If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We will be told “By some partless part.” But, at this, the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded – and it cannot be denied – that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the IDEAL FORMS in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the bodies (in which these forms appear) and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them. Enneads IV,7,8
Anyone not of the strength to lay hold of the first soul, that possessing pure intellection, must grasp that which has to do with our ordinary thinking and thence ascend: if even this prove too hard, let him turn to account the sensitive phase which carries the IDEAL FORMS of the less fine degree, that phase which, too, with its powers, is immaterial and lies just within the realm of Ideal-principles. Enneads V,3,9
Admitted, then – it will be said – for the nobler forms of life; but how can the divine contain the mean, the unreasoning? The mean is the unreasoning, since value depends upon reason and the worth of the intellective implies worthlessness where intellection is lacking. Yet how can there be question of the unreasoning or unintellective when all particulars exist in the divine and come forth from it? In taking up the refutation of these objections, we must insist upon the consideration that neither man nor animals here can be thought of as identical with the counterparts in the higher realm; those IDEAL FORMS must be taken in a larger way. And again the reasoning thing is not of that realm: here the reasoning, There the pre-reasoning. Enneads VI,7,9