The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of IMPRESSIONS printed upon the Animate by sensation: these IMPRESSIONS are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other (of that in the Soul) which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms. Enneads I,1,
Now this (the required faint image of Being) might be the sensible universe with all the IMPRESSIONS it engenders, or it might be something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense, or again, it might be the source of the sense-world or something of the same order entering into it to complete it. Enneads I,8,
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain – and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to IMPRESSIONS. Enneads II,3,
For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a thing whose nature is just a sum of IMPRESSIONS from outside – as if it, alone, of all that exists, had no native character. Enneads II,3,
And note that we do not appeal to stored-up IMPRESSIONS to account for memory: we think of the mind awakening its powers in such a way as to possess something not present to it. Enneads III,6,
To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of IMPRESSIONS on sealing-wax; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the Soul – as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness are importations into body – but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries. Enneads III,6,
If the particular soul is a part of the All-Soul only in the sense that this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing, multi-present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul that is a part against a soul that is an all – especially where an identical power is present. Even difference of function, as in eyes and ears, cannot warrant the assertion of distinct parts concerned in each separate act – with other parts again making allotment of faculty – all is met by the notion of one identical thing, but a thing in which a distinct power operates in each separate function. All the powers are present either in seeing or in hearing; the difference in impression received is due to the difference in the organs concerned; all the varying IMPRESSIONS are our various responses to Ideal-forms that can be taken in a variety of modes. Enneads IV,3,
A further proof (of the unity of Soul) is that perception demands a common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these IMPRESSIONS must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all that is said and done. Enneads IV,3,
Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of soul and body, sensation must be of that double nature. Hence it is classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the body to the tool employed: the body is passive and menial; the soul is active, reading such IMPRESSIONS as are made upon the body or discerned by means of the body, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as the result of the bodily experiences. Enneads IV,3,
It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body, it may reasonably be thought capable of accepting such IMPRESSIONS, and in such a manner as to retain them (thus in some sense possessing memory). Enneads IV,3,
But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes (are not of corporeal nature at all); there is no resemblance to seal IMPRESSIONS, no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust (as of the seal) nor (the acceptance) as in the wax: the process is entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense; and what kind of resistance (or other physical action) can be affirmed in matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or bodily quality as a means? Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know. Enneads IV,3,
But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all that the better sort of man may reasonably remember? All these, the one (the lower man) retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from which, however, the best of such IMPRESSIONS pass over to the graver soul in the degree in which the two are in communication. Enneads IV,3,
If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in abeyance: they could not be in the nature of IMPRESSIONS permanently adopted – a notion which would entail absurdities – but were no more than a potentiality realized after return. When that energy of the Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it sees what it saw in the earlier state before it revisited the Supreme. Enneads IV,4,
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,
If our perception is to depend upon previous IMPRESSIONS made upon the air, then we have no direct knowledge of the object of vision, but know it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are aware of warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the warmed intervening air. That is a matter of contact; but sight is not produced by contact: the application of an object to the eye would not produce sight; what is required is the illumination of the intervening medium; for the air in itself is a dark substance: If it were not for this dark substance there would probably be no reason for the existence of light: the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires that it be overcome by light. Perhaps also the reason why an object brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a double obscuration, its own and that of the air. Enneads IV,5,
For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the transmission of IMPRESSIONS of any kind made upon the air, we have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the stars and their very shapes. Enneads IV,5,
Besides, the very condition of the mind being able to exercise discrimination upon what it is to see and hear is not, of course, that these objects be equally IMPRESSIONS made upon it; on the contrary, there must be no IMPRESSIONS, nothing to which the mind is passive; there can be only acts of that in which the objects become known. Enneads IV,6,
In taste and smell also we distinguish between the IMPRESSIONS received and the sensations and judgements; these last are mental acts, and belong to an order apart from the experiences upon which they are exercised. Enneads IV,6,
And, once it is admitted that sensations are not IMPRESSIONS, the memory of a sensation cannot consist in the retention of an impression that was never made. Enneads IV,6,
Yet there could be nothing to prevent men of superior faculty from reading IMPRESSIONS on the mind; why should one thus gifted be incapable of what would be no more than a passive taking and holding? That memory is a power of the Soul (not a capacity for taking imprint) is established at a stroke by the consideration that the soul is without magnitude. Enneads IV,6,
Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the added material must be either soul or soulless body: if soul, whence and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined (to the soul which by hypothesis is body); if soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the stored IMPRESSIONS and notions of that initial soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up before? Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of our material mass? And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul? Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body, characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being; soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a quality quite independent of quantity. Enneads IV,7,
If, at this, the impression is like one made in liquids – as would be reasonable – it will be confused and wavering as upon water, and there can be no memory. If the IMPRESSIONS are permanent, then either no fresh ones can be stamped upon the occupied ground – and there can be no change of sensations – or, others being made, the former will be obliterated; and all record of the past is done away with. Enneads IV,7,
Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues – moral excellence (Sophrosyne), justice, courage and so forth? All these could be only some kind of rarefied body (pneuma), or blood in some form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of IMPRESSIONS received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough with the idea of rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft around it: what could it care about a just distribution? Then consider the objects of the soul’s contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul’s contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux. Enneads IV,7,
Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the IMPRESSIONS of absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images, and that would mean that it could not take in fresh IMPRESSIONS; the perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from body; this also is no inseparable Entelechy. Enneads IV,7,
The reasoning-principle in the Soul acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the IMPRESSIONS, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming IMPRESSIONS (those of sense) and adapts them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before – the act which may be described as the soul’s Reminiscence. Enneads V,3,
We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the soul has equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the IMPRESSIONS, superior and inferior, which it receives. Enneads V,3,
Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive IMPRESSIONS, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not (fully realised) Intellectual-Principle; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of the multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold quality with which it has of its own act invested the simplex. Enneads V,3,
Next, the intellections would be IMPRESSIONS, that is to say not native act but violence from without: now how is such impressing possible and what shape could the IMPRESSIONS bear? Intellection, again, becomes at this a mere handling of the external, exactly like sense-perception. What then distinguishes it unless that it deals with objects of less extension? And what certitude can it have that its knowledge is true? Or what enables it to pronounce that the object is good, beautiful, or just, when each of these ideas is to stand apart from itself? The very principles of judgement, by which it must be guided, would be (as Ideas) excluded: with objects and canons alike outside it, so is truth. Enneads V,5,
Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects (the Ideas) outside of the Intellectual-Principle, treating them as IMPRESSIONS of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and so make its objects unknowable and non-existent and in the end annul the Intellectual-Principle itself. We must provide for knowledge and for truth; we must secure reality; being must become knowable essentially and not merely in that knowledge of quality which could give us a mere image or vestige of the reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, absorption. Enneads V,5,
To Real Being we go back, all that we have and are; to that we return as from that we came. Of what is There we have direct knowledge, not images or even IMPRESSIONS; and to know without image is to be; by our part in true knowledge we are those Beings; we do not need to bring them down into ourselves, for we are There among them. Since not only ourselves but all other things also are those Beings, we all are they; we are they while we are also one with all: therefore we and all things are one. Enneads VI,5,