Platonismo

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====== Intellectual Essence ======

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis - which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature - and to recognize Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system - an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul’s need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past. Ennead II,9,6

the INTELLECTUAL ESSENCE, wholly of the order of Ideal-form, must be taken as impassive has been already established. Ennead III,6,6

May we, perhaps, identify Eternity with Repose-There as Time has been identified with Movement-Here? This would bring on the counter-question whether Eternity is presented to us as Repose in the general sense or as the Repose that envelops the INTELLECTUAL ESSENCE. Ennead III,7,2