Idea

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,

But where the IDEAl-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the IDEA is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may. Enneads I,6,

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the IDEAl-Form within itself, using this IDEA as a canon of accuracy in its decision. Enneads I,6,

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter? On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity? So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the IDEAl-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to IDEA, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the IDEAl-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul. 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,

What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark? An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its own essential IDEA. Enneads I,6,

The Soul thus cleansed is all IDEA and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty. Enneads I,6,

Still, it will be urged, the incoming IDEA should have been able to conquer the Matter. Enneads I,8,

No: much more than all else, the Soul, possessing the IDEA which belongs to a Principle, must have as its native wealth many powers serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an Essential-Existent and with this Existence must go desire and act and the tendency towards some good. Enneads II,3,

And again, where could it have come from? whence did it take its being? If it is derived, it has a source: if it is eternal, then the Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by IDEA, the union constitutes a body; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme. Enneads II,4,

Further, a compound in the Intellectual order is not to be confounded with a compound in the realm of Matter; the Divine Reasons are compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that (lower) Nature which works towards IDEA. And there is not only a difference of function; there is a still more notable difference of source. Then, too, the Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form: in the eternal, Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this realm is all things in turn, a new entity in every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly pushes another out of being: Matter has no identity here. In the Intellectual it is all things at once: and therefore has nothing to change into: it already and ever contains all. This means that not even in its own Sphere is the Matter there at any moment shapeless: no doubt that is true of the Matter here as well; but shape is held by a very different right in the two orders of Matter. Enneads II,4,

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two – Matter and IDEA – by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter. Enneads II,4,

They must, therefore, consist of Matter and Form-IDEA – Form for quality and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as being other than IDEA. Enneads II,4,

Anaxagoras, in identifying his “primal-combination” with Matter – to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all – withdraws in this way the very Intellectual-Principle he had introduced; for this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming IDEA; and it is co-aeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible: for if the combination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior; if both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is imperative (a ground of unification). And if this Creator, Mind, must pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-IDEAs parcel-wise for the Mind, with unending labour, to assort and allot? Surely the undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive act? As for the notion that all is in all, this clearly is impossible. Enneads II,4,

No: all that ever appears upon it is brought in by the IDEA: the IDEA alone possesses: to it belongs the magnitude and all else that goes with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it. Quantity is given with the IDEAl-Form in all the particular species – man, bird, and particular kind of bird. Enneads II,4,

This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats the Matter out into Magnitude? Not at all: the Matter was not previously shrunken small: there was no littleness or bigness: the IDEA gives Magnitude exactly as it gives every quality not previously present. Enneads II,4,

“A certain mass then; and if mass, then Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose it sizeless; then, what end does it serve? It never helped IDEA or quality; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into embodied entities by way of Matter.” Enneads II,4,

Those, however, who assert Matter in the Intellectual Realm will be asked whether the existence of that Matter does not imply the potential there too; for even if Matter there exists in another mode than here, every Being there will have its Matter, its form and the union of the two (and therefore the potential, separable from the actual). What answer is to be made? Simply, that even the Matter there is IDEA, just as the Soul, an IDEA, is Matter to another (a higher) Being. Enneads: II V.

But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a potentiality? No: for the IDEA (to which it is Matter) is integral to the Soul and does not look to a future; the distinction between the Soul and its IDEA is purely mental: the IDEA and the Matter it includes are conceived as a conjunction but are essentially one Kind: remember that Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial. Enneads: II V.

It is, further, by definition, formless and therefore not an IDEA: it cannot then be classed among things of the Intellectual Realm, and so is, once more, a Non-Being. Falling, as regards both worlds, under Non-Being, it is all the more decidedly the Non-Being. Enneads: II V.

We have thus covered our main ground, but since corporeity has been mentioned, we must consider its nature: is it the conjunction of all the qualities or is it an IDEA, or Reason-Principle, whose presence in Matter constitutes a body? Now if body is the compound, the thing made up of all the required qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is nothing more than their conjunction. Enneads: II VII.

And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body: thus the body will be Matter associated with an indwelling Reason-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure IDEA, even though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man – treated elsewhere – which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle. Enneads: II VII.

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms – and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one<one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or IDEA: individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine. Enneads III,2,

What is our answer? All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts – strictly “included” for this Universal IDEA does not engender them but encompasses them. Enneads III,3,

Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing changing must remain within its constitutive IDEA so that the alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential thing; the changing object must retain this fundamental permanence, and the permanent substance cannot be the member of it which accepts modification. Enneads III,6,

Just as the IDEAl Principles stand immutably in their essence – which consists precisely in their permanence – so, since the essence of Matter consists in its being Matter (the substratum to all material things) it must be permanent in this character; because it is Matter, it is immutable. In the Intellectual realm we have the immutable IDEA; here we have Matter, itself similarly immutable. Enneads III,6,

It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact, unaffected by IDEAl-forms present within it, especially seeing that these are affected by each other. It is surprising, too, that the entrant Forms should regularly expel preceding shapes and qualities, and that the modification (which cannot touch Matter) should affect what is a compound (of IDEA with Matter) and this, again, not a haphazard but precisely where there is need of the incoming or outgoing of some certain IDEAl-form, the compound being deficient through the absence of a particular principle whose presence will complete it. Enneads III,6,

We conclude that Matter’s participation in IDEA is not by way of modification within itself: the process is very different; it is a bare seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the difficulty as to how Matter, essentially evil, can be reaching towards The Good: there would be no such participation as would destroy its essential nature. Given this mode of pseudo-participation – in which Matter would, as we say, retain its nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been – there is no longer any reason to wonder as to how while essentially evil, it yet participates in IDEA: for, by this mode, it does not abandon its own character: participation is the law, but it participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under a mode of participation which allows it to remain on its own footing, its essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever the IDEA, within that limit, may communicate to it: it is by no means the less evil for remaining immutably in its own order. If it had authentic participation in The Good and were veritably changed, it would not be essentially evil. Enneads III,6,

Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took any IDEA to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant IDEA will enter as an image, the untrue entering the untruth. Enneads III,6,

Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an IDEAl-Form of a Kind (has some degree of Real Being); but bare Matter, which is no IDEA, is not a visible thing; if it were, it would have been visible in its own character before anything else appeared upon it. The condition of Matter may be illustrated by that of air penetrated by light and remaining, even so, unseen because it is invisible whatever happens. Enneads III,6,

Eliminate this IDEAl-Form and the substratum ceases to be a thing of magnitude, or to appear so: the mass produced by the IDEA was, let us suppose, a man or a horse; the horse-magnitude came upon the Matter when a horse was produced upon it; when the horse ceases to exist upon the Matter, the magnitude of the horse departs also. If we are told that the horse implies a certain determined bulk and that this bulk is a permanent thing, we answer that what is permanent in this case is not the magnitude of the horse but the magnitude of mass in general. That same Magnitude might be fire or earth; on their disappearance their particular magnitudes would disappear with them. Matter, then, can never take to itself either pattern or magnitude; if it did, it would no longer be able to turn from being fire, let us say, into being something else; it would become and be fire once for all. 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,

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,

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,

The IDEAl Principle possessing the Intellection (= IDEA, Noesis) of Magnitude – assuming that this Intellection is of such power as not merely to subsist within itself but to be urged outward as it were by the intensity of its life – will necessarily realize itself in a Kind (= Matter) not having its being in the Intellective Principle, not previously possessing the IDEA of Magnitude or any trace of that IDEA or any other. 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,

But would we not expect that some one particularized form should occupy Matter (at once) and so exclude such others as are not able to enter into combination? No: for there is no first IDEA except the IDEAl Principle of the Universe – and, by this IDEA, Matter is (the seat of) all things at once and of the particular thing in its parts – for the Matter of a living being is disparted according to the specific parts of the organism: if there were no such partition nothing would exist but the Reason-Principle. Enneads III,6,

So the appellation “Recipient and Nurse” is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as Matter but as being an IDEAl-Form; for only the IDEA is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile. Enneads III,6,

The phrase “He was good” (used by Plato of the Demiurge) refers to the IDEA of the All; and its very indefiniteness signifies the utter absense of relation to Time: so that even this Universe has had no temporal beginning; and if we speak of something “before” it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects it as inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms. Enneads III,7,

To this end we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity, unwavering Life, undivided totality, limitless, knowing no divagation, at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet: or at least it did not exist for the Eternal Beings, though its being was implicit in the IDEA and Principle of progressive derivation. Enneads III,7,

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 by an IDEA, and will therefore be distinct from that IDEA: the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation. Taking the Reason-Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act (in the higher Logos) and is itself a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated, but above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as All-Soul and, next, that operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle. Enneads III,8,

Hence the IDEA must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own. Enneads III,8,

The Soul, once domiciled within that IDEA and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees (in its outgoing act) as a stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a (lower) realm which these do not see. Enneads III,8,

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 to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to produce IDEAl-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all produce objects of vision, IDEAl-forms. In the engendering of these sub-existences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that the creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and IDEA that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal. Enneads III,8,

But, if in the total the organization in which they have their being is compact of variety – as it must be since every Reason-Principle is a unity of multiplicity and variety, and may be thought of as a psychic animated organism having many shapes at its command – if this is so and all constitutes a system in which being is not cut adrift from being, if there is nothing chance – borne among beings as there is none even in bodily organisms, then it follows that Number must enter into the scheme; for, once again, Being must be stable; the members of the Intellectual must possess identity, each numerically one; this is the condition of individuality. Where, as in bodily masses, the IDEA is not essentially native, and the individuality is therefore in flux, existence under ideal form can rise only out of imitation of the Authentic Existences; these last, on the contrary, not rising out of any such conjunction (as the duality of IDEA and dead Matter) have their being in that which is numerically one, that which was from the beginning, and neither becomes what it has not been nor can cease to be what it is. Enneads IV,3,

The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature – a thing unbounded – as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the IDEA (the Divine forming power) which it conveys. Enneads IV,3,

Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way: The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens, sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the IDEA uttered by the Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase (the World-Soul) maintaining the unvarying march (of the kosmic circuit) the other (the soul of the Individual) adopting itself to times and season. Enneads IV,3,

Then (by the nature of body) the many souls could result only from the splitting up of that entity, each an entirely different substance: if this body-soul be uniform in kind, each of the resultant souls must be of the one kind; they will all carry the one Form undividedly and will differ only in their volumes. Now, if their being souls depended upon their volumes they would be distinct; but if it is ideal-form that makes them souls, then all are, in virtue of this IDEA, one. Enneads IV,8,

This second outflow is a Form or IDEA representing the Divine Intellect as the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, The One. Enneads V,2,

But this would mean that after all there are not as many Reason Principles as separate beings? As many as there are of differing beings, differing by something more than a mere failure in complete reproduction of their IDEA. Enneads V,7,

Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the IDEA or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful. Enneads V,8,

Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battle-sought; or of all those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite; or of Aphrodite herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty; or of any of these gods manifest to sight, or unseen but carrying what would be beauty if we saw? In all these is it not the IDEA, something of that realm but communicated to the produced from within the producer just as in works of art, we held, it is communicated from the arts to their creations? Now we can surely not believe that, while the made thing and the IDEA thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet the IDEA not so alloyed but resting still with the creator – the IDEA primal, immaterial, firmly a unity – is not Beauty. Enneads V,8,

If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then the creating principle, being without extension, could not be beautiful: but beauty cannot be made to depend upon magnitude since, whether in a large object or a small, the one IDEA equally moves and forms the mind by its inherent power. A further indication is that as long as the object remains outside us we know nothing of it; it affects us by entry; but only as an IDEA can it enter through the eyes which are not of scope to take an extended mass: we are, no doubt, simultaneously possessed of the magnitude which, however, we take in not as mass but by an elaboration upon the presented form. Enneads V,8,

From the beginning to end all is gripped by the Forms of the Intellectual Realm: Matter itself is held by the IDEAs of the elements and to these IDEAs are added other IDEAs and others again, so that it is hard to work down to crude Matter beneath all that sheathing of IDEA. Indeed since Matter itself is in its degree, an IDEA – the lowest – all this universe is IDEA and there is nothing that is not IDEA as the archetype was. And all is made silently, since nothing had part in the making but Being and IDEA further reason why creation went without toil. The Exemplar was the IDEA of an All, and so an All must come into being. Enneads V,8,

Thus nothing stood in the way of the IDEA, and even now it dominates, despite all the clash of things: the creation is not hindered on its way even now; it stands firm in virtue of being All. To me, moreover, it seems that if we ourselves were archetypes, IDEAs, veritable Being, and the IDEA with which we construct here were our veritable Essence, then our creative power too would toillessly effect its purpose: as man now stands, he does not produce in his work a true image of himself: become man, he has ceased to be the All: ceasing to be man – we read – “he soars aloft and administers the Kosmos entire”; restored to the All he is maker of the All. Enneads V,8,

If this principle were not beautiful, what other could be? Its prior does not deign to be beautiful; that which is the first to manifest itself – Form and object of vision to the intellect – cannot but be lovely to see. It is to indicate this that Plato, drawing on something well within our observation, represents the Creator as approving the work he has achieved: the intention is to make us feel the lovable beauty of the autotype and of the Divine IDEA; for to admire a representation is to admire the original upon which it was made. Enneads V,8,

The power in that other world has merely Being and Beauty of Being. Beauty without Being could not be, nor Being voided of Beauty: abandoned of Beauty, Being loses something of its essence. Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty; and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate which is the cause of the other, where the nature is one? The very figment of Being needs some imposed image of Beauty to make it passable and even to ensure its existence; it exists to the degree in which it has taken some share in the beauty of IDEA; and the more deeply it has drawn on this, the less imperfect it is, precisely because the nature which is essentially the beautiful has entered into it the more intimately. Enneads V,8,

The pattern giving beauty to the corporeal rests upon it as IDEA to its Matter and the substrate may change and from being pleasant become distasteful, a sign, in all reason, that the beauty comes by participation. Enneads V,8,

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the IDEA imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle – since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless – you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else – the Intellectual-Principle in it – representing IDEA, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. Enneads V,8,

Its objects certainly cannot be the things of sense, as people think; no First could be of the sense-known order; for in things of sense the IDEA is but an image of the authentic, and every IDEA thus derivative and exiled traces back to that original and is no more than an image of it. Enneads V,8,

We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all – not as in a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of them merged into any other, each acting its own part at call quite independently, every conception coming out from the inner total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a closer unity, that the Intellectual-Principle is all Being in one total – and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a distinct power which, however, the total Intellectual-Principle includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This relation may be illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in one kernel; yet in that unit there is eye-principle, and there is hand-principle, each of which is revealed as a separate power by its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is IDEA and nothing else, idea identical with the generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher. This power is sometimes designated as Nature in the seed-life; its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as light from fire, it converts and shapes the matter of things, not by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but by bestowal of the IDEAs. Enneads V,8,

Not by its thinking God does God come to be; not by its thinking Movement does Movement arise. Hence it is an error to call the IDEAs intellections in the sense that, upon an intellectual act in this Principle, one such IDEA or another is made to exist or exists. No: the object of this intellection must exist before the intellective act (must be the very content not the creation of the Intellectual-Principle). How else could that Principle come to know it: certainly not (as an external) by luck or by haphazard search. Enneads V,8,

If, then, the Intellection is an act upon the inner content (of a perfect unity), that content is at once the IDEA (as object: eidos) and the IDEA itself (as concept: idea). Enneads V,8,

Being, therefore, and the Intellectual-Principle are one Nature: the Beings, and the Act of that which is, and the Intellectual-Principle thus constituted, all are one: and the resultant Intellections are the IDEA of Being and its shape and its act. Enneads V,8,

Given the Reason-Principle (the outgoing divine IDEA) of a certain living thing and the Matter to harbour this seed-principle, the living thing must come into being: in the same way once there exists – an intellective Nature, all powerful, and with nothing to check it – since nothing intervenes between it and that which is of a nature to receive it – inevitably the higher imprints form and the lower accepts, it. The recipient holds the IDEA in division, here man, there sun, while in the giver all remains in unity. Enneads V,8,

All, then, that is present in the sense realm as IDEA comes from the Supreme. But what is not present as IDEA, does not. Thus of things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not contained in the arts; lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reason-principle or is a marring of the achieved form by accident. To that Intellectual Kosmos belong qualities, accordant with Nature, and quantities; number and mass; origins and conditions; all actions and experiences not against nature; movement and repose, both the universals and the particulars: but There time is replaced by eternity and space by its intellectual equivalent, mutual inclusiveness. Enneads V,8,

It should however be added that if the IDEA of man exists in the Supreme, there must exist the IDEA of reasoning man and of man with his arts and crafts; such arts as are the offspring of intellect Must be There. Enneads V,8,

It must be observed that the IDEAs will be of universals; not of Socrates but of Man: though as to man we may enquire whether the individual may not also have place There. Under the heading of individuality there is to be considered the repetition of the same feature from man to man, the simian type, for example, and the aquiline: the aquiline and the simian must be taken to be differences in the IDEA of Man as there are different types of the animal: but Matter also has its effect in bringing about the degree of aquilinity. Similarly with difference of complexion, determined partly by the Reason-Principle, partly by Matter and by diversity of place. Enneads V,8,

But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their IDEA – whether there is an IDEA of filth and mud – it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those IDEAs the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the Soul which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these. Enneads V,8,

Everything exists forever, unfailing, involved by very existence in eternity. Individuals have their separate entities, but are at one in the (total) unity. The complex, so to speak, of them all, thus combined, is Intellect; and Intellect, holding all existence within itself, is a complete living being, and the essential IDEA of Living Being. In so far as Intellect submits to contemplation by its derivative, becoming an Intelligible, it gives that derivative the right also to be called “living being.” Enneads VI,2,

How can we so dispart Being? We cannot break Life into parts; if the total was Life, the fragment is not. But we do not thus sunder Intelligence, one intelligence in this man, another in that? No; such a fragment would not be Intelligence. But the Being of the individual? Once more, if the total thing is Being, then a fragment could not be. Are we told that in a body, a total of parts, every member is also a body? But here we are dividing not body but a particular quantity of body, each of those divisions being described as body in virtue of possessing the Form or IDEA that constitutes body; and this IDEA has no magnitude, is incapable of magnitude. Enneads VI,4,

The Intellectual Beings, thus, are multiple and one; in virtue of their infinite nature their unity is a multiplicity, many in one and one over many, a unit-plurality. They act as entire upon entire; even upon the partial thing they act as entire; but there is the difference that at first the partial accepts this working only partially though the entire enters later. Thus, when Man enters into human form there exists a particular man who, however, is still Man. From the one thing Man – man in the IDEA – material man has come to constitute many individual men: the one identical thing is present in multiplicity, in multi-impression, so to speak, from the one seal. Enneads VI,5,

We do not mean that the IDEA, locally separate, shows itself in Matter like a reflection in water; the Matter touches the IDEA at every point, though not in a physical contact, and, by dint of neighbourhood – nothing to keep them apart – is able to absorb thence all that lies within its capacity, the IDEA itself not penetrating, not approaching, the Matter, but remaining self-locked. Enneads VI,5,

We take it, then, that the IDEA, say of Fire – for we had best deal with Matter as underlying the elements – is not in the Matter. The IDEAl Fire, then, remaining apart, produces the form of fire throughout the entire enfired mass. Now let us suppose – and the same method will apply to all the so-called elements – that this Fire in its first material manifestation is a multiple mass. That single Fire is seen producing an image of itself in all the sensible fires; yet it is not spatially separate; it does not, then, produce that image in the manner of our visible light; for in that case all this sensible fire, supposing that it were a whole of parts (as the analogy would necessitate), must have generated spatial positions out of itself, since the IDEA or Form remains in a non-spatial world; for a principle thus pluralized must first have departed from its own character in order to be present in that many and participate many times in the one same Form. Enneads VI,5,

The IDEA, impartible, gives nothing of itself to the Matter; its unbreaking unity, however, does not prevent it shaping that multiple by its own unity and being present to the entirety of the multiple, bringing it to pattern not by acting part upon part but by presence entire to the object entire. It would be absurd to introduce a multitude of IDEAs of Fire, each several fire being shaped by a particular idea; the IDEAs of fire would be infinite. Besides, how would these resultant fires be distinct, when fire is a continuous unity? and if we apply yet another fire to certain matter and produce a greater fire, then the same IDEA must be allowed to have functioned in the same way in the new matter as in the old; obviously there is no other IDEA. Enneads VI,5,

But how explain the unlimited? It would seem that either it is among beings and so is limited or, if unlimited, is not among beings but, at best, among things of process such as Time. To be brought to limit it must be unlimited; not the limited but the unlimited is the subject of limitation, since between the limited and the unlimited there is no intermediate to accept the principle of limitation. The unlimited recoils by very nature from the IDEA of limit, though it may be caught and held by it from without: – the recoil, of course, is not from one place to another; the limitless can have nothing to do with place which arises only with the limiting of the unlimited. Hence what is known as the flux of the unlimited is not to be understood as local change; nor does any other sort of recognisable motion belong to it in itself; therefore the limitless cannot move: neither can it be at rest: in what, since all place is later? Its movement means little more than that it is not fixed in rest. Enneads VI,6,

If, on the contrary, Number is a direct production of the Intellectual-Principle (an IDEA in itself), there is the question whether it preceded or followed the other IDEAs. Enneads VI,6,

As a beginning, what is the origin of the IDEAs in general? It is not that the thinking principle thought of each IDEA and by that act of thought procured their several existences; not because Justice and Movement were thus thought did they come to be; that would imply that while the thought is later than the thing – the concept of Justice must be later than Justice itself – yet the thought precedes what, as founded on the thinking, owes its existence to it. Besides, if justice is only a certain definite thought we have the absurdity that Justice is nothing more than a definition of Justice. Thinking of Justice or Movement is but grasping their nature; this would mean grasping the non-existent, an impossibility. Enneads VI,6,

Even here the thing and its cause are often identical – an eclipse furnishes an example – what then is there to prevent other things too being identical with their cause and this cause being the essence of the thing? It must be so; and by this search after the cause the thing’s essence is reached, for the essence of a thing is its cause. I am not here saying that the informing IDEA is the cause of the thing – though this is true – but that the IDEA itself, unfolded, reveals the cause inherent in it. Enneads VI,7,

A thing of inactivity, even though alive, cannot include its own cause; but where could a Forming-IDEA, a member of the Intellectual-Principle, turn in quest of its cause? We may be answered “In the Intellectual-Principle”; but the two are not distinct; the IDEA is the Intellectual-Principle; and if that Principle must contain the IDEAs complete, their cause must be contained in them. The Intellectual-Principle itself contains every cause of the things of its content; but these of its content are identically Intellectual-Principle, each of them Intellectual-Principle; none of them, thus, can lack its own cause; each springs into being carrying with it the reason of its being. No result of chance, each must rise complete with its cause; it is an integral and so includes the excellence bound up with the cause. This is how all participants in the IDEA are put into possession of their cause. Enneads VI,7,

Further, since nothing There is chance-sprung, and the multiplicity in each comprehends the entire content, then the cause of every member can be named; the cause was present from the beginning, inherent, not a cause but a fact of the being; or, rather, cause and manner of being were one. What could an IDEA have, as cause, over and above the Intellectual-Principle? It is a thought of that Principle and cannot, at that, be considered as anything but a perfect product. If it is thus perfect we cannot speak of anything in which it is lacking nor cite any reason for such lack. That thing must be present, and we can say why. The why is inherent, therefore, in the entity, that is to say in every thought and activity of the Intellectual-Principle. Take for example the IDEA of Man; Man entire is found to contribute to it; he is in that IDEA in all his fulness including everything that from the beginning belonged to Man. If Man were not complete There, so that there were something to be added to the IDEA, that additional must belong to a derivative; but Man exists from eternity and must therefore be complete; the man born is the derivative. Enneads VI,7,

But, at this, sense-perception – even in its particular modes – is involved in the IDEA by eternal necessity, in virtue of the completeness of the IDEA; Intellectual-Principle, as all-inclusive, contains in itself all by which we are brought, later, to recognise this perfection in its nature; the cause, There, was one total, all-inclusive; thus Man in the Intellectual was not purely intellect, sense-perception being an addition made upon his entry into birth: all this would seem to imply a tendance in that great Principle towards the lower, towards this sphere. Enneads VI,7,

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,

The very heavens, patently multiple, cannot be thought to disdain any form of life since this universe holds everything. Now how do these things come to be here? Does the higher realm contain all of the lower? All that has been shaped by Reason-Principle and conforms to IDEA. Enneads VI,7,

That Life, the various, the all-including, the primal and one, who can consider it without longing to be of it, disdaining all the other? All other life is darkness, petty and dim and poor; it is unclean and polluting the clean for if you do but look upon it you no longer see nor live this life which includes all living, in which there is nothing that does not live and live in a life of purity void of all that is ill. For evil is here where life is in copy and Intellect in copy; There is the archetype, that which is good in the very IDEA – we read – as holding The Good in the pure IDEA. That Archetype is good; Intellectual-Principle is good as holding its life by contemplation of the archetype; and it sees also as good the objects of its contemplation because it holds them in its act of contemplating the Principle of Good. But these objects come to it not as they are There but in accord with its own condition, for it is their source; they spring thence to be here, and Intellectual-Principle it is that has produced them by its vision There. In the very law, never, looking to That, could it fail of Intellectual Act; never, on the other hand, could it produce what is There; of itself it could not produce; Thence it must draw its power to bring forth, to teem with offspring of itself; from the Good it takes what itself did not possess. From that Unity came multiplicity to Intellectual-Principle; it could not sustain the power poured upon it and therefore broke it up; it turned that one power into variety so as to carry it piecemeal. Enneads VI,7,

But even there we are not to remain always, in that beauty of the multiple; we must make haste yet higher, above this heaven of ours and even that; leaving all else aside we ask in awe “Who produced that realm and how?” Everything There is a single IDEA in an individual impression and, informed by The Good, possesses the universal good transcendent over all. Each possessing that Being above, possesses also the total Living-Form in virtue of that transcendent life, possesses, no doubt, much else as well. Enneads VI,7,

But in what way is the content of Intellectual-Principle participant in good? Is it because each member of it is an IDEA or because of their beauty or how? Anything coming from The Good carries the image and type belonging to that original or deriving from it, as anything going back to warmth or sweetness carries the memory of those originals: Life entered into Intellectual-Principle from The Supreme, for its origin is in the Activity streaming Thence; Intellectual-Principle springs from the Supreme, and with it the beauty of the IDEAs; at once all these, Life, Intellectual-Principle, IDEA, must inevitably have goodness. Enneads VI,7,

But if in that higher Life there must be something from That, something which is the Authentic Life, we must admit that since nothing worthless can come Thence Life in itself is good; so too we must admit, in the case of Authentic Intellectual-Principle, that its Life because good derives from that First; thus it becomes clear that every IDEA is good and informed by the Good. The IDEAs must have something of good, whether as a common property or as a distinct attribution or as held in some distinct measure. Enneads VI,7,

Thus it is established that the particular IDEA contains in its essence something of good and thereby becomes a good thing; for Life we found to be good not in the bare being but in its derivation from the Authentic, the Supreme whence it sprung: and the same is true of Intellectual-Principle: we are forced therefore admit a certain identity. Enneads VI,7,

Are we to determine the good by the respective values of things? This is to make IDEA and Reason-Principle the test: all very well; but arrived at these, what explanation have we to give as to why IDEA and Reason-Principle themselves are good? In the lower, we recognise goodness – in its less perfect form – by comparison with what is poorer still; we are without a standard There where no evil exists, the Bests holding the field alone. Reason demands to know what constitutes goodness; those principles are good in their own nature and we are left in perplexity because cause and fact are identical: and even though we should state a cause, the doubt still remains until our reason claims its rights There. But we need not abandon the search; another path may lead to the light. Enneads VI,7,

Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and only some faint trace of it upon the dead, though the face yet retains all its fulness and symmetry? Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful, even though the others happen to be more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this because there is soul there, because there is more of the IDEA of The Good, because there is some glow of the light of The Good and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won over to goodness, and in the fullest measure stirred to life. Enneads VI,7,

And we must not overlook what some surly critic will surely bring up against us: What’s all this: you scatter praises here, there and everywhere: Life is good, Intellectual-Principle is good: and yet The Good is above them; how then can Intellectual-Principle itself be good? Or what do we gain by seeing the IDEAs themselves if we see only a particular IDEA and nothing else (nothing “substantial”)? If we are happy here we may be deceived into thinking life a good when it is merely pleasant; but suppose our lot unhappy, why should we speak of good? Is mere personal existence good? What profit is there in it? What is the advantage in existence over utter non-existence – unless goodness is to be founded upon our love of self? It is the deception rooted in the nature of things and our dread of dissolution that lead to all the “goods” of your positing. Enneads VI,7,

But what is that whose entry supplies every such need? Some IDEA, we maintain. There is a Form to which Matter aspires: to soul, moral excellence is this Form. 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,

The Intellectual-Principle is the less for seeing things as distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the multiple content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual shape; but, even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us still with the question how we are to envisage that which stands beyond this all-lovely, beyond this principle at once multiple and above multiplicity, the Supreme for which the soul hungers though unable to tell why such a being should stir its longing-reason, however, urging that This at last is the Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. Bring something under Form and present it so before the mind; immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers that while there exists the giver having shape to give – a giver that is shape, idea, an entirely measured thing – yet this is not alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own right but is a mingled thing. Shape and idea and measure will always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the Beyond-Beauty cannot be under measure and therefore cannot have admitted shape or be IDEA: the primal existent, The First, must be without Form; the beauty in it must be, simply, the Nature of the Intellectual Good. Enneads VI,7,

If Being is identical with Intellectual-Principle, even at that it is a manifold; all the more so when count is taken of the IDEAl Forms in it; for the IDEA, particular or collective, is, after all, a numerable agglomeration whose unity is that of a kosmos. Enneads VI,8,