Principle

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct PRINCIPLE, the Animate; and in this PRINCIPLE are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate. Enneads I,1,

But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To what Divine Being, then, would our Likeness be? To the Being – must we not think? – in Which, above all, such excellence seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the PRINCIPLE ruling within it, the PRINCIPLE endowed with a wisdom most wonderful. What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should become Like to its ruler? But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this Divine-Being all the virtues find place – Moral-Balance (Sophrosyne), for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is alien; where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the desire of possession. Enneads I,2,

But is that conceivable? When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be something to warm the source of the warmth? If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that fire? Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an essential constituent of the PRINCIPLE from which the Soul attaining Likeness absorbs it. Enneads I,2,

Against the illustration drawn from the fire, it may be urged that the analogy would make that PRINCIPLE identical with virtue, whereas we hold it to be something higher. Enneads I,2,

So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what PRINCIPLE? Identity with what God? The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion – anger, desire and the like, with grief and its kin – and in what degree the disengagement from the body is possible. Enneads I,2,

The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain – and then either come to a stand or pass beyond – has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One<One PRINCIPLE underlying all, a PRINCIPLE apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social system may be pointed out to him – a first training this in the loveliness of the immaterial – he must learn to recognise the beauty in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms must be brought under the one<one principle by the explanation of their origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way. Enneads I,3,

In sum we may safely gather that while the Intellective-Act may be attended by the Imaging PRINCIPLE, it is not to be confounded with it. Enneads I,4,

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul? Is there some One PRINCIPLE from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a PRINCIPLE be? Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue. Enneads I,6,

Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the PRINCIPLE that bestows beauty on material things. Enneads I,6,

Undoubtedly this PRINCIPLE exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it. Enneads I,6,

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary but are determined by the PRINCIPLE whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being. Enneads I,6,

We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the PRINCIPLE contrary to Existence: and the Ugly is also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil. Enneads I,6,

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and PRINCIPLE of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There. Enneads I,6,

With Soul it is different; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and through that PRINCIPLE is of the nature of good; it will actually possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, since this follows immediately upon the Good. Enneads I,7,

All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The Good is beyond-beautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in the Intellectual-Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a PRINCIPLE wholly unlike what is known as Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is nourished on the propositions of logic, is skilled in following discussions, works by reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of Being also by the steps of logical process, having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining empty, all Intelligence though it be, until it has put itself to school. Enneads I,8,

What will this be? That Kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements and limits, that which has no trace of good by any title of its own, but (at best) takes order and grace from some PRINCIPLE outside itself, a mere image as regards Absolute-Being but the Authentic Essence of Evil – in so far as Evil can have Authentic Being. In such a Kind, Reason recognizes the Primal Evil, Evil Absolute. Enneads I,8,

But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul’s evil has its source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause – and at once the PRINCIPLE of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to Matter. Enneads I,8,

But why does the existence of the PRINCIPLE of Good necessarily comport the existence of a PRINCIPLE of Evil? Is it because the All necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form. Enneads I,8,

If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this PRINCIPLE must be demonstrated from the treatises “On Matter” where the question is copiously treated. Enneads I,8,

We have a parallel in our earth, constant from eternity to pattern and to mass; the air, too, never fails; and there is always water: all the changes of these elements leave unchanged the PRINCIPLE of the total living thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a ceaseless shifting of particles – and that with outgoing loss – and yet the individual persists for a long time: where there is no question of an outside region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as against the identity and endless duration of the living thing. Enneads: II I

But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our present problem. We are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system exposed to any such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration corresponding to nourishment; or do its members, once set in their due places, suffer no loss of substance, permanent by Kind? Does it consist of fire only, or is it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and carried in the circuit by the dominant PRINCIPLE? Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars. Enneads: II I

A soul, then, of the minor degree – reproducing, indeed, that of the Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as it must exercise its creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region – the substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be of strength to last for ever; the material constituents are not as firmly held and controlled as if they were ruled immediately by a PRINCIPLE of higher potency. Enneads: II I

In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to ensure their permanence – or to produce their circular movement, for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line; on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here represent a slipping-away from the being (a phenomenon not incident to the celestial sphere) and take place at the dictate of a PRINCIPLE not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm. Enneads: II I

Thus each entity takes its origin from one PRINCIPLE and, therefore, while executing its own function, works in with every other member of that All from which its distinct task has by no means cut it off: each performs its act, each receives something from the others, every one at its own moment bringing its touch of sweet or bitter. And there is nothing undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process: all is one scheme of differentiation, starting from the Firsts and working itself out in a continuous progression of Kinds. Enneads II,3,

Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own; alike in its direct course and in its divagation it is the cause of all by its possession of the Thought of the FirsFirst PRINCIPLE: thus a Law of Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise, would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is guided as much by the orderliness as by the power of the controlling force. And in this order the stars, as being no minor members of the heavenly system, are co-operators contributing at once to its stately beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power extends to the entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to what they patently do. Enneads II,3,

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,

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled – the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body – for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that PRINCIPLE which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It – unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted. Enneads II,3,

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,

An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not complete – if it were we would have a PRINCIPLE of Being wrecked in Non-being – nor does an engendered thing pass from utter non-being into Being: what happens is that a new form takes the place of an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of the incoming entity. 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,

It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex, one distinct thing in its nature; only so can it be void of all quality. The PRINCIPLE which gives it form gives this as something alien: so with magnitude and all really-existent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed a magnitude of its own, the PRINCIPLE giving it form would be at the mercy of that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within the limit of the Matter’s capacity: to imagine that Will keeping step with its material is fantastic. Enneads II,4,

Now all that is Number and Reason-PRINCIPLE is outside of boundlessness: these bestow bound and settlement and order in general upon all else: neither anything that has been brought under order nor any Order-Absolute is needed to bring them under order. The thing that has to be brought under order (e.g., Matter) is other than the Ordering PRINCIPLE which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-PRINCIPLE. Therefore, necessarily, the thing to be brought under order and to definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking delimitation. Enneads II,4,

Then Matter is simply Alienism (the PRINCIPLE of Difference)? No: it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-PRINCIPLEs. So understood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence; for it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing in opposition to the things that exist in Reason. Enneads II,4,

But if this be the significance of potentiality, may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be? Is the Bronze a power towards a statue? Not in the sense of an effectively productive force: such a power could not be called a potentiality. Of course Potentiality may be a power, as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing which may be brought into actualization but to Actuality itself (the PRINCIPLE or Abstract in which potentiality and the power of realizing potentiality may be thought of as identical): but it is better, as more conducive to clarity, to use “Potentiality” in regard to the process of Actualization and “Power” in regard to the PRINCIPLE, Actuality. Enneads: II V.

There is in the Intellectual PRINCIPLE no progression from some power capable of intellection to the Actuality of intellection: such a progression would send us in search of a Prior PRINCIPLE not progressing from Power to Act; there all stands ever realized. Potentiality requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it to the actualization which otherwise cannot be; but what possesses, of itself, identity unchangeable for ever is an actualization: all the Firsts then are actualizations, simply because eternally and of themselves they possess all that is necessary to their completion. Enneads: II V.

Then, everything, in the intellectual is in actualization and so all There is Actuality? Why not? If that Nature is rightly said to be “Sleepless,” and to be Life and the noblest mode of Life, the noblest Activities must be there; all then is actualization there, everything is an Actuality, for everything is a Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life, in the true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE. Enneads: II V.

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.

We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the PRINCIPLE, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal – for the secondary can never be simplex – that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity. Enneads: II VIII.

Now the same Nature belongs to the PRINCIPLE we know as The One. just as the goodness of The Good is essential and not the outgrowth of some prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential. Enneads: II VIII.

We need not, then, go seeking any other PRINCIPLEs; this – the One and the Good – is our First; next to it follows the Intellectual PRINCIPLE, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. Such is the order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and no fewer. Enneads: II VIII.

They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the PRINCIPLE in Act by a PRINCIPLE in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of immaterial beings whose existence is in Act – even in lower forms no such division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual PRINCIPLE as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the others? No: the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement – towards it or within it – we are in the realm of the Soul’s operation: such act is a Reason-PRINCIPLE emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate PRINCIPLE to stand between the two. Enneads: II VIII.

Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope: given powers that have no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic Existences, how imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them? It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another: without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE an Intellective PRINCIPLE, nor would Soul itself be what it is: the law is, “some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary.” Enneads: II VIII.

Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal PRINCIPLE, though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls – yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die. Enneads: II VIII.

Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe – though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating PRINCIPLE – and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato. Enneads: II VIII.

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis – which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature – and to recognize Soul as the third PRINCIPLE, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system – an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul’s need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past. Enneads: II VIII.

But what of murder? What of the feebleness that brings men under slavery to the passions? Is it any wonder that there should be failing and error, not in the highest, the intellectual, PRINCIPLE but in Souls that are like undeveloped children? And is not life justified even so if it is a training ground with its victors and its vanquished? You are wronged; need that trouble an immortal? You are put to death; you have attained your desire. And from the moment your citizenship of the world becomes irksome you are not bound to it. Enneads: II VIII.

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the PRINCIPLE of their Being. Enneads: II VIII.

The School that erects other material forces into universal causes is met by the same reasoning: we say that while these can warm us and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of nothing that is done in the sphere of mind or soul: all this must be traceable to quite another kind of PRINCIPLE. Enneads: III I

None the less, in spite of physical resemblance and similar environment, we observe the greatest difference in temperament and in ideas: this side of the human being, then, derives from some quite other PRINCIPLE (than any external causation or destiny). A further confirmation is found in the efforts we make to correct both bodily constitution and mental aspirations. Enneads: III I

It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-PRINCIPLE alleged to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon – a PRINCIPLE which, acting through seminal Reason-Forms – Logoi Spermatikoi – elaborates all that exists and happens. Enneads: III I

What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury? Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other PRINCIPLE, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual: this, no mean PRINCIPLE, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would hold rank in a series. Enneads: III I

But when our Soul holds to its Reason-PRINCIPLE, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as our doing, for they have no other source; they are the issue of the unmingled Soul, a PRINCIPLE that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus. Enneads: III I

The relationship may be presented thus: The authentic and primal Kosmos is the Being of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE and of the Veritable Existent. This contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and even its parts bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual is not severed from the entire. In this Nature inheres all life and all intellect, a life living and having intellection as one act within a unity: every part that it gives forth is a whole; all its content is its very own, for there is here no separation of thing from thing, no part standing in isolated existence estranged from the rest, and therefore nowhere is there any wronging of any other, any opposition. Everywhere one and complete, it is at rest throughout and shows difference at no point; it does not make over any of its content into any new form; there can be no reason for changing what is everywhere perfect. Enneads III,2,

The Intellectual PRINCIPLE, then, in its unperturbed serenity has brought the universe into being, by communicating from its own store to Matter: and this gift is the Reason-Form flowing from it. For the Emanation of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE is Reason, an emanation unfailing as long as the Intellectual PRINCIPLE continues to have place among beings. Enneads III,2,

So from this, the One Intellectual PRINCIPLE, and the Reason-Form emanating from it, our Universe rises and develops part, and inevitably are formed groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups discordant and combative; sometimes of choice and sometimes incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering proceeds by destruction. Enneads III,2,

Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act; each utters its own voice, but all is brought into accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the ruling Reason-PRINCIPLE. This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason, like the Supernal, but participant in Intelligence and Reason: it stands in need of the harmonizing because it is the meeting ground of Necessity and divine Reason-Necessity pulling towards the lower, towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the Intellectual PRINCIPLE remains sovereign over it. Enneads III,2,

Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies under an Intellectual PRINCIPLE whose power has touched every existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of this sphere is just. Enneads III,2,

Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us powerless: if the universe were something outside and apart from us it would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their part, no man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to their intention. But, as things are, efficient act does come from men: given the starting PRINCIPLE, the secondary line, no doubt, is inevitably completed; but each and every principle contributes towards the sequence. Now Men are PRINCIPLEs, or, at least, they are moved by their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature is a PRINCIPLE, a freely acting cause. Enneads III,2,

Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the Reason-PRINCIPLE applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter, retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from its Prior, the Intellectual PRINCIPLE – then, this its product, so produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the Reason-PRINCIPLE could not be a thing of entire identity or even of closely compact diversity; and the mode in which it is here manifested is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each single thing in some distinctive way. Enneads III,2,

The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in keeping with the Intellectual PRINCIPLE. True, no reasoning went to its creation, but it so stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder – since no reasoning could be able to make it otherwise – at the spectacle before it, a product which, even in the Kinds of the partial and particular Sphere, displays the Divine Intelligence to a degree in which no arranging by reason could express it. Every one of the ceaselessly recurrent types of being manifests a creating Reason-PRINCIPLE above all censure. No fault is to be found unless on the assumption that everything ought to come into being with all the perfection of those that have never known such a coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of the Intellectual realm and things of the realm of sense must remain one unbroken identity for ever. Enneads III,2,

This Reason-PRINCIPLE, then – let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth – this Logos is not the Intellectual PRINCIPLE unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from the pure Soul alone; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the Intellectual PRINCIPLE and the Soul – the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual PRINCIPLE engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a certain measure of Reason. Enneads III,2,

Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of Reason-PRINCIPLEs which, by the fact that they are PRINCIPLEs of harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more comprehensive PRINCIPLE, greater than they and including them as its parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we find contraries – white and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless, reasoning and unreasoning – but all these elements are members of one living body, their sum-total; the Universe is a self-accordant entity, its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation of a Reason-PRINCIPLE. That one Reason-PRINCIPLE, then, must be the unification of conflicting Reason-PRINCIPLEs whose very opposition is the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being. Enneads III,2,

And indeed, if it were not multiple, it could not be a Universal PRINCIPLE, it could not even be at all a Reason-PRINCIPLE; in the fact of its being a Reason-PRINCIPLE is contained the fact of interior difference. Now the maximum of difference is contrariety; admitting that this differentiation exists and creates, it will create difference in the greatest and not in the least degree; in other words, the Reason-PRINCIPLE, bringing about differentiation to the uttermost degree, will of necessity create contrarieties: it will be complete only by producing itself not in merely diverse things but in contrary things. Enneads III,2,

No doubt all are members of this PRINCIPLE but one is a good man, another is bad – the larger class, this – and it goes as in a play; the poet while he gives each actor a part is also using them as they are in their own persons: he does not himself rank the men as leading actor, second, third; he simply gives suitable words to each, and by that assignment fixes each man’s standing. Enneads III,2,

As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a Soul is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphazard but always under a Reason: it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to it, attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole PRINCIPLE of the piece: then it speaks out its business, exhibiting at the same time all that a Soul can express of its own quality, as a singer in a song. A voice, a bearing, naturally fine or vulgar, may increase the charm of a piece; on the other hand, an actor with his ugly voice may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the drama stands as good a work as ever: the dramatist, taking the action which a sound criticism suggests, disgraces one, taking his part from him, with perfect justice: another man he promotes to more serious roles or to any more important play he may have, while the first is cast for whatever minor work there may be. Enneads III,2,

But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dignity: they act in a vaster place than any stage: the Author has made them masters of all this world; they have a wide choice of place; they themselves determine the honour or discredit in which they are agents since their place and part are in keeping with their quality: they therefore fit into the Reason-PRINCIPLE of the Universe, each adjusted, most legitimately, to the appropriate environment, as every string of the lyre is set in the precisely right position, determined by the PRINCIPLE directing musical utterance, for the due production of the tones within its capacity. All is just and good in the Universe in which every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in the Darkness and in Tartarus the dreadful sounds whose utterance there is well. Enneads III,2,

Then the Reason-PRINCIPLE has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality? Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the Reason-PRINCIPLE of this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual PRINCIPLE, and this Intellectual PRINCIPLE is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-PRINCIPLE constituting a living being, but it is another Soul (a lesser phase), not that (the Supreme Soul) from which the Reason-PRINCIPLE itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel! Enneads III,3,

If man were all of one piece – I mean, if he were nothing more than a made thing, acting and acted upon according to a fixed nature – he could be no more subject to reproach and punishment than the mere animals. But as the scheme holds, man is singled out for condemnation when he does evil; and this with justice. For he is no mere thing made to rigid plan; his nature contains a PRINCIPLE apart and free. Enneads III,3,

Men possess, then, a distinctive PRINCIPLE: but not all men turn to account all that is in their Nature; there are men that live by one PRINCIPLE and men that live by another or, rather, by several others, the least noble. For all these PRINCIPLEs are present even when not acting upon the man – though we cannot think of them as lying idle; everything performs its function. Enneads III,3,

But surely not where they exercise no action? If they necessarily reside in all men, surely they must be operative in all – this PRINCIPLE of free action, especially. Enneads III,3,

First of all, this free PRINCIPLE is not an absolute possession of the animal Kinds and is not even an absolute possession to all men. Enneads III,3,

So this PRINCIPLE is not the only effective force in all men? There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it alone acts, giving its character to the life while all else is but Necessity (and therefore outside of blame). Enneads III,3,

For (in the case of an evil life) whether it is that the constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled paths or whether (the fault is mental or spiritual in that) the desires have gained control, we are compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum (something inferior to the highest principle in Man). We would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum (the responsible source of evil) must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-PRINCIPLE; it would appear that not the Reason-PRINCIPLE but Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free PRINCIPLE in man (which is a phase of the All Soul) the Substratum (the direct inferior to be moulded) is (not Matter but) the Reason-PRINCIPLE itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is sovereign within us. Enneads III,3,

Still, how did the inferior PRINCIPLE ever come into being, and how does the higher fall to it? Once more – not all things are Firsts; there are Secondaries and Tertiaries, of a nature inferior to that of their Priors; and a slight tilt is enough to determine the departure from the straight course. Further, the linking of any one being with any other amounts to a blending such as to produce a distinct entity, a compound of the two; it is not that the greater and prior suffers any diminution of its own nature; the lesser and secondary is such from its very beginning; it is in its own nature the lesser thing it becomes, and if it suffers the consequences, such suffering is merited: all our reasonings on these questions must take account of previous living as the source from which the present takes its rise. Enneads III,3,

There is, then a Providence, which permeates the Kosmos from first to last, not everywhere equal, as in a numerical distribution, but proportioned, differing, according to the grades of place – just as in some one animal, linked from first to last, each member has its own function, the nobler organ the higher activity while others successively concern the lower degrees of the life, each part acting of itself, and experiencing what belongs to its own nature and what comes from its relation with every other. Strike, and what is designed for utterance gives forth the appropriate volume of sound while other parts take the blow in silence but react in their own especial movement; the total of all the utterance and action and receptivity constitutes what we may call the personal voice, life and history of the living form. The parts, distinct in Kind, have distinct functions: the feet have their work and the eyes theirs; the understanding serves to one end, the Intellectual PRINCIPLE to another. Enneads III,3,

That which resumes all under a unity is a PRINCIPLE in which all things exist together and the single thing is All. From this PRINCIPLE, which remains internally unmoved, particular things push forth as from a single root which never itself emerges. They are a branching into part, into multiplicity, each single outgrowth bearing its trace of the common source. Thus, phase by phase, there in finally the production into this world; some things close still to the root, others widely separate in the continuous progression until we have, in our metaphor, bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one side all is one point of unbroken rest, on the other is the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit, all the things of process carrying ever within themselves the Reason-PRINCIPLEs of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in their own minor order and producing, if at all, only what is in strict gradation from themselves. Enneads III,3,

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit (equivalent in all men) as cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective PRINCIPLE (the diviner phase of the human Soul) which therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity. Enneads III,4,

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual PRINCIPLE as possessing for presiding spirit the Prior to the Intellectual PRINCIPLE: how then does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that he now is? The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth – though, before all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out towards its own. Enneads III,4,

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos who is no other than the Intellectual PRINCIPLE – must be the Soul at its divinest: unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever Above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter – and therefore mythically “the unmothered” justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within itself. Enneads III,5,

Any Nature springing directly from the Intellectual PRINCIPLE must be itself also a clean thing: it will derive a resistance of its own from its nearness to the Highest, for all its tendency, no less than its fixity, centres upon its author whose power is certainly sufficient to maintain it Above. Enneads III,5,

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual PRINCIPLE. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite (= the habra, delicate) indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul. Enneads III,5,

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls – to every Intellectual PRINCIPLE its companion Soul – we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the Soul of Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call Aphrodite’s star the star of Hera. Enneads III,5,

The Intellectual PRINCIPLE possesses Itself to satiety, but there is no “drunken” abandonment in this possession which brings nothing alien to it. But the Reason-PRINCIPLE – as its offspring, a later hypostasis – is already a separate Being and established in another Realm, and so is said to lie in the garden of this Zeus who is divine Mind; and this lying in the garden takes place at the moment when, in our way of speaking, Aphrodite enters the realm of Being. Enneads III,5,

Yes: but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the Soul must depend upon a previous virtue, that of each several faculty within itself; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the vice of the single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual presence of vice as they can be good only by the presence of virtue. It is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with ignorance in the reasoning faculty of the Soul; ignorance is not a positive thing; but in the presence of false judgements – the main cause of vice – must it not be admitted that something positive has entered into the Soul, something perverting the reasoning faculty? So, the initiative faculty; is it not, itself, altered as one varies between timidity and boldness? And the desiring faculty, similarly, as it runs wild or accepts control? Our teaching is that when the particular faculty is sound it performs the reasonable act of its essential nature, obeying the reasoning faculty in it which derives from the Intellectual PRINCIPLE and communicates to the rest. And this following of reason is not the acceptance of an imposed shape; it is like using the eyes; the Soul sees by its act, that of looking towards reason. The faculty of sight in the performance of its act is essentially what it was when it lay latent; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the relation that belongs to its essential character; it knows – that is, sees – without suffering any change: so, precisely, the reasoning phase of the Soul stands towards the Intellectual PRINCIPLE; this it sees by its very essence; this vision is its knowing faculty; it takes in no stamp, no impression; all that enters it is the object of vision – possessed, once more, without possession; it possesses by the fact of knowing but “without possession” in the sense that there is no incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the impression of the seal on sealing-wax. Enneads III,6,

Now Matter is the one field of the desiring faculty, as of the principles of nutrition growth and engendering, which are root and spring to desire and to every other affection known to this Ideal-form. No Ideal-form can be the victim of disturbance or be in any way affected: it remains in tranquillity; only the Matter associated with it can be affected by any state or experience induced by the movement which its mere presence suffices to set up. Thus the vegetal PRINCIPLE induces vegetal life but it does not, itself, pass through the processes of vegetation; it gives growth but it does not grow; in no movement which it originates is it moved with the motion it induces; it is in perfect repose, or, at least, its movement, really its act, is utterly different from what it causes elsewhere. Enneads III,6,

The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity; it operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently – and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not – but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the strings of his instrument, and once more, the Melodic PRINCIPLE itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody. Enneads III,6,

Hence its eternity, its identity, its utter irreceptivity and impermeability. If it took in anything, it must be taking in something outside itself, that is to say, Existence would at last include non-existence. But it must be Authentic Existence all through; it must, therefore, present itself equipped from its own stores with all that makes up Existence so that all stands together and all is one thing. The Existent (Real Being) must have thus much of determination: if it had not, then it could not be the source of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE and of Life which would be importations into it originating in the sphere of non-Being; and Real Being would be lifeless and mindless; but mindlessness and lifelessness are the characteristics of non-being and must belong to the lower order, to the outer borders of the existent; for Intellect and Life rise from the Beyond-Existence (the Indefinable Supreme) – though Itself has no need of them – and are conveyed from It into the Authentic Existent. Enneads III,6,

Matter is no Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-PRINCIPLE, no Reason-PRINCIPLE; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce? It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no tide to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and this in the sense not of movement (away from Being) or station (in Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is in itself invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based upon it; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw – not even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it failed to accept strength from the Intellectual PRINCIPLE, so absolute its lack of all Being. Enneads III,6,

Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-PRINCIPLE: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE or of the All-Soul, desires expansion (and thereby engenders secondaries): in its images – aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act – is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Image-making phase (of Intellect or All-Soul) runs forth into the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter – which never possesses a content – to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe. 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,

No: this PRINCIPLE comes from the source of Magnitude (= is primal “Magnitude”) and therefore Matter can have no extension, in which to harbour the Magnitude of the PRINCIPLE, but can take in only its reflected appearance. Enneads III,6,

The (Universal) Soul – containing the Ideal PRINCIPLEs of Real-Beings, and itself an Ideal PRINCIPLE – includes all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal PRINCIPLE of each particular entity is complete and self-contained: it, therefore, sees these principles of sensible things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active power may choose to send. In what is thus sent, from the Reason-PRINCIPLE in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained a degree of the partial object that is to be formed: in the image-making impulse within the Reason-PRINCIPLE there is already a step (towards the lower manifestation) or we may put it that the downward movement from the Reason-PRINCIPLE is a first form of the partial: utter absence of partition would mean no movement but (sterile) repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the Soul is: if it were so, it would belong to the Intellective Sphere. It must be all-recipient but not in that partless mode. It is to be the Place of all things, and it must therefore extend universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval: thus it will be a thing unconfined to any moment (of space or time) but laid out in submission to all that is to be. 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,

In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. (Body is modified: Mind knows) but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither PRINCIPLE is associated with it as friend or enemy. Enneads III,6,

This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the generative organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of things of sense is the Intellectual Reason PRINCIPLE: the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it in its representation as the All-Mother. Enneads III,6,

Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent – one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that possesses life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that is now receiving none and will never receive any – we have, with the statement of a perduring Being, the statement also of perdurance and of Eternity: perdurance is the corresponding state arising from the (divine) substratum and inherent in it; Eternity (the PRINCIPLE as distinguished from the property of everlastingness) is that substratum carrying that state in manifestation. Enneads III,7,

Now the PRINCIPLE this stated, all good and beauty, and everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its law; and it is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato – finely, and by no means inadvertently but with profound intention – wrote those words of his, “Eternity stable in Unity”; he wishes to convey that Eternity is not merely something circling on its traces into a final unity but has (instantaneous) Being about The One as the unchanging Life of the Authentic Existent. This is certainly what we have been seeking: this PRINCIPLE, at rest within rest with the One, is Eternity; possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute self-identical and none the less the active manifestation of an unchanging Life set towards the Divine and dwelling within It, untrue, therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side of Life – this will be Eternity (the Real-Being we have sought). Enneads III,7,

If, then, there is no first or last in this PRINCIPLE, if existence is its most authentic possession and its very self, and this in the sense that its existence is Essence or Life – then, once again, we meet here what we have been discussing, Eternity. Enneads III,7,

There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being; just as there is none between a philosopher and a true philosopher: the attribute “true” came into use because there arose what masqueraded as philosophy; and for similar reasons “everlasting” was adjoined to “Being,” and “Being” to “everlasting,” and we have (the tautology of) “Everlasting Being.” We must take this “Everlasting” as expressing no more than Authentic Being: it is merely a partial expression of a potency which ignores all interval or term and can look forward to nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The PRINCIPLE of which this is the statement will be the All-Existent, and, as being all, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one point complete and at some other lacking. 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,

We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-PRINCIPLE – Time – a certain expanse (a quantitative phase) of the Life of the Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other – a PRINCIPLE, then, whose Act is sequent. Enneads III,7,

Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end – and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the PRINCIPLE that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these – and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in mimicry and in image – we would scarcely find anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a light handling of our own ideas. Enneads III,8,

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,

All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a Soul in vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent – this PRINCIPLE (of Nature), itself also contemplative but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its prior – a Vision creates the Vision. Enneads III,8,

The Charioteer (the Leading PRINCIPLE of the Soul, in the Phaedrus Myth) gives the two horses (its two dissonant faculties) what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what made that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for – and that was vision, and an object of vision. 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,

The Intellectual-PRINCIPLE on the other hand was never merely the PRINCIPLE of an inviolable unity; it was a universal as well and, being so, was the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE of all things. Being, thus, all things and the PRINCIPLE of all, it must essentially include this part of itself (this element-of-plurality) which is universal and is all things: otherwise, it contains a part which is not Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: it will be a juxtaposition of non-Intellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass of things into the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE! Enneads III,8,

In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things in their precise forms and not merely in the agglomerate mass – for this would be to contain them imperfectly and inarticulately – it must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the PRINCIPLE of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect and of the Universe. Enneads III,8,

For the Universe is not a PRINCIPLE and Source: it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but the Source of plurality, since universally a begetting power is less complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has engendered the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE must be more simplex than the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE. Enneads III,8,

We may be told that this engendering PRINCIPLE is the One-and-All. Enneads III,8,

And what will such a PRINCIPLE essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE which is the primal Life and all Life. Enneads III,8,

This PRINCIPLE on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life – for that Manifestation of Life which is the Universe of things is not the First Activity; it is itself poured forth, so to speak, like water from a spring. Enneads III,8,

Or: think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree while yet it is the stationary PRINCIPLE of the whole, in no sense scattered over all that extent but, as it were, vested in the root: it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself, not manifold but the PRINCIPLE of that manifold life. Enneads III,8,

And this surprises no one: though it is in fact astonishing how all that varied vitality springs from the unvarying, and how that very manifoldness could not be unless before the multiplicity there were something all singleness; for, the PRINCIPLE is not broken into parts to make the total; on the contrary, such partition would destroy both; nothing would come into being if its cause, thus broken up, changed character. Enneads III,8,

Now when we reach a One – the stationary PRINCIPLE – in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All – we have in every case the most powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the Authentically Existent Beings – their PRINCIPLE and source and potentiality – shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being-nothing? Certainly this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source – its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it – not existence, not essence, not life – since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more – understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power. Enneads III,8,

No doubt the passage: (of the Timaeus) seems to imply tacitly that this planning PRINCIPLE is distinct from the other two: but the three – the Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE and this planning PRINCIPLE will, to others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the discrimination. Enneads III,8,

We have dealt with the first two; but the third – this PRINCIPLE which decides to work upon the objects (the Ideas) contemplated by the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE within the Essentially-Living, to create them, to establish them in their partial existence – what is this third? It is possible that in one aspect the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is the principle of partial existence, while in another aspect it is not. Enneads III,8,

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third PRINCIPLE and begins within the Third: for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division. Enneads III,8,

…. For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest PRINCIPLE and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first PRINCIPLEs of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme. Enneads III,8,

These Beings (the Reason-PRINCIPLEs of this sphere) are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual PRINCIPLE, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being. Enneads IV,3,

The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual PRINCIPLE down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens. Enneads IV,3,

For with the Intellectual or Supreme – considered as distinct from the One – there is already the power of harbouring that PRINCIPLE of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its superior. Enneads IV,4,

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that PRINCIPLE to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself. Enneads: V I

Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally an eternal being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor: what then are we to think of the All-Perfect but that it can produce nothing less than the very greatest that is later than itself. The greatest, later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans while the First has no need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it – the soul, for example, being an utterance and act of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE as that is an utterance and act of The One. But in soul the utterance is obscured, for soul is an image and must look to its own original: that PRINCIPLE, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation – thus becoming what it is – and has that vision not as from a distance but as the immediate next with nothing intervening, close to the One as Soul to it. Enneads: V I

We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to the scheme of things: There exists a PRINCIPLE which transcends Being; this is The One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the PRINCIPLE which is at once Being and the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE. Third comes the PRINCIPLE, Soul. Enneads: V I

Soul thus is nowhere but in the PRINCIPLE which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere. Enneads V,2,

At that, the object known must be identical with the knowing act (or agent), the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, therefore, identical with the Intellectual Realm. And in fact, if this identity does not exist, neither does truth; the PRINCIPLE that should contain realities is found to contain a transcript, something different from the realities; that constitutes non-Truth; Truth cannot apply to something conflicting with itself; what it affirms it must also be. Enneads V,3,

All turns on the identity. The intellectual object is itself an activity, not a mere potentiality; it is not lifeless; nor are the life and intellection brought into it as into something naturally devoid of them, some stone or other dead matter; no, the intellectual object is essentially existent, the primal reality. As an active force, the first activity, it must be, also itself, the noblest intellection, intellection possessing real being since it is entirely true; and such an intellection, primal and primally existent, can be no other than the primal principle of Intellection: for that primal principle is no potentiality and cannot be an agent distinct from its act and thus, once more, possessing its essential being as a mere potentiality. As an act – and one whose very being is an act – it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the PRINCIPLE itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object seen in that act – self, is itself. Enneads V,3,

Our way is to teach our soul how the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE exercises self-vision; the phase thus to be taught is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent soul, indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an Intellectual-PRINCIPLE or that it holds its peculiar power through and from that PRINCIPLE. This phase must be brought to understand by what means it has knowledge of the thing it sees and warrant for what it affirms: if it became what it affirms, it would by that fact possess self-knowing. All its vision and affirmation being in the Supreme or deriving from it – There where itself also is – it will possess self-knowledge by its right as a Reason-PRINCIPLE, claiming its kin and bringing all into accord with the divine imprint upon it. Enneads V,3,

If the soul is questioned as to the nature of that Intellectual-PRINCIPLE – the perfect and all-embracing, the primal self-knower – it has but to enter into that PRINCIPLE, or to sink all its activity into that, and at once it shows itself to be in effective possession of those priors whose memory it never lost: thus, as an image of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, it can make itself the medium by which to attain some vision of it; it draws upon that within itself which is most closely resemblant, as far as resemblance is possible between divine Intellect and any phase of soul. Enneads V,3,

The PRINCIPLE before all these principles is no doubt the firsfirst principle of the universe, but not as immanent: immanence is not for primal sources but for engendering secondaries; that which stands as primal source of everything is not a thing but is distinct from all things: it is not, then, a member of the total but earlier than all, earlier, thus, than the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE – which in fact envelops the entire train of things. Enneads V,3,

Now if these activities arise from some unexplained first activity in that principle, then it too contains the manifold: if, on the contrary, they are the very earliest activities and the source and cause of any multiple product and the means by which that PRINCIPLE is able, before any activity occurs, to remain self-centred, then they are allocated to the product of which they are the cause; for this principle is one thing, the activities going forth from it are another, since it is not, itself, in act. If this be not so, the first act cannot be the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: the One does not provide for the existence of an Intellectual-PRINCIPLE which thereupon appears; that provision would be something (an Hypostasis) intervening between the One and the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, its offspring. There could, in fact, be no such providing in The One, for it was never incomplete; and such provision could name nothing that ought to be provided. It cannot be thought to possess only some part of its content, and not the whole; nor did anything exist to which it could turn in desire. Clearly anything that comes into being after it, arises without shaking to its permanence in its own habit. It is essential to the existence of any new entity that the First remain in self-gathered repose throughout: otherwise, it moved before there was motion and had intellectual act before any intellection – unless, indeed, that first act (as motionless and without intelligence) was incomplete, nothing more than a tendency. And what can we imagine it lights upon to become the object of such a tendency? The only reasonable explanation of act flowing from it lies in the analogy of light from a sun. The entire intellectual order may be figured as a kind of light with the One in repose at its summit as its King: but this manifestation is not cast out from it: we may think, rather, of the One as a light before the light, an eternal irradiation resting upon the Intellectual Realm; this, not identical with its source, is yet not severed from it nor of so remote a nature as to be less than Real-Being; it is no blind thing, but is seeing and knowing, the primal knower. Enneads V,3,

But what can it be which is loftier than that existence – a life compact of wisdom, untouched by struggle and error, or than this Intellect which holds the Universe with all there is of life and intellect? If we answer “The Making PRINCIPLE,” there comes the question, “making by what virtue?” and unless we can indicate something higher there than in the made, our reasoning has made no advance: we rest where we were. Enneads V,3,

Whence must such a sequent arise? It must be an offspring of The First; for suppose it the product of chance, that First ceases to be the PRINCIPLE of All. Enneads V,4,

The only way to this is to leave nothing out side of the veritable Intellectual-PRINCIPLE which thus has knowledge in the true knowing (that of identification with the object), cannot forget, need not go wandering in search. At once truth is there, this is the seat of the authentic Existents, it becomes living and intellective: these are the essentials of that most lofty PRINCIPLE; and, failing them, where is its worth, its grandeur? Only thus (by this inherence of the Ideas) is it dispensed from demonstration and from acts of faith in the truth of its knowledge: it is its entire self, self-perspicuous: it knows a prior by recognising its own source; it knows a sequent to that prior by its self-identity; of the reality of this sequent, of the fact that it is present and has authentic existence, no outer entity can bring it surer conviction. Enneads V,5,

Thus veritable truth is not accordance with an external; it is self-accordance; it affirms and is nothing other than itself and is nothing other; it is at once existence and self-affirmation. What external, then, can call it to the question, and from what source of truth could the refutation be brought? Any counter affirmation (of truth) must fall into identity with the truth which first uttered itself; brought forward as new, it has to appear before the PRINCIPLE which made the earlier statement and to show itself identical with that: for there is no finding anything truer than the true. Enneads V,5,

Thus we have here one identical PRINCIPLE, the Intellect, which is the universe of authentic beings, the Truth: as such it is a great god or, better, not a god among gods but the Godhead entire. It is a god, a secondary god manifesting before there is any vision of that other, the Supreme which rests over all, enthroned in transcendence upon that splendid pediment, the Nature following close upon it. Enneads V,5,

Only by a leap can we reach to this One which is to be pure of all else, halting sharp in fear of slipping ever so little aside and impinging on the dual: for if we fail of the centre, we are in a duality which does not even include The authentic One but belongs on both sides, to the later order. The One does not bear to be numbered in with anything else, with a one or a two or any such quantity; it refuses to take number because it is measure and not the measured; it is no peer of other entities to be found among them; for thus, it and they alike would be included in some container and this would be its prior, the prior it cannot have. Not even essential (ideal or abstract) number can belong to The One and certainly not the still later number applying to quantities; for essential number first appears as providing duration to the divine Intellection, while quantitative number is that (still later and lower) which furnishes the Quantity found in conjunction with other things or which provides for Quantity independent of things, if this is to be thought of as number at all. The PRINCIPLE which in objects having quantitative number looks to the unity from which they spring is a copy (or lower phase) of the PRINCIPLE which in the earlier order of number (in essential or ideal number) looks to the veritable One; and it attains its existence without in the least degree dissipating or shattering that prior unity: the dyad has come into being, but the precedent monad still stands; and this monad is quite distinct within the dyad from either of the two constituent unities, since there is nothing to make it one rather than the other: being neither, but simply that thing apart, it is present without being inherent. Enneads V,5,

So it is with the act of vision in the Intellectual PRINCIPLE. Enneads V,5,

This vision sees, by another light, the objects illuminated by the FirsFirst PRINCIPLE: setting itself among them, it sees veritably; declining towards the lower Nature, that upon which the light from above rests, it has less of that vision. Passing over the visible and looking to the medium by which it sees, then it holds the Light and the source of Light. Enneads V,5,

This PRINCIPLE, of which the sun is an image, where has it its dawning, what horizon does it surmount to appear? It stands immediately above the contemplating Intellect which has held itself at rest towards the vision, looking to nothing else than the good and beautiful, setting its entire being to that in a perfect surrender, and now tranquilly filled with power and taking a new beauty to itself, gleaming in the light of that presence. Enneads V,5,

So, too, Repose is not troubled, for there is no admixture of the unstable; and the Beauty is all beauty since it is not merely resident (as an attribute or addition) in some beautiful object. Each There walks upon no alien soil; its place is its essential self; and, as each moves, so to speak, towards what is Above, it is attended by the very ground from which it starts: there is no distinguishing between the Being and the Place; all is Intellect, the PRINCIPLE and the ground on which it stands, alike. Thus we might think that our visible sky (the ground or place of the stars), lit, as it is, produces the light which reaches us from it, though of course this is really produced by the stars (as it were, by the PRINCIPLEs of light alone, not also by the ground as the analogy would require). Enneads V,8,

What is this other place and how it is accessible? It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose beauty is of the soul – such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom – and thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the Soul, thence to whatever be above that again, until the uttermost is reached. The First, the PRINCIPLE whose beauty is self-springing: this attained, there is an end to the pain inassuageable before. 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,

What, then, is that content? An Intellectual-PRINCIPLE and an Intellective Essence, no concept distinguishable from the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, each actually being that PRINCIPLE. The Intellectual-PRINCIPLE entire is the total of the Ideas, and each of them is the (entire) Intellectual-PRINCIPLE in a special form. Thus a science entire is the total of the relevant considerations each of which, again, is a member of the entire science, a member not distinct in space yet having its individual efficacy in a total. Enneads V,8,

There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this PRINCIPLE must be the source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly? The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes to be, why the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is all and whence it springs, these matters demand another approach. Enneads V,8,

But if Quality is determined by formation and characteristic and Reason-PRINCIPLE, how explain the various cases of powerlessness and deformity? Doubtless we must think of PRINCIPLEs imperfectly present, as in the case of deformity. And disease – how does that imply a Reason-PRINCIPLE? Here, no doubt, we must think of a principle disturbed, the PRINCIPLE of health. Enneads: VI I

Again, even taking it as bound up with Being: If it is a consequent of Being, then it is a consequent of everything, and therefore the latest of things: but the genus takes priority. If it is simultaneous with Being, it is simultaneous with everything: but a genus is not thus simultaneous. If it is prior to Being, it is of the nature of a PRINCIPLE, and therefore will belong only to Being; but if it serves as PRINCIPLE to Being, it is not its genus: if it is not genus to Being, it is equally not a genus of anything else; for that would make Being a genus of all other things. Enneads VI,2,

Further, as the simplex must be the principle of the non-simplex, though not its genus – for then the non-simplex too would be simplex, – so it stands with unity; if unity is a PRINCIPLE; it cannot be a genus to its subsequents, and therefore cannot be a genus of Being or of other things. If it is nevertheless to be a genus, everything of which it is a genus must be taken as a unit – a notion which implies the separation of unity from substance: it will not, therefore, be all-embracing. just as Being is not a genus of everything but only of species each of which is a being, so too unity will be a genus of species each of which is a unity. But that raises the question of what difference there is between one thing and another in so far as they are both units, corresponding to the difference between one being and another. Enneads VI,2,

Thus for Being, as for the others, unity turns out to be, in some sense, PRINCIPLE and Term, not however in the same sense as for things of the physical order – a discrepancy leading us to infer that even in unity there are degrees of priority. Enneads VI,2,

Why are not beauty, goodness and the virtues, together with knowledge and intelligence, included among the primary genera? If by goodness we mean The First – what we call the PRINCIPLE of Goodness, the PRINCIPLE of which we can predicate nothing, giving it this name only because we have no other means of indicating it – then goodness, clearly, can be the genus of nothing: this principle is not affirmed of other things; if it were, each of these would be Goodness itself. The truth is that it is prior to Substance, not contained in it. If, on the contrary, we mean goodness as a quality, no quality can be ranked among the primaries. Enneads VI,2,

But Matter, it may be contended, is the source of existence to the Sensible things implanted in it. From what source, then, we retort, does Matter itself derive existence and being? That Matter is not a Primary we have established elsewhere. If it be urged that other things can have no subsistence without being implanted in Matter, we admit the claim for Sensible things. But though Matter be prior to these, it is not thereby precluded from being posterior to many things-posterior, in fact, to all the beings of the Intellectual sphere. Its existence is but a pale reflection, and less complete than that of the things implanted in it. These are Reason-PRINCIPLEs and more directly derived from Being: Matter has of itself no Reason-PRINCIPLE whatever; it is but a shadow of a PRINCIPLE, a vain attempt to achieve a PRINCIPLE. Enneads VI,3,

Moreover, such a difference, if established, would be incompatible with a single Reason-PRINCIPLE of Substance; First and Second Substance could not have the same PRINCIPLE, nor be brought under a single genus. Enneads VI,3,

In sum, just as there is a Reason-PRINCIPLE of Beauty, so there must be a Reason-PRINCIPLE of greatness, participation in which makes a thing great, as the PRINCIPLE of beauty makes it beautiful. Enneads VI,3,

Let us consider once more how it is possible for an identity to extend over a universe. This comes to the question how each variously placed entity in the multiplicity of the sense order can have its share in one identical PRINCIPLE. Enneads VI,4,

But if that PRINCIPLE can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul’s entry or presence to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting. Enneads VI,4,

We have, of course, no slight aid to conviction, indeed the very strongest, in the exposition of the character of that principle. It is not like a stone, some vast block lying where it lies, covering the space of its own extension, held within its own limits, having a fixed quantity of mass and of assigned stone-power. It is a First PRINCIPLE, measureless, not bounded within determined size – such measurement belongs to another order – and therefore it is all-power, nowhere under limit. Being so, it is outside of Time. Enneads VI,5,

How does the mind pronounce? By being able to enumerate; that is by knowing Number: but in order to this, Number must be in existence, and that that PRINCIPLE should not know its own total content is absurd, impossible. Enneads VI,6,

It is with Number as with Good. When we pronounce things to be good either we mean that they are in their own nature so or we affirm goodness as an accidental in them. Dealing with the primals, the goodness we have in mind is that First Hypostasis; where the goodness is an accidental we imply the existence of a PRINCIPLE of Good as a necessary condition of the accidental presence; there must be some source of that good which is observed elsewhere, whether this source be an Absolute Good or something that of its own nature produces the good. Similarly with number; in attributing the decad to things we affirm either the truly existent decad or, where the decadhood is accidental, we necessarily posit the self-subsistent decad, decad not associated; if things are to be described as forming a decad, then either they must be of themselves the decad or be preceded by that which has no other being than that of decadhood. Enneads VI,6,

If, then, unity is more pronounced in the continuous, and more again where there is no separation by part, this is clearly because there exists, in real existence, something which is a Nature or PRINCIPLE of Unity. There cannot be a greater and less in the non-existent: as we predicate Substance of everything in sense, but predicate it also of the Intellectual order and more strictly there – since we hold that the greater and more sovereign substantiality belongs to the Real Beings and that Being is more marked in Substance, even sensible Substance, than in the other Kinds – so, finding unity to exhibit degree of more and less, differing in sense-things as well as in the Intellectual, we must similarly admit that Unity exists under all forms though still by reference, only, to that primal Unity. Enneads VI,6,

Again: Man exists in the Intellectual and with him all other living things, both by possession of Real-Being and because that is the Life-Form Complete. Even the man of this sphere is a member of the Intellectual since that is the Life-Form Complete; every living thing by virtue of having life, is There, There in the Life-form, and man is There also, in the Intellectual, in so far as he is intellect, for all intelligences are severally members of That. Now all this means Number There. Yet even in Intellect Number is not present primally; its presence There is the reckoning of the Acts of Intellectual-PRINCIPLE; it tallies with the justice in Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, its moral wisdom, its virtues, its knowledge, all whose possession makes That PRINCIPLE what it is. Enneads VI,6,

Next we come to Being, fully realized, and this is the seat of Number; by Number, Being brings forth the Beings; its movement is planned to Number; it establishes the numbers of its offspring before bringing them to be, in the same way as it establishes its own unity by linking pure Being to the First: the numbers do not link the lower to the First; it suffices that Being is so linked; for Being, in taking form as Number, binds its members to itself. As a unity, it suffers no division, remaining self-constant; as a thing of division, containing its chosen total of members, it knows that total and so brings forth Number, a phase therefore of its content: its development of part is ruled by the powers of Number, and the Beings it produces sum to that Number. Thus Number, the primal and true, is PRINCIPLE and source of actuality to the Beings. Enneads VI,6,

But does the Life-Form contain the configurations by the mere fact of its life? They are in the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE previously but they also exist in the Living-Form; if this be considered as including the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, then they are primally in the Life-Form, but if that PRINCIPLE comes first then they are previously in that. And if the Life-Form entire contains also souls, it must certainly be subsequent to the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE. Enneads VI,6,

Thus we have even here the means of knowing the nature of the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, though, seeing it more closely than anything else, we still see it at less than its worth. We know that it exists but its cause we do not see, or, if we do, we see that cause as something apart. We see a man – or an eye, if you like – but this is an image or part of an image; what is in that PRINCIPLE is at once Man and the reason of his being; for There man – or eye – must be, itself, an intellective thing and a cause of its being; it could not exist at all unless it were that cause, whereas here, everything partial is separate and so is the cause of each. In the Intellectual, all is at one so that the thing is identical with the cause. 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,

But how could that PRINCIPLE have such perception, be aware of things of sense? Surely it is untenable on the one hand that sense-perception should exist There, from eternity, and on the other that only upon the debasement of the soul should there be sense-perception here and the accomplishment in this realm of the Act of what was always a power in that? Enneads VI,7,

But (it will be objected) if this were a matter of mere thinking we might well admit that the intellectual concept, remaining concept, should take in the unintellectual, but where concept is identical with thing how can the one be an Intellection and the other without intelligence? Would not this be Intellect making itself unintelligent? No: the thing is not unintelligent; it is Intelligence in a particular mode, corresponding to a particular aspect of Life; and just as life in whatever form it may appear remains always life, so Intellect is not annulled by appearing in a certain mode. Intellectual-PRINCIPLE adapted to some particular living being does not cease to be the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE of all, including man: take it where you will, every manifestation is the whole, though in some special mode; the particular is produced but the possibility is of all. In the particular we see the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE in realization; the realized is its latest phase; in one case the last aspect is “horse”; at “horse” ended the progressive outgoing towards the lesser forms of life, as in another case it will end at something lower still. The unfolding of the powers of this PRINCIPLE is always attended by some abandonment in regard to the highest; the outgoing is by loss, and by this loss the powers become one thing or another according to the deficiency of the life-form produced by the failing principle; it is then that they find the means of adding various requisites; the safeguards of the life becoming inadequate there appear nail, talon, fang, horn. Thus the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE by its very descent is directed towards the perfect sufficiency of the natural constitution, finding there within itself the remedy of the failure. Enneads VI,7,

The Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is the Intellectual Act; its movement is complete, filling Being complete; And the entire of Being is the Intellectual Act entire, comprehending all life and the unfailing succession of things. Because this PRINCIPLE contains Identity and Difference its division is ceaselessly bringing the different things to light. Its entire movement is through life and among living things. To a traveller over land, all is earth but earth abounding in difference: so in this journey the life through which Intellectual-PRINCIPLE passes is one life but, in its ceaseless changing, a varied life. 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,

No: that would not be Intellection looking upon the Good; it would be a looking void of Intellection. We must think of it not as looking but as living; dependent upon That, it kept itself turned Thither; all the tendance taking place There and upon That must be a movement teeming with life and must so fill the looking PRINCIPLE; there is no longer bare Act, there is a filling to saturation. Forthwith Intellectual-PRINCIPLE becomes all things, knows that fact in virtue of its self-knowing and at once becomes Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, filled so as to hold within itself that object of its vision, seeing all by the light from the Giver and bearing that Giver with it. Enneads VI,7,

In this way the Supreme may be understood to be the cause at once of essential reality and of the knowing of reality. The sun, cause of the existence of sense-things and of their being seen, is indirectly the cause of sight, without being either the faculty or the object: similarly this PRINCIPLE, The Good, cause of Being and Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, is a light appropriate to what is to be seen There and to their seer; neither the Beings nor the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, it is their source and by the light it sheds upon both makes them objects of Intellection. This filling procures the existence; after the filling, the being; the existence achieved, the seeing followed: the beginning is that state of not yet having been filled, though there is, also, the beginning which means that the Filling PRINCIPLE was outside and by that act of filling gave shape to the filled. Enneads VI,7,

But in what mode are these secondaries, and Intellectual-PRINCIPLE itself, within the First? They are not in the Filling PRINCIPLE; they are not in the filled since before that moment it did not contain them. Enneads VI,7,

As what, then, is its unity determined? As Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: determined Life is Intellectual-PRINCIPLE. And the multiplicity? As the multiplicity of Intellectual-PRINCIPLEs: all its multiplicity resolves itself into Intellectual-PRINCIPLEs – on the one hand the collective PRINCIPLE, on the other the particular PRINCIPLEs. Enneads VI,7,

The soul aiming only at that PRINCIPLE would need a further lessoning; it must be taught that Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is not the ultimate, that not all things look to that while all do look to the good. Not all that is outside of Intellectual-PRINCIPLE seeks to attain it; what has attained it does not halt there but looks still towards good. Besides, Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is sought upon motives of reasoning, the good before all reason. And in any striving towards life and continuity of existence and activity, the object is aimed at not as Intellectual-PRINCIPLE but as good, as rising from good and leading to it: life itself is desirable only in view of good. Enneads VI,7,

But if Matter by very essence is evil how could it choose the good? This question implies that if Evil were self-conscious it would admire itself: but how can the unadmirable be admired; and did we not discover that the good must be apt to the nature? There that question may rest. But if universally the good is Form and the higher the ascent the more there is of Form-Soul more truly Form than body is and phases of soul progressively of higher Form and Intellectual-PRINCIPLE standing as Form to soul collectively – then the Good advances by the opposite of Matter and, therefore, by a cleansing and casting away to the utmost possible at each stage: and the greatest good must be there where all that is of Matter has disappeared. The PRINCIPLE of Good rejecting Matter entirely – or rather never having come near it at any point or in any way – must hold itself aloft with that Formless in which Primal Form takes its origin. But we will return to this. Enneads VI,7,

Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and Matter is needed for the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest away, since of itself it has not even the lowest degree of shape. Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which draws upon Form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable; Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, nearer still, is even more to be loved: by these steps we are led to know that the FirsFirst PRINCIPLE, principle of Beauty, must be formless. Enneads VI,7,

As for soul, it attains that vision by – so to speak – confounding and annulling the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE within it; or rather that PRINCIPLE immanent in soul sees first and thence the vision penetrates to soul and the two visions become one. Enneads VI,7,

But how admit a PRINCIPLE void of self-knowledge, self-awareness; surely the First must be able to say “I possess Being?” Enneads VI,7,

As regards Providence, that is sufficiently saved by the fact that This is the source from which all proceeds; the dependent he cannot know when he has no knowledge of himself but keeps that august repose. Plato dealing with essential Being allows it intellection but not this august repose: intellection then belongs to Essential Being; this august repose to the PRINCIPLE in which there is no intellection. Repose, of course, is used here for want of a fitter word; we are to understand that the most august, the truly so, is That which transcends (the movement of) Intellection. Enneads VI,7,

It does not see itself: seeing aims at acquisition: all this it abandons to the subsequent: in fact nothing found elsewhere can be There; even Being cannot be There. Nor therefore has it intellection which is a thing of the lower sphere where the first intellection, the only true, is identical with Being. Reason, perception, intelligence, none of these can have place in that PRINCIPLE in which no presence can be affirmed. Enneads VI,7,

Further, this objected obedience to the characteristic nature would imply a duality, master and mastered; but an undivided PRINCIPLE, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be free; there can be no thought of “action according to the nature,” in the sense of any distinction between the being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical. Where act is performed neither because of another nor at another’s will, there surely is freedom. Freedom may of course be an inappropriate term: there is something greater here: it is self-disposal in the sense, only, that there is no disposal by the extern, no outside master over the act. Enneads VI,8,

In a principle, act and essence must be free. No doubt Intellectual-PRINCIPLE itself is to be referred to a yet higher; but this higher is not extern to it; Intellectual-PRINCIPLE is within the Good; possessing its own good in virtue of that indwelling, much more will it possess freedom and self-disposal which are sought only for the sake of the good. Acting towards the good, it must all the more possess self-disposal for by that Act it is directed towards the PRINCIPLE from which it proceeds, and this its act is self-centred and must entail its very greatest good. Enneads VI,8,

How then can the sovereign of all that august sequence – the first in place, that to which all else strives to mount, all dependent upon it and taking from it their powers even to this power of self-disposal – how can This be brought under the freedom belonging to you and me, a conception applicable only by violence to Intellectual-PRINCIPLE itself? It is rash thinking drawn from another order that would imagine a First PRINCIPLE to be chance – made what it is, controlled by a manner of being imposed from without, void therefore of freedom or self-disposal, acting or refraining under compulsion. Such a statement is untrue to its subject and introduces much difficulty; it utterly annuls the principle of freewill with the very conception of our own voluntary action, so that there is no longer any sense in discussion upon these terms, empty names for the non-existent. Anyone upholding this opinion would be obliged to say not merely that free act exists nowhere but that the very word conveys nothing to him. To admit understanding the word is to be easily brought to confess that the conception of freedom does apply where it is denied. No doubt a concept leaves the reality untouched and unappropriated, for nothing can produce itself, bring itself into being; but thought insists upon distinguishing between what is subject to others and what is independent, bound under no allegiance, lord of its own act. Enneads VI,8,

If we cannot but speak of Happening we must not halt at the word but look to the intention. And what is that? That the Supreme by possession of a certain nature and power is the PRINCIPLE. Obviously if its nature were other it would be that other and if the difference were for the worse it would manifest itself as that lesser being. But we must add in correction that, as PRINCIPLE of All, it could not be some chance product; it is not enough to say that it could not be inferior; it could not even be in some way good, for instance in some less perfect degree; the PRINCIPLE of All must be of higher quality than anything that follows it. It is therefore in a sense determined – determined, I mean, by its uniqueness and not in any sense of being under compulsion; compulsion did not co-exist with the Supreme but has place only among secondaries and even there can exercise no tyranny; this uniqueness is not from outside. Enneads VI,8,

All the rest waits for the appearing of the king to hail him for himself, not a being of accident and happening but authentically king, authentically PRINCIPLE, The Good authentically, not a being that acts in conformity with goodness – and so, recognisably, a secondary – but the total unity that he is, no moulding upon goodness but the very Good itself. Enneads VI,8,

The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false happening can be supposed to have come about, taking it that it did, and haw the happening, then, is not universally prevalent. If there is to be a natural scheme at all, it must be admitted that this happening does not and cannot exist: for if we attribute to chance the PRINCIPLE which is to eliminate chance from all the rest, how can there ever be anything independent of chance? And this Nature does take away the chanced from the rest, bringing in form and limit and shape. In the case of things thus conformed to reason the cause cannot be identified with chance but must lie in that very reason; chance must be kept for what occurs apart from choice and sequence and is purely concurrent. When we come to the source of all reason, order and limit, how can we attribute the reality there to chance? Chance is no doubt master of many things but is not master of Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, of reason, of order, so as to bring them into being. How could chance, recognised as the very opposite of reason, be its Author? And if it does not produce Intellectual-PRINCIPLE, then certainly not that which precedes and surpasses that PRINCIPLE. Chance, besides, has no means of producing, has no being at all, and, assuredly, none in the Eternal. Enneads VI,8,

The difficulty this PRINCIPLE presents to our mind in so far as we can approach to conception of it may be exhibited thus: We begin by posing space, a place, a Chaos; into this existing container, real or fancied, we introduce God and proceed to enquire: we ask, for example, whence and how He comes to be there: we investigate the presence and quality of this new-comer projected into the midst of things here from some height or depth. But the difficulty disappears if we eliminate all space before we attempt to conceive God: He must not be set in anything either as enthroned in eternal immanence or as having made some entry into things: He is to be conceived as existing alone, in that existence which the necessity of discussion forces us to attribute to Him, with space and all the rest as later than Him – space latest of all. Thus we conceive as far as we may, the spaceless; we abolish the notion of any environment: we circumscribe Him within no limit; we attribute no extension to Him; He has no quality since no shape, even shape Intellectual; He holds no relationship but exists in and for Himself before anything is. Enneads VI,8,

Still, is not this PRINCIPLE subject to its essential Being? On the contrary, it is the source of freedom to Being. Enneads VI,8,

Consider also that every being in its pursuit of its good seeks to be that good rather than what it is it judges itself most truly to be when it partakes of its good: in so far as it thus draws on its good its being is its choice: much more, then, must the very PRINCIPLE, The Good, be desirable in itself when any fragment of it is very desirable to the extern and becomes the chosen essence promoting that extern’s will and identical with the will that gave the existence? As long as a thing is apart from its good it seeks outside itself; when it holds its good it itself as it is: and this is no matter of chance; the essence now is not outside of the will; by the good it is determined, by the good it is in self-possession. Enneads VI,8,

If then this PRINCIPLE is the means of determination to everything else, we see at once that self-possession must belong primally to it, so that, through it, others in their turn may be self-belonging: what we must call its essence comports its will to possess such a manner of being; we can form no idea of it without including in it the will towards itself as it is. It must be a consistent self willing its being and being what it wills; its will and itself must be one thing, all the more one from the absence of distinction between a given nature and one which would be preferred. What could The Good have wished to be other than what it is? Suppose it had the choice of being what it preferred, power to alter the nature, it could not prefer to be something else; it could have no fault to find with anything in its nature, as if that nature were imposed by force; The Good is what from always it wished and wishes to be. For the really existent Good is a willing towards itself, towards a good not gained by any wiles or even attracted to it by force of its nature; The Good is what it chose to be and, in fact, there was never anything outside it to which it could be drawn. Enneads VI,8,

Further we must remember what has been already said, that where there is true being, where things have been brought to reality by that PRINCIPLE – and this is true of whatsoever has determined condition within the order of sense – all that reality is brought about in virtue of something emanating from the divine. By things of determined condition I mean such as contain, inbound with their essence, the reason of their being as they are, so that, later, an observer can state the use for each of the constituent parts – why the eye, why feet of such and such a kind to such and such a being – and can recognise that the reason for the production of each organ is inherent in that particular being and that the parts exist for each other. Why feet of a certain length? Because another member is as it is: because the face is as it is, therefore the feet are what they are: in a word the mutual determinant is mutual adaptation and the reason of each of the several forms is that such is the plan of man. Enneads VI,8,

Of things carrying their causes within, none arises at hazard or without purpose; this “So it happened to be” is applicable to none. All that they have comes from The Good; the Supreme itself, then, as author of reason, of causation, and of causing essence – all certainly lying far outside of chance – must be the PRINCIPLE and as it were the examplar of things, thus independent of hazard: it is, the First, the Authentic, immune from chance, from blind effect and happening: God is cause of Himself; for Himself and of Himself He is what He is, the first self, transcendently The Self. Enneads VI,8,

One seeing That as it really is will lay aside all reasoning upon it and simply state it as the self-existent; such that if it had essence that essence would be subject to it and, so to speak, derived from it; none that has seen would dare to talk of its “happening to be,” or indeed be able to utter word. With all his courage he would stand astounded, unable at any venture to speak of This, with the vision everywhere before the eyes of the soul so that, look where one may, there it is seen unless one deliberately look away, ignoring God, thinking no more upon Him. So we are to understand the Beyond-Essence darkly indicated by the ancients: is not merely that He generated Essence but that He is subject neither to Essence nor to Himself; His essence is not His PRINCIPLE; He is PRINCIPLE to Essence and not for Himself did He make it; producing it He left it outside of Himself: He had no need of being who brought it to be. Thus His making of being is no “action in accordance with His being.” Enneads VI,8,

The answer is that we utterly must not speak of Him as made but sheerly as maker; the making must be taken as absolved from all else; no new existence is established; the Act here is not directed to an achievement but is God Himself unalloyed: here is no duality but pure unity. Let no one suspect us of asserting that the first Activity is without Essence; on the contrary the Activity is the very reality. To suppose a reality without activity would be to make the PRINCIPLE of all principles deficient; the supremely complete becomes incomplete. To make the Activity something superadded to the essence is to shatter the unity. If then Activity is a more perfect thing than essence and the First is all perfect, then the Activity is the First. Enneads VI,8,

Other considerations also go to show that the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE cannot be the First. Intellect must be above the Intellectual Act: at least in its higher phase, that not concerned with the outer universe, it must be intent upon its Prior; its introversion is a conversion upon the PRINCIPLE. Enneads VI,8,

We are in search of unity; we are to come to know the principle of all, the Good and First; therefore we may not stand away from the realm of Firsts and lie prostrate among the lasts: we must strike for those Firsts, rising from things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared of all evil in our intention towards The Good, we must ascend to the PRINCIPLE within ourselves; from many, we must become one; only so do we attain to knowledge of that which is PRINCIPLE and Unity. We shape ourselves into Intellectual-PRINCIPLE; we make over our soul in trust to Intellectual-PRINCIPLE and set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul will waken to see; it is through the Intellectual-PRINCIPLE that we have this vision of The Unity; it must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even of soul to enter into Intellectual-PRINCIPLE: with Intellect pure, and with the summit of Intellect, we are to see the All-Pure. Enneads VI,8,

The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this PRINCIPLE comes neither by knowing nor by the Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence overpassing all knowledge. In knowing, soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain a simplex: knowing is taking account of things; that accounting is multiple; the mind, thus plunging into number and multiplicity, departs from unity. Enneads VI,8,

From none is that PRINCIPLE absent and yet from all: present, it remains absent save to those fit to receive, disciplined into some accordance, able to touch it closely by their likeness and by that kindred power within themselves through which, remaining as it was when it came to them from the Supreme, they are enabled to see in so far as God may at all be seen. Enneads VI,8,

Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the things of Being: there must be a prior to this PRINCIPLE which aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in unity’s likeness. From this highest it is not sundered; it too is self-present: so close to the unity, it cannot be articulated: and yet it is a principle which in some measure has dared secession. Enneads VI,8,

This PRINCIPLE is not, therefore, to be identified with the good of which it is the source; it is good in the unique mode of being The Good above all that is good. Enneads VI,8,

If the mind reels before something thus alien to all we know, we must take our stand on the things of this realm and strive thence to see. But, in the looking, beware of throwing outward; this PRINCIPLE does not lie away somewhere leaving the rest void; to those of power to reach, it is present; to the inapt, absent. In our daily affairs we cannot hold an object in mind if we have given ourselves elsewhere, occupied upon some other matter; that very thing must be before us to be truly the object of observation. So here also; preoccupied by the impress of something else, we are withheld under that pressure from becoming aware of The Unity; a mind gripped and fastened by some definite thing cannot take the print of the very contrary. As Matter, it is agreed, must be void of quality in order to accept the types of the universe, so and much more must the soul be kept formless if there is to be no infixed impediment to prevent it being brimmed and lit by the Primal PRINCIPLE. Enneads VI,8,

Is then this “centre” of our souls the PRINCIPLE for which we are seeking? We must look yet further: we must admit a PRINCIPLE in which all these centres coincide: it will be a centre by analogy with the centre of the circle we know. The soul is not a circle in the sense of the geometric figure but in that it at once contains the Primal Nature (as centre) and is contained by it (as circumference), that it owes its origin to such a centre and still more that the soul, uncontaminated, is a self-contained entity. Enneads VI,8,

Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they will know their source and PRINCIPLE since by principle they see principle and are linked with it, by like they have contact with like and so they grasp all of the divine that lies within the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still craving something, that which only the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have overpassed all, is the All-Transcending. Enneads VI,8,