The greater and most valuable among them have an important operation over a wide range: their contribution towards the life of the whole consists in acting, not in being acted upon; others, but feebly equipped for action, are almost wholly PASSIVE; there is an intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a principle of productivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many spheres or ways and yet serve also by their passivity. 667 Enneads: II III. 13
But Matter also is an incorporeal, though after a mode of its own; we must examine, therefore, how this stands, whether it is PASSIVE, as is commonly held, a thing that can be twisted to every shape and Kind, or whether it too must be considered imPASSIVE and in what sense and fashion so. But in engaging this question and defining the nature of matter we must correct certain prevailing errors about the nature of the Authentic Existent, about Essence, about Being. 1445 Enneads: III VI. 6
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. 1980 Enneads: IV III. 26
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. 2315 Enneads: IV VI. 2
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. 2336 Enneads: IV VI. 3
But the nature of this contained potentiality would have to be explained: it cannot be that of Matter, a receptivity, for thus the Source becomes PASSIVE – the very negation of production. 2732 Enneads: V III. 15
Above all, has Relation – for example, that of right and left, double and half – any actuality? Has it, perhaps, actuality in some cases only, as for instance in what is termed “posterior” but not in what is termed “prior”? Or is its actuality in no case conceivable? What meaning, then, are we to attach to double and half and all other cases of less and more; to habit and disposition, reclining, sitting, standing; to father, son, master, slave; to like, unlike, equal, unequal; to active and PASSIVE, measure and measured; or again to knowledge and sensation, as related respectively to the knowable and the sensible? Knowledge, indeed, may be supposed to entail in relation to the known object some actual entity corresponding to that object’s Ideal Form, and similarly with sensation as related to the sense-object. The active will perform some constant function in relation to the PASSIVE, as will the measure in relation to the measured. 3072 Enneads: VI I. 6
What then will be the common ground in habit, disposition, PASSIVE quality, figure, shape? In light, thick and lean? If we hold this common ground to be a power adapting itself to the forms of habits, dispositions and physical capacities, a power which gives the possessor whatever capacities he has, we have no plausible explanation of incapacities. Besides, how are figure and the shape of a given thing to be regarded as a power? Moreover, at this, Being will have no power qua Being but only when Quality has been added to it; and the activities of those substances which are activities in the highest degree, will be traceable to Quality, although they are autonomous and owe their essential character to powers wholly their own! 3100 Enneads: VI I. 10
In the first place, Quality is not merely a question of action and passion, involving a simple distinction between the potentially active (quality) and the PASSIVE: health, disposition and habit, disease, strength and weakness are also classed as qualities. It follows that the common ground is not power, but something we have still to seek. 3105 Enneads: VI I. 10
It will be objected that greater and less are due to participation in greatness and smallness; and it might be inferred that a thing is active or PASSIVE by participation in activity or passivity. 3128 Enneads: VI I. 12
Suppose however Passion to be a different motion from Action: how then does its modification of the patient object change that patient’s character without the agent being affected by the patient? For obviously an agent cannot be PASSIVE to the operation it performs upon another. Can it be that the fact of motion existing elsewhere creates the Passion, which was not Passion in the agent? If the whiteness of the swan, produced by its Reason-Principle, is given at its birth, are we to affirm Passion of the swan on its passing into being? If, on the contrary, the swan grows white after birth, and if there is a cause of that growth and the corresponding result, are we to say that the growth is a Passion? Or must we confine Passion to purely qualitative change? One thing confers beauty and another takes it: is that which takes beauty to be regarded as patient? If then the source of beauty – tin, suppose – should deteriorate or actually disappear, while the recipient – copper – improves, are we to think of the copper as PASSIVE and the tin active? Take the learner: how can he be regarded as PASSIVE, seeing that the Act of the agent passes into him (and becomes his Act)? How can the Act, necessarily a simple entity, be both Act and Passion? No doubt the Act is not in itself a Passion; nonetheless, the learner coming to possess it will be a patient by the fact of his appropriation of an experience from outside: he will not, of course, be a patient in the sense of having himself performed no Act; learning – like seeing – is not analogous to being struck, since it involves the acts of apprehension and recognition. 3170 Enneads: VI I. 20
On other grounds also, it is indefensible not to have reserved the high place for the true first-principle of things but to have set up in its stead the formless, PASSIVE and lifeless, the irrational, dark and indeterminate, and to have made this the source of Being. In this theory God is introduced merely for the sake of appearance: deriving existence from Matter he is a composite, a derivative, or, worse, a mere state of Matter. 3208 Enneads: VI I. 27
(With regard to PASSIVE qualities🙂 3515 Enneads: VI III. 19
What, then, is the ground for denying that becoming is a motion? The fact, perhaps, that what comes to be does not yet exist, whereas Motion has no dealings with the non-existent. But, on that ground, becoming will not be a change either. If however it be alleged that becoming is merely a type of alteration or growth since it takes place when things alter and grow, the antecedents of becoming are being confused with becoming itself. Yet becoming, entailing as it does these antecedents, must necessarily be a distinct species; for the event and process of becoming cannot be identified with merely PASSIVE alteration, like turning hot or white: it is possible for the antecedents to take place without becoming as such being accomplished, except in so far as the actual alteration (implied in the antecedents) has “come to be”; where, however, an animal or a vegetal life is concerned, becoming (or birth) takes place only upon its acquisition of a Form. 3535 Enneads: VI III. 21
But how can it be a Form in cases where the motion leads to deterioration, or is purely PASSIVE? Motion, we may suggest, is like the heat of the sun causing some things to grow and withering others. In so far as Motion is a common property, it is identical in both conditions; its apparent difference is due to the objects moved. 3540 Enneads: VI III. 22
A principle attached to body might be exposed, at least by way of accident, to such partition and so be definable as PASSIVE and partible in view of its close relationship with the body of which it is so to speak a state or a Form; but that which is not inbound with body, which on the contrary body must seek, will of necessity go utterly free of every bodily modification and especially of the very possibility of partition which is entirely a phenomenon of body, belonging to its very essence. As partibility goes with body, so impartibility with the bodiless: what partition is possible where there is no magnitude? If a thing of magnitude participates to any degree in what has no magnitude, it must be by a participation without division; divisibility implies magnitude. 3627 Enneads: VI IV. 8