colour

Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of COLOUR, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. Enneads I,6,

All the loveliness of COLOUR and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. Enneads I,6,

The beauty of COLOUR is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form. Enneads I,6,

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has COLOUR primally; they receive the Form of COLOUR from it: hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of COLOUR. Enneads I,6,

But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no COLOUR, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no COLOUR, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of god-like Intellection. Enneads I,6,

For not he that has failed of the joy that is in COLOUR or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose winning he should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if only, spurning the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining to This, he may see. Enneads I,6,

But all this does not assure us that the earth to be visible must contain fire: light is sufficient: snow, for example, and other extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire – though of course it might be said that fire was once there and communicated COLOUR before disappearing. Enneads: II I

And it is that loftier light – falling variously upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion – that gives them their characteristic differences, as well in magnitude as in COLOUR; just such light constitutes also the still higher heavenly bodies which, however, like clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting transparency of their material substance and also by their very distance. Enneads: II I

Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of this sort is our object: we are seeking the stuff which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all that we find in things of sense – not merely such attributes as COLOUR, heat or cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness, shape and therefore magnitude; though notice that to be present within magnitude and shape is very different from possessing these qualities. Enneads II,4,

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,

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn? No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any COLOUR not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense – all that corresponds to light – comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision. Enneads II,4,

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever? No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds (i.e., as possessing with these forms a formless base) for they appear as things that have accepted COLOUR and other quality. Enneads II,4,

It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of COLOUR: it is not heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour for nostrils or palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither is it corporeal; and touch deals with body, which is known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry – all properties utterly lacking in Matter. Enneads II,4,

Or again, it may be that magnitude is known incidentally (as a deduction) from the observation of COLOUR. With an object at hand we know how much space is covered by the COLOUR; at a distance, only that something is COLOURed, for the parts, quantitatively distinct among themselves, do not give us the precise knowledge of that quantity, the COLOURs themselves reaching us only in a blurred impression. Enneads: II VIII.

True; but there is the common fact of diminution. There is COLOUR with its diminution, faintness; there is magnitude with its diminution, smallness; and magnitude follows COLOUR diminishing stage by stage with it. Enneads: II VIII.

But, the phenomenon is more easily explained by the example of things of wide variety. Take mountains dotted with houses, woods and other land-marks; the observation of each detail gives us the means of calculating, by the single objects noted, the total extent covered: but, where no such detail of form reaches us, our vision, which deals with detail, has not the means towards the knowledge of the whole by measurement of any one clearly discerned magnitude. This applies even to objects of vision close at hand: where there is variety and the eye sweeps over all at one glance so that the forms are not all caught, the total appears the less in proportion to the detail which has escaped the eye; observe each single point and then you can estimate the volume precisely. Again, magnitudes of one COLOUR and unbroken form trick the sense of quantity: the vision can no longer estimate by the particular; it slips away, not finding the stand-by of the difference between part and part. Enneads: II VIII.

The school, no doubt, is free-spoken enough – whether in the set purpose of giving its opinions a plausible COLOUR of verity or in honest belief – but we are addressing here our own acquaintances, not those people with whom we could make no way. We have spoken in the hope of preventing our friends from being perturbed by a party which brings, not proof – how could it? – but arbitrary, tyrannical assertion; another style of address would be applicable to such as have the audacity to flout the noble and true doctrines of the august teachers of antiquity. Enneads: II VIII.

Augury, it is urged, is able from these indications to foretell what is to happen not merely to the universe as a whole, but even to individuals, and this not merely as regards external conditions of fortune but even as to the events of the mind. We observe, too, how growth or check in other orders of beings – animals and Plants – is determined by their sympathetic relations with the heavenly bodies and how widely they are influenced by them, how, for example, the various countries show a different produce according to their situation on the earth and especially their lie towards the sun. And the effect of place is not limited to plants and animals; it rules human beings too, determining their appearance, their height and COLOUR, their mentality and their desires, their pursuits and their moral habit. Thus the universal circuit would seem to be the monarch of the All. Enneads: III I

The intermediary mass on which these surface changes appear is certainly not transmuted by them; but might there not be a modification of the underlying Matter? No: it is impossible to think of Matter being modified by, for instance, COLOUR – for, of course we must not talk of modification when there is no more than a presence, or at most a presenting of shape. Enneads III,6,

By the conditions of Manifestation, COLOUR rises from non-COLOUR (= from the COLOURless prototype of COLOUR in the Ideal Realm). Quality, known by the one name with its parallel in the sphere of Primals, rises, similarly, from non-quality: in precisely the same mode, the Magnitude appearing upon Matter rises from non-Magnitude or from that Primal which is known to us by the same name; so that material things become visible through standing midway between bare underlie and Pure Idea. All is perceptible by virtue of this origin in the Intellectual Sphere but all is falsity since the base in which the manifestation takes place is a non-existent. Enneads III,6,

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, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the creative act of Nature, are unable to make COLOURs; all they can do to impose upon their handicraft COLOURs taken from elsewhere. None the less there is a parallel which demands attention: in the case of workers in such arts there must be something locked within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all their creation; and this observation should have indicated a similar phenomenon in Nature; it should be clear that this indwelling efficacy, which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman – but, there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgoing force as against that remaining within; the only moved thing is Matter; there can be no moved phase in this Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover; this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity; it is the unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos. Enneads III,8,

So far we have the primarily indivisible – supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent – and we have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also another Kind, of earlier rank than the sensible yet near to it and resident within it – an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we may think of COLOUR, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations. In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility. Enneads IV,2,

But, on the other hand, that first utterly indivisible Kind must be accompanied by a subsequent Essence, engendered by it and holding indivisibility from it but, in virtue of the necessary outgo from source, tending firmly towards the contrary, the wholly partible; this secondary Essence will take an intermediate Place between the first substance, the undivided, and that which is divisible in material things and resides in them. Its presence, however, will differ in one respect from that of COLOUR and quantity; these, no doubt, are present identically and entire throughout diverse material masses, but each several manifestation of them is as distinct from every other as the mass is from the mass. Enneads IV,2,

Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum: anything in a substratum is a condition affecting that – a COLOUR, a form – but the soul is a separate existence. Enneads IV,3,

Suppose something visible lying at a distance: the soul sees it; now, admitting to the full that at first only the pure idea of the thing is seized – a total without discerned part – yet in the end it becomes to the seeing soul an object whose complete detail of COLOUR and form is known: this shows that there is something more here than the outlying thing and the soul; for the soul is immune from experience; there must be a third, something not thus exempt; and it is this intermediate that accepts the impressions of shape and the like. Enneads IV,4,

Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere: Is it necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception is to take place should be in contact with the organ of perception, or can the process occur across space upon an object at a distance? Thus, is the heat of a fire really at a distance from the flesh it warms, the intermediate space remaining unmodified; is it possible to see COLOUR over a sheer blank intervening between the COLOUR and the eye, the organ of vision reaching to its object by its own power? For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the body. Enneads IV,4,

How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been? But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as COLOUR belongs to bodies by the fact that they throw off light, yet when corruptible bodies are transformed the COLOUR disappears and we no more ask where the COLOUR of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is. Enneads IV,4,

Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands clenched or spread; the COLOUR is no such accidental but is more like, for example, sweetness: when a material substance breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception. Enneads IV,4,

If we are told that beauty is the motive of attraction, does not this mean simply that the power of appeal to this or that mind depends upon pattern, configuration? How can we allow power to COLOUR and none to configuration? It is surely untenable that an entity should have existence and yet have no power to effect: existence carries with it either acting or answering to action, some beings having action alone, others both. Enneads IV,4,

The light, then, raying from bodies is an outgoing activity of a luminous body; the light within luminous bodies – understand; such as are primarily luminous – is the essential being embraced under the idea of that body. When such a body is brought into association with Matter, its activity produces COLOUR: when there is no such association, it does not give COLOUR – it gives merely an incipient on which COLOUR might be formed – for it belongs to another being (primal light) with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or from its (inner) activity. Enneads IV,5,

And light is incorporeal even when it is the light of a body; there is therefore no question, strictly speaking, of its withdrawal or of its being present – these terms do not apply to its modes – and its essential existence is to be an activity. As an example: the image upon a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the reflected object upon the potential recipient: there is no outgoing from the object (or ingoing into the reflecting body); it is simply that, as long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form of COLOUR shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not there, the reflecting surface no longer holds what it held when the conditions were favourable. Enneads IV,5,

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity – as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body to be – is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held in material things? No; for in those things the COLOUR is due to an actual intermixture of the active element (the light being alloyed with Matter); whereas the life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul closely present to it. Enneads IV,5,

Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that percipients and things perceived are all members of one living being, no acts of perception could take place: that far body could be known only if it were a member of this living universe of ours – which condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if, without being thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting light and COLOUR and the qualities by which we perceive things, and belonging to the same ideal category as the organ of vision? If our supposition (of perception by sympathy) is true, there would still be no perception – though we may be told that the hypothesis is clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can fail in grasping an illuminated object lying before it, and that the other senses in the presence of their particular objects remain unresponsive. Enneads IV,5,

Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy and light. If it were material, its quality – and the COLOUR it must have – would produce one invariable effect and not the variety actually observed. Enneads IV,7,

Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear: the very word, strictly used, means that the thing is perdurable. Similarly white, the COLOUR, cannot be now white and now not white: if this “white” were a real being it would be eternal as well as being white: the COLOUR is merely white but whatsoever possesses being, indwelling by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an entity this primal and eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it remains self-gathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own. Enneads IV,7,

(15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material: besides it has neither shape or COLOUR nor is it tangible. But there are other proofs. Enneads IV,7,

Now comes the question what sort of thing does the Intellectual-Principle see in seeing the Intellectual Realm and what in seeing itself? We are not to look for an Intellectual realm reminding us of the COLOUR or shape to be seen on material objects: the intellectual antedates all such things; and even in our sphere the production is very different from the Reason-Principle in the seeds from which it is produced. The seed principles are invisible and the beings of the Intellectual still more characteristically so; the Intellectuals are of one same nature with the Intellectual Realm which contains them, just as the Reason-Principle in the seed is identical with the soul, or life-principle, containing it. Enneads V,3,

But let us leave the arts and consider those works produced by Nature and admitted to be naturally beautiful which the creations of art are charged with imitating, all reasoning life and unreasoning things alike, but especially the consummate among them, where the moulder and maker has subdued the material and given the form he desired. Now what is the beauty here? It has nothing to do with the blood or the menstrual process: either there is also a COLOUR and form apart from all this, or there is nothing unless sheer ugliness or a bare recipient, as it were the mere Matter of beauty. Enneads V,8,

This vision Zeus takes, and it is for such of us, also, as share his love and appropriate our part in the Beauty There, the final object of all seeing, the entire beauty upon all things; for all There sheds radiance, and floods those that have found their way thither so that they too become beautiful; thus it will often happen that men climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will themselves appear so, borrowing COLOUR from the place on which they move. The COLOUR flowering on that other height we speak of is Beauty; or rather all There is light and beauty, through and through, for the beauty is no mere bloom upon the surface. Enneads V,8,

But a recipient must possess what it has received. A thing is admitted to possess its natural COLOUR: why not its motion also? Besides, independent motions such as walking and thought do, in fact, involve the possession of the powers respectively to walk and to think. Enneads: VI I

As for Possession, if the term is used comprehensively, why are not all its modes to be brought under one category? Possession, thus, would include the quantum as possessing magnitude, the quale as possessing COLOUR; it would include fatherhood and the complementary relationships, since the father possesses the son and the son possesses the father: in short, it would include all belongings. Enneads: VI I

If we had to ascertain the nature of body and the place it holds in the universe, surely we should take some sample of body, say stone, and examine into what constituents it may be divided. There would be what we think of as the substrate of stone, its quantity – in this case, a magnitude; its quality – for example, the COLOUR of stone. As with stone, so with every other body: we should see that in this thing, body, there are three distinguishable characteristics – the pseudo-substance, the quantity, the quality – though they all make one and are only logically trisected, the three being found to constitute the unit thing, body. If motion were equally inherent in its constitution, we should include this as well, and the four would form a unity, the single body depending upon them all for its unity and characteristic nature. Enneads VI,2,

Now the wonder comes how a unity of this type can be many as well as one. In the case of body it was easy to concede unity-with-plurality; the one body is divisible to infinity; its COLOUR is a different thing from its shape, since in fact they are separated. But if we take Soul, single, continuous, without extension, of the highest simplicity – as the first effort of the mind makes manifest – how can we expect to find multiplicity here too? We believed that the division of the living being into body and soul was final: body indeed was manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt, supposing that we had come to the limit of our course. Enneads VI,2,

A first point demanding consideration: Bodies – those, for example, of animals and plants – are each a multiplicity founded on COLOUR and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from Reality. Since, thus, bodies take their rise from unity, but not “unity” in the sense of the complete unity or Unity-Absolute – for this could never yield discrete plurality – it remains that they be derived from a unity Pluralized. But the creative principle (in bodies) is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity. Enneads VI,2,

But Sensible Substance is never found apart from magnitude and quality: how then do we proceed to separate these accidents? If we subtract them – magnitude, figure, COLOUR, dryness, moistness – what is there left to be regarded as Substance itself? All the substances under consideration are, of course, qualified. Enneads VI,3,

But, waiving this objection, how deal with qualities perceived by the same sense-organ? We may be told that some COLOURs integrate, others disintegrate the vision, that some tastes integrate, others disintegrate the tongue: we reply that, first, it is the actual experiences (of COLOUR and taste, and not the sense-organs) that we are discussing and it is to these that the notions of integration and disintegration must be applied; secondly, a means of differentiating these experiences has not been offered. Enneads VI,3,

But how are we to classify such terms as “not white”? If “not white” signifies some other COLOUR, it is a quality. But if it is merely a negation of an enumeration of things not white, it will be either a meaningless sound, or else a name or definition of something actual: if a sound, it is a kind of motion; if a name or definition, it is a relative, inasmuch as names and definitions are significant. But if not only the things enumerated are in some one genus, but also the propositions and terms in question must be each of them significative of some genus, then we shall assert that negative propositions and terms posit certain things within a restricted field and deny others. Perhaps, however, it would be better, in view of their composite nature, not to include the negations in the same genus as the affirmations. Enneads VI,3,

That we are accustomed to act upon these assumptions is obvious enough; but the following considerations may perhaps commend themselves: White and yellow are entirely different from each other – a statement which applies to any COLOUR whatsoever as compared with any other; they are accordingly contrary qualities. Their contrariety is independent of the presence of intermediates: between health and disease no intermediate intrudes, and yet they are contraries. Enneads VI,3,

If these observations be sound, COLOURs which have a common ground will not be contraries. But there will be nothing to prevent, not indeed every COLOUR from being contrary to every other, but any one COLOUR from being contrary to any other; and similarly with tastes. This will serve as a statement of the problem. Enneads VI,3,

But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before there was any All? And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence of extension, extending over a universe? We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an accidental attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the move of accident? We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say sweetness or COLOUR, for while these are actual states of the masses affected so that they show that quality at every point, none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of body and known only as in body; such quality is necessarily of a definite extension. Further, the COLOUR at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence. Enneads VI,4,

Still, this integral omnipresence admitted, why do not all things participate in the Intellectual Order in its entirety? Why has it a first participant, a second, and so on? We can but see that presence is determined by the fitness of the participant so that, while Being is omnipresent to the realm of Being, never falling short of itself, yet only the competent possess themselves of that presence which depends not upon situation but upon adequacy; the transparent object and the opaque answer very differently to the light. These firsts, seconds, thirds, of participance are determined by rank, by power, not by place but by differentiation; and difference is no bar to coexistence, witness soul and Intellectual-Principle: similarly our own knowledge, the trivial next the gravest; one and the same object yields COLOUR to our sight, fragrance to smell, to every sense a particular experience, all presented simultaneously. Enneads VI,4,

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,

That light known, then indeed we are stirred towards those Beings in longing and rejoicing over the radiance about them, just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the Beauty manifested upon it. Every one of those Beings exists for itself but becomes an object of desire by the COLOUR cast upon it from The Good, source of those graces and of the love they evoke. The soul taking that outflow from the divine is stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love. Before that, even Intellectual-Principle with all its loveliness did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the light of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all, unquickened even to Intellectual-Principle there before it. But when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and however urged by its nearer environing, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something greater to its memory: so long as there exists anything loftier than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the giver of that love. Beyond Intellectual-Principle it passes but beyond The Good it cannot, for nothing stands above That. Let it remain in Intellectual-Principle and it sees the lovely and august, but it is not there possessed of all it sought; the face it sees is beautiful no doubt but not of power to hold its gaze because lacking in the radiant grace which is the bloom upon beauty. Enneads VI,7,

Every activity, state, and life, will be followed and as it were escorted by the over-dwelling consciousness; sometimes as these take their natural course they will be met by hindrance and by intrusion of the conflicting so that the life is the less self-guided; sometimes the natural activity is unmixed, wholly free, and then the life goes brilliantly; this last state is judged the pleasantest, the most to be chosen; so, for lack of an accurate expression, we hear of “Intellect in conjunction with pleasure.” But this is no more than metaphor, like a hundred others drawn by the poets from our natural likings – “Drunk with nectar,” “To banquet and feast,” “The Father smiled.” No: the veritably pleasant lies away in that other realm, the most to be loved and sought for, not something brought about and changing but the very principle of all the COLOUR and radiance and brightness found here. This is why we read of “Truth introduced into the Mixture” and of the “measuring standard as a prior condition” and are told that the symmetry and beauty necessary to the Mixture come Thence into whatever has beauty; it is in this way that we have our share in Beauty; but in another way, also, we achieve the truly desirable, that is by leading our selves up to what is best within us; this best is what is symmetry, beauty, collective Idea, life clear, Intellective and good. Enneads VI,7,