Absolute

It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The ABSOLUTE Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good. Enneads I,2,

That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not self-existent justice, or the ABSOLUTE of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme is self-standing, independent. Enneads I,2,

This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the ABSOLUTE Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show later. Enneads I,3,

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the ABSOLUTE Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. Enneads I,6,

This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think of one that contemplates ABSOLUTE Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens – so perfect Its purity – far above all such things in that they are non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This? Beholding this Being – the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes – resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also worthy of love. Enneads I,6,

This ABSOLUTE Good other entities may possess in two ways – by becoming like to It and by directing the Act of their being towards It. Enneads I,7,

In what substantial-form (hypostasis) then is all this to be found – not as accident but as the very substance itself? For if Evil can enter into other things, it must have in a certain sense a prior existence, even though it may not be an essence. As there is Good, the ABSOLUTE, as well as Good, the quality, so, together with the derived evil entering into something not itself, there must be the ABSOLUTE Evil. Enneads I,8,

There must, then, be some Undetermination-ABSOLUTE, some ABSOLUTE Formlessness; all the qualities cited as characterizing the Nature of Evil must be summed under an ABSOLUTE Evil; and every evil thing outside of this must either contain this ABSOLUTE by saturation or have taken the character of evil and become a cause of evil by consecration to this ABSOLUTE. Enneads I,8,

What will this be? That Kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits, that which has no trace of good by any title of its own, but (at best) takes order and grace from some Principle outside itself, a mere image as regards ABSOLUTE-Being but the Authentic Essence of Evil – in so far as Evil can have Authentic Being. In such a Kind, Reason recognizes the Primal Evil, Evil ABSOLUTE. Enneads I,8,

In a word since Matter belongs only to the sensible world, vice in men is not the ABSOLUTE Evil; not all men are vicious; some overcome vice, some, the better sort, are never attacked by it; and those who master it win by means of that in them which is not material. Enneads I,8,

How can there any contrary to the ABSOLUTE Good, when the absolute has no quality? Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence of the other? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other – sickness and health, for example – yet there is no universal compulsion. Enneads I,8,

But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we can have of it, or is there some other way of knowing it? Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision, for it is utterly outside of bound and measure; this thing which is nowhere can be seized only by abstraction; but any degree of evil falling short of The ABSOLUTE is knowable by the extent of that falling short. Enneads I,8,

But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the ABSOLUTE Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil-ABSOLUTE. Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE Good, but a co-operator with it; and if Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE Good neither is Vice the ABSOLUTE Evil. Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE Beauty or the ABSOLUTE Good; neither, therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil. Enneads I,8,

We teach that Virtue is not the ABSOLUTE GoodGood and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our “going down to Hades and slumbering there.” Enneads I,8,

Besides quantitativeness itself (the ABSOLUTE-Principle) does not possess quantity, which belongs only to things participating in it, a consideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle. A white object becomes white by the presence of whiteness; what makes an organism white or of any other variety of colour is not itself a specific colour but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle: in the same way what gives an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude but is Magnitude itself, the abstract ABSOLUTE, or the Reason-Principle. Enneads II,4,

No doubt in the case of things as we know them there is a certain mass lying ready beforehand to the shaping power: but that is no reason for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called; for in such cases Matter is not the absolute; it is that of some definite object; the ABSOLUTE Matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself. Enneads II,4,

If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself (since it is certainly not an absolute) but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so by virtue of Identicalness (the ABSOLUTE principle of Identity). Enneads II,4,

This Reason-Principle, then – let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth – this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle unmingled, not the ABSOLUTE Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from the pure Soul alone; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the Intellectual Principle and the Soul – the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual Principle engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a certain measure of Reason. Enneads III,2,

For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent in the Real-Being of all that authentically is – in the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the Soul; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an emotion, will take its name from Love, the Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior to what lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular act directed towards a particular object; but it must not be confused with the ABSOLUTE Love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal Soul must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as being of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very offspring; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of the Gods. Enneads III,5,

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love – the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards – like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe – not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the ABSOLUTE, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring. Enneads III,5,

We understand, now, why good men have no other Love other Eros of life – than that for the ABSOLUTE and Authentic Good, and never follow the random attractions known to those ranged under the lower Spirit Kind. Enneads III,5,

In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence – and this not merely in the ABSOLUTE, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form. Enneads III,5,

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,

Nor can we, on the other hand, think that matter is simply ABSOLUTE Magnitude. Enneads III,6,

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 (and thereby engenders secondaries): in its images – aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act – is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Image-making phase (of Intellect or All-Soul) runs forth into the ABSOLUTE Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter – which never possesses a content – to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe. Enneads III,6,

The Magnitude inherent in each Ideal-Principle – that of a horse or of anything else – combines with Magnitude the ABSOLUTE with the result that, irradiated by that ABSOLUTE, Matter entire takes Magnitude and every particle of it becomes a mass; in this way, by virtue at once of the totality of Idea with its inherent magnitude and of each several specific Idea, all things appear under mass; Matter takes on what we conceive as extension; it is compelled to assume a relation to the All and, gathered under this Idea and under Mass, to be all things – in the degree in which the operating power can lead the really nothing to become all. Enneads III,6,

Particular entities thus attain their Magnitude through being drawn out by the power of the Existents which mirror themselves and make space for themselves in them. And no violence is required to draw them into all the diversity of Shapes and Kinds because the phenomenal All exists by Matter (by Matter’s essential all-receptivity) and because each several Idea, moreover, draws Matter its own way by the power stored within itself, the power it holds from the Intellectual Realm. Matter is manifested in this sphere as Mass by the fact that it mirrors the ABSOLUTE Magnitude; Magnitude here is the reflection in the mirror. The Ideas meet all of necessity in Matter (the Ultimate of the emanatory progress): and Matter, both as one total thing and in its entire scope, must submit itself, since it is the Material of the entire Here, not of any one determined thing: what is, in its own character, no determined thing may become determined by an outside force – though, in becoming thus determined, it does not become the definite thing in question, for thus it would lose its own characteristic indetermination. Enneads III,6,

Matter, then, wears Magnitude as a dress thrown about it by its association with that ABSOLUTE Magnitude to whose movement it must answer; but it does not, for that, change its Kind; if the Idea which has clothed it were to withdraw, it would once again be what it permanently is, what it is by its own strength, or it would have precisely the Magnitude lent to it by any other form that happens to be present in it. Enneads III,6,

Of those that explain it as Movement, some identify it with ABSOLUTE Movement (or with the total of Movement), others with that of the All. Those that make it a moved object would identify it with the orb of the All. Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of Movement treat it, severally, either as a standard of measure or as something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite. Enneads III,7,

Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced; the All has its One, its Prior but not yet the ABSOLUTE One; through this we reach that ABSOLUTE One, where all such reference comes to an end. Enneads III,8,

Now when we reach a One – the stationary Principle – in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All – we have in every case the most powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the Authentically Existent Beings – their Principle and source and potentiality – shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being-nothing? Certainly this ABSOLUTE is none of the things of which it is the source – its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it – not existence, not essence, not life – since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more – understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power. Enneads III,8,

While the Soul (as an eternal, a Divine Being) is at rest – in rest firmly based on Repose, the ABSOLUTE – yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest. Enneads IV,3,

Again: the soul’s understanding of the ABSOLUTE Forms by means of the visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal. Enneads IV,7,

Still, how can a Reason-Principle (the Intellectual), characteristically a manifold, a total, derive from what is obviously no Reason-Principle? But how, failing such origin in the simplex, could we escape (what cannot be accepted) the derivation of a Reason-Principle from a Reason-Principle? And how does the secondarily good (the imaged Good) derive from The Good, the ABSOLUTE? What does it hold from the ABSOLUTE Good to entitle it to the name? Similarity to the prior is not enough, it does not help towards goodness; we demand similarity only to an actually existent Good: the goodness must depend upon derivation from a Prior of such a nature that the similarity is desirable because that Prior is good, just as the similarity would be undesirable if the Prior were not good. Enneads V,3,

The Supreme, as the ABSOLUTE Good and not merely a good being or thing, can contain nothing, since there is nothing that could be its good. Enneads V,5,

Anything it could contain must be either good to it or not good; but in the supremely and primally Good there can be nothing not good; nor can the ABSOLUTE Good be a container to the Good: containing, then, neither the good nor the not good it contains nothing and, containing nothing, it is alone: it is void of all but itself. Enneads V,5,

Thus we rob it of its very being as The ABSOLUTE Good if we ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or goodness. The only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no quality or content there but to permit only the “It is” in which we pretend to no affirmation of non-existent attribute: there is an ignorant praise which, missing the true description, drags in qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy must guard against attaching to the Supreme what is later and lower: moving above all that order, it is the cause and source of all these, and is none of them. Enneads V,5,

The intellective act is a movement towards the unmoved Good: thus the self-intellection in all save the ABSOLUTE Good is the working of the imaged Good within them: the intellectual principle recognises the likeness, sees itself as a good to itself, an object of attraction: it grasps at that manifestation of The Good and, in holding that, holds self-vision: if the state of goodness is constant, it remains constantly self-attractive and self-intellective. The self-intellection is not deliberate: it sees itself as an incident in its contemplation of The Good; for it sees itself in virtue of its Act; and, in all that exists, the Act is towards The Good. Enneads V,6,

The God fettered (as in the Kronos Myth) to an unchanging identity leaves the ordering of this universe to his son (to Zeus), for it could not be in his character to neglect his rule within the divine sphere, and, as though sated with the Authentic-Beauty, seek a lordship too recent and too poor for his might. Ignoring this lower world, Kronos (Intellectual-Principle) claims for his own father (Ouranoo, the ABSOLUTE, or One) with all the upward-tending between them: and he counts all that tends to the inferior, beginning from his son (Zeus, the All-Soul), as ranking beneath him. Thus he holds a mid position determined on the one side by the differentiation implied in the severance from the very highest and, on the other, by that which keeps him apart from the link between himself and the lower: he stands between a greater father and an inferior son. But since that father is too lofty to be thought of under the name of Beauty, the second God remains the primally beautiful. Enneads V,8,

The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul’s inability to bring some other thing to being – something in the order of nature, which, else, it would – but producing where it may. In the matter of the arts and crafts, all that are to be traced to the needs of human nature are laid up in the ABSOLUTE Man. Enneads V,8,

Again, whence does Matter derive its unifying power? It is assuredly not the ABSOLUTE Unity, but has only that of participation in Unity. Enneads: VI I

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,

Stability, then, may also be taken as a single genus. Obviously distinct from Motion and perhaps even its contrary, that it is also distinct from Being may be shown by many considerations. We may especially observe that if Stability were identical with Being, so also would Motion be, with equal right. Why identity in the case of Stability and not in that of Motion, when Motion is virtually the very life and Act both of Substance and of ABSOLUTE Being? However, on the very same principle on which we separated Motion from Being with the understanding that it is the same and not the same – that they are two and yet one – we also separate Stability from Being, holding it, yet, inseparable; it is only a logical separation entailing the inclusion among the Existents of this other genus. To identify Stability with Being, with no difference between them, and to identify Being with Motion, would be to identify Stability with Motion through the mediation of Being, and so to make Motion and Stability one and the same thing. Enneads VI,2,

It may be contended that the unity which is implicit in Being and in Motion is common to all other things, and that therefore Being and unity are inseparable. But we rejected the idea that Being is a genus comprising all things, on the ground that these things are not beings in the sense of the ABSOLUTE Being, but beings in another mode: in the same way, we assert, unity is not a genus, the Primary Unity having a character distinct from all other unities. Enneads VI,2,

Admitted that not everything suffices to produce a genus, it may yet be urged that there is an ABSOLUTE or Primary Unity corresponding to the other primaries. But if Being and unity are identified, then since Being has already been included among the genera, it is but a name that is introduced in unity: if, however, they are both unity, some principle is implied: if there is anything in addition (to this principle), unity is predicated of this added thing; if there is nothing added, the reference is again to that unity predicated of nothing. If however the unity referred to is that which accompanies Being, we have already decided that it is not unity in the primary sense. Enneads VI,2,

In sum, the unity exhibited in Being on the one hand approximates to Unity-ABSOLUTE and on the other tends to identify itself with Being: Being is a unity in relation to the ABSOLUTE, is Being by virtue of its sequence upon that ABSOLUTE: it is indeed potentially a plurality, and yet it remains a unity and rejecting division refuses thereby to become a genus. Enneads VI,2,

We are bound however to enquire under what mode unity is contained in Being. How is what is termed the “dividing” effected – especially the dividing of the genera Being and unity? Is it the same division, or is it different in the two cases? First then: In what sense, precisely, is any given particular called and known to be a unity? Secondly: Does unity as used of Being carry the same connotation as in reference to the ABSOLUTE? Unity is not identical in all things; it has a different significance according as it is applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual realms – Being too, of course, comports such a difference – and there is a difference in the unity affirmed among sensible things as compared with each other; the unity is not the same in the cases of chorus, camp, ship, house; there is a difference again as between such discrete things and the continuous. Nevertheless, all are representations of the one exemplar, some quite remote, others more effective: the truer likeness is in the Intellectual; Soul is a unity, and still more is Intellect a unity and Being a unity. Enneads VI,2,

If, again, we mean beauty in relation to ourselves as spectators in whom it produces a certain experience, this Act (of production) is Motion – and none the less Motion by being directed towards ABSOLUTE Beauty. Enneads VI,2,

Similarly, an object is great in itself, and its greatness is due, not to any external, but to its own participation in the ABSOLUTE Great. Enneads VI,3,

This does not mean that Man ABSOLUTE, or any ABSOLUTE, or the Universe in the sense of a Whole, is absorbed by multiplicity; on the contrary, the multiplicity is absorbed by the ABSOLUTE, or rather is bound up with it. There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a substance entire and that in which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the body: it is in this latter mode that Being is omnipresent. Enneads VI,5,

As then there is a Life-Form primal – which therefore is the Life-Form ABSOLUTE – and there is Intellectual-Principle or Being, Authentic Being, these, we affirm, contain all living things and all Number, and ABSOLUTE Justice and Beauty and all of that order; for we ascribe an existence of their own to ABSOLUTE Man, ABSOLUTE Number, ABSOLUTE Justice. It remains to discover, in so far as such knowledge is possible, how these distinct entities come to be and what is the manner of their being. Enneads VI,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,

In the Intellectuals, all, if the ABSOLUTE Living-Form, there is a multiple – a triad, let us say – that Triad of the Living-Form is of the nature of essence: and the Triad prior to any living thing, Triad in the realm of Being, is a principle of essence. Enneads VI,6,

It is our view that there does exist an infinite line, among the Intellectual Beings: for There a line would not be quantitative and being without quantity could be numerically infinite. This however would be in another mode than that of limitless extension. In what mode then? In that the conception of the ABSOLUTE Line does not include the conception of limit. Enneads VI,6,

It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the “More than is present”; the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire; no number has been or could be omitted to make addition possible. It might be described as infinite in the sense that it has not been measured – who is there to measure it? – but it is solely its own, a concentrated unit, entire, not ringed round by any boundary; its manner of being is settled for it by itself alone. None of the Real-Beings is under limit; what is limited, measured, is what needs measure to prevent it running away into the unbounded. There every being is Measure; and therefore it is that all is beautiful. Because that is a living thing it is beautiful, holding the highest life, the complete, a life not tainted towards death, nothing mortal there, nothing dying. Nor is the life of that ABSOLUTE Living-Form some feeble flickering; it is primal, the brightest, holding all that life has of radiance; it is that first light which the souls There draw upon for their life and bring with them when they come here. It knows for what purpose it lives, towards What it lives, from Whence it lives; for the Whence of its life is the Whither… and close above it stands the wisdom of all, the collective Intellectual-Principle, knit into it, one with it, colouring it to a higher goodness, by kneading wisdom into it, making its beauty still more august. Even here the august and veritably beautiful life is the life in wisdom, here dimly seen, There purely. For There wisdom gives sight to the seer and power for the fuller living and in that tenser life both to see and to become what is seen. Enneads VI,6,

We ask first whether man as here is a Reason-Principle different to that soul which produces him as here and gives him life and thought; or is he that very soul or, again, the (yet lower) soul using the human body? Now if man is a reasonable living being and by “living being” is meant a conjoint of soul and body, the Reason-Principle of man is not identical with soul. But if the conjoint of soul and body is the reason-principle of man, how can man be an eternal reality, seeing that it is only when soul and body have come together that the Reason-Principle so constituted appears? The Reason-Principle will be the foreteller of the man to be, not the Man ABSOLUTE with which we are dealing but more like his definition, and not at that indicating his nature since what is indicated is not the Idea that is to enter Matter but only that of the known thing, the conjoint. We have not yet found the Man we are seeking, the equivalent of the Reason-Principle. Enneads VI,7,

Anything that can be described as a unity is so in the precise degree in which it holds a characteristic being; the less or more the degree of the being, the less or more the unity. Soul, while distinct from unity’s very self, is a thing of the greater unity in proportion as it is of the greater, the authentic, being. ABSOLUTE unity it is not: it is soul and one soul, the unity in some sense a concomitant; there are two things, soul and soul’s unity as there is body with body’s unity. The looser aggregates, such as a choir, are furthest from unity, the more compact are the nearer; soul is nearer yet but still a participant. Enneads VI,8,

It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the unity are distinct, yet in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when we have grasped Being we hold unity; Real Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, taking the Intellectual-Principle as Essential Being, that principle and the Unity ABSOLUTE would be at once Primal Being and Pure Unity, purveying, accordingly, to the rest of things something of Being and something, in proportion, of the unity which is itself. Enneads VI,8,