Categoria: Tratado 30 (III,8)

3. But if this Reason-Principle (Nature) is in act – and produces by the process indicated – how can it have any part in Contemplation? To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative act. All doing must be guided…

PRACTICE IS ONLY A PREPARATION FOR CONTEMPLATION. 6. (5). The purpose of action is to contemplate, and to possess the contemplated object. Thz object or activity, therefore, is contemplation. It seeks to achieve indirectly what it is unable to accomplish directly. It is not otherwise when one has achieved the object of one’s desires. One’s…

THE PROCESSION OF THE WORLD-SOUL. 5. (4). After having spoken of nature, and having explained how generation is a sort of contemplation, let us pass to the Soul that occupies a rank superior to nature. This is what we have to say about her. By her contemplative action, by her ardent desire to learn and…

NATURE’S CONFESSION THAT HER MOTHER IS UNIVERSAL REASON, AND HER FATHER THE FORMAL REASONS. 4. (3). If anybody were to ask nature why she produces, Nature, if at all willing to listen and answer would say, “You should not have questioned me; you should have tried to understand, keeping silence, as I do; for I…

BOTH NATURE AND REASON ARE CONTEMPLATION; WHILE UNIVERSAL REASON IS BOTH SOUL AND NATURE. 3. (2). How does nature produce? And how, in producing, does she arrive at contemplation ? Since she produces while remaining immovable within herself, and as she is a “reason,” she is a contemplation also. Indeed, every action is produced according…

NATURE ACTS ON MATTER NOT MECHANICALLY BUT BY ITS POTENCY. 2. Evidently nature possesses neither hands, nor feet, nor any natural or artificial instrument. For production its only need is a matter on which to work, and which it forms. The works of nature exclude all ideas of mechanical operation; not by any impelling force,…

INTRODUCTION: AS A JOKE, IT MAY BE SAID THAT EVEN PLANTS ASPIRE TO CONTEMPLATION. 1. If as a preliminary pleasantry, we said that all beings, not only reasonable ones, but even the irrational, plants as well as the earth that begets them, aspire to contemplation, and are directed towards that end; that, as a result…

10. And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life. This Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life – for that…

9. Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent; there must exist that which transcends it, that Being (the Absolute), to which all our discussion has been leading. In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The Intellectual-Principle is a number (= the expression of a plurality); and number derives from…

7. Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established – some self-evident, others brought out by our treatment above: All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision-manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or…

4. And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it cared to listen and to speak: “It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever…

THIS CONTEMPLATION IS THE GOAL OF ALL KINDS AND GRADES OF EXISTENCE. 7. (6). Thus everything (ultimately) derives from contemplation; everything (really) is contemplation, including the true beings, and the beings by the former secondarily begotten by giving themselves up to contemplation, and which themselves are objects of contemplation either for sensation, or for knowledge…

2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern? The wax-workers,…

NATURE 1. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end – and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces…

8. From this basis we proceed: In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself – the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them; and…

THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK EIGHT. OF NATURE, CONTEMPLATION AND UNITY. C. OF UNITY. THE DIFFERENT GRADES OF THOUGHT AND LIFE. LIKE A CIRCLE, INTELLIGENCE IS INSEPARABLY SINGLE AND MANIFOLD. TO THE INTELLIGENCE THAT SIMULTANEOUSLY IS THE INTELLIGIBLE THERE MUST BE A SUPREME. THE BEGETTER OF INTELLIGENCE MUST BE SIMPLER THAN IT, AND IS REACHED NOT BY…

THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK EIGHT. Of Nature, Contemplation and Unity. (These three subjects are discussed in paragraphs 1-4, 5-7, and 8-16. The plain paragraph numbers, are those of the Teubner edition; those in parenthesis are the Creuzer (Didot) edition.) B. CONTEMPLATION. THE PROCESSION OF THE WORLD-SOUL. PRACTICE IS ONLY A PREPARATION FOR CONTEMPLATION. THIS CONTEMPLATION IS…

THIRD ENNEAD, BOOK EIGHT. OF NATURE, CONTEMPLATION AND UNITY. (These three subjects are discussed in paragraphs 1-4, 5-7, and 8-16. The plain paragraph numbers, are those of the Teubner edition; those in parenthesis are the Creuzer (Didot) edition.) A. OF NATURE. INTRODUCTION: AS A JOKE, IT MAY BE SAID THAT EVEN PLANTS ASPIRE TO CONTEMPLATION.…