeal Entities (Soul and and Matter). B. OF MATTER. INTRODUCTION TO THE ESCOREAL NUMENIAN FRAGMENT. 6. We have sufficiently demonstrated the impassibility of intelligible “being” which is entirely comprised within the genus of form. But as matter also, though in another manner, is an incorporeal entity, we…