That principle (of the new birth) strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit (its next higher): if on the contrary it is weighed down by the developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the ACTIVE PRINCIPLE of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the height. Enneads III,4,
But from the Divine Beings thus at rest within themselves, how did this Time first emerge? We can scarcely call upon the Muses to recount its origin since they were not in existence then – perhaps not even if they had been. The engendered thing, Time, itself, can best tell us how it rose and became manifest; something thus its story would run: Time at first – in reality before that “first” was produced by desire of succession – Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent: it was not yet Time; it was merged in the Authentic and motionless with it. But there was an ACTIVE PRINCIPLE there, one set on governing itself and realizing itself (= the All-Soul), and it chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest, and Time stirred with it. And we, stirring to a ceaseless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the establishment of ever-new difference, traversed a portion of the outgoing path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time. Enneads III,7,
Nature, being thus a mere communicator, does not possess even the imaging act. There is (within the Soul) intellection, superior to imagination; and there is imagination standing midway between that intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. For Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything; imagination (the imaging faculty) has consciousness of the external, for it enables that which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience encountered, while Nature’s function is to engender – of itself though in an act derived from the ACTIVE PRINCIPLE (of the soul). Enneads IV,4,
Where, then, does Motion reside, when there is one thing that moves and another that passes from an inherent potentiality to actuality? In the mover? How then will the moved, the patient, participate in the motion? In the moved? Then why does not Motion remain in it, once having come? It would seem that Motion must neither be separated from the ACTIVE PRINCIPLE nor allowed to reside in it; it must proceed from agent to patient without so inhering in the latter as to be severed from the former, passing from one to the other like a breath of wind. Enneads VI,3,