quality

We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human QUALITY, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term? To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but Goodness is something more. Enneads I,2,4

But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes alike, what, in sum, is it? It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of things – what each is, how it differs from others, what common QUALITY all have, to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many Beings there are, and how many non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings. Enneads I,3,4

By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without knowledge: there is good in the appropriate state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or desirable QUALITY – for it must be in itself desirable. Enneads I,4,2

Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure’s value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order? No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise QUALITY of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life. Enneads I,4,2

And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural QUALITY may give to a single stone. Enneads I,6,2

In what substantial-form (hypostasis) then is all this to be found – not as accident but as the very substance itself? For if Evil can enter into other things, it must have in a certain sense a prior existence, even though it may not be an essence. As there is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the QUALITY, so, together with the derived evil entering into something not itself, there must be the Absolute Evil. Enneads I,8,3

How can there any contrary to the Absolute Good, when the absolute has no QUALITY? Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of two contraries should entail the existence of the other? Admit that the existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other – sickness and health, for example – yet there is no universal compulsion. Enneads I,8,6

For these last are opposed as members of one species or of one genus, and, within that common ground, they participate in some common QUALITY. Enneads I,8,6

Now to the content of the divine order, the fixed QUALITY, the measuredness and so forth – there is opposed the content of the evil principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth: total is opposed to total. The existence of the one genus is a falsity, primarily, essentially, a falseness: the other genus has Essence-Authentic: the opposition is of truth to lie; essence is opposed to essence. Enneads I,8,6

In sum, things utterly sundered, having nothing in common, standing at the remotest poles, are opposites in nature: the contrariety does not depend upon QUALITY or upon the existence of a distinct genus of beings, but upon the utmost difference, clash in content, clash in effect. Enneads I,8,6

For, the QUALITY (form) that has entered into Matter does not act as an entity apart from the Matter, any more than axe-shape will cut apart from iron. Further, Forms lodged in Matter are not the same as they would be if they remained within themselves; they are Reason-Principles Materialized, they are corrupted in the Matter, they have absorbed its nature: essential fire does not burn, nor do any of the essential entities effect, of themselves alone, the operation which, once they have entered into Matter, is traced to their action. Enneads I,8,8

But if Matter is devoid of QUALITY how can it be evil? It is described as being devoid of QUALITY in the sense only that it does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no nature; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be evil though not in the sense of QUALITY? Quality qualifies something not itself: it is therefore an accidental; it resides in some other object. Matter does not exist in some other object but is the substratum in which the accidental resides. Matter, then, is said to be devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself possess this thing which is by nature an accidental. If, moreover, Quality itself be devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the unqualified, be said to have it? Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that Matter is without Quality and that it is evil: it is Evil not in the sense of having Quality but, precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and in its very Evil it would almost be a Form, whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to Form. Enneads I,8,10

Thus we are told that earth cannot have concrete existence without the help of some moist element – the moisture in water being the necessary adhesive – but admitting that we so find it, there is still a contradiction in pretending that any one element has a being of its own and in the same breath denying its self-coherence, making its subsistence depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the specific element to nothing. How can we talk of the existence of the definite Kind, earth – earth essential – if there exists no single particle of earth which actually is earth without any need of water to secure its self-cohesion? What has such an adhesive to act upon if there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it may bind particle after particle in its business of producing the continuous mass? If there is any such given magnitude, large or small, of pure earth, then earth can exist in its own nature, independently of water: if there is no such primary particle of pure earth, then there is nothing whatever for the water to bind. As for air – air unchanged, retaining its distinctive QUALITY – how could it conduce to the subsistence of a dense material like earth? Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of it as necessary not to the existence but to the visibility of earth and the other elements; and certainly light is essential to all visibility – we cannot say that we see darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen, as silence means nothing being heard. Enneads II,1,6

Thus: In the universe as a whole there must necessarily be such a degree of solidity, that is to say, of resistance, as will ensure that the earth, set in the centre, be a sure footing and support to the living beings moving over it, and inevitably communicate something of its own density to them: the earth will possess coherence by its own unaided QUALITY, but visibility by the presence of fire: it will contain water against the dryness which would prevent the cohesion of its particles; it will hold air to lighten its bulky matters; it will be in contact with the celestial fire – not as being a member of the sidereal system but by the simple fact that the fire there and our earth both belong to the ordered universe so that something of the earth is taken up by the fire as something of the fire by the earth and something of everything by everything else. Enneads II,1,7

Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the heavens would be air or fire: air has no destructive QUALITY; fire would be powerless there since it could not enter into effective contact: in its very rush it would change before its attack could be felt; and, apart from that, it is of the lesser order, no match for what it would be opposing in those higher regions. Enneads II,1,8

If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving (wearing it down at last); the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for “Nature” is no other than the custom the All-Soul has established. Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates that QUALITY of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it. Enneads II,2,1

We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the QUALITY of signifying, just as the one<one principle underlying any living unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies. Enneads II,3,7

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,3,8

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,3,9

For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold QUALITY belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system. Enneads II,3,9

Any such QUALITY, modified at best from its supreme form, deteriorates again within itself: things of any kind that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other. Enneads II,3,11

All that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity and every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some QUALITY. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it; for horse comes by horse, and man by man: the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the man has his origin in the Human-Principle. Outer things have their effect, sometimes to hurt and sometimes to help; like a father, they often contribute to good but sometimes also to harm; but they do not wrench the human being from the foundations of its nature; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection; the Ideal has been attenuated. Enneads II,3,12

The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter – and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void of QUALITY, but a magnitude. Enneads II,4,1

They must, therefore, consist of Matter and Form-Idea – Form for QUALITY and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as being other than Idea. Enneads II,4,6

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,4,7

What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without QUALITY? Clearly since it is without QUALITY it is incorporeal; bodiliness would be QUALITY. Enneads II,4,8

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,4,8

This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats the Matter out into Magnitude? Not at all: the Matter was not previously shrunken small: there was no littleness or bigness: the Idea gives Magnitude exactly as it gives every QUALITY not previously present. Enneads II,4,9

But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter? How do you form the concept of any absence of QUALITY? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case? The secret is Indetermination. Enneads II,4,10

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever? No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds (i.e., as possessing with these forms a formless base) for they appear as things that have accepted colour and other QUALITY. Enneads II,4,10

“A certain mass then; and if mass, then Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose it sizeless; then, what end does it serve? It never helped Idea or QUALITY; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into embodied entities by way of Matter.” Enneads II,4,11

Now, to begin with: extension is not an imperative condition of being a recipient; it is necessary only where it happens to be a property inherent to the recipient’s peculiar mode of being. The Soul, for example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended unity; if magnitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in extension. Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it takes in; but this is because itself is a potential recipient of spatial extension: animals and plants, in the same way, as they increase in size, take QUALITY in parallel development with quantity, and they lose in the one as the other lessens. Enneads II,4,11

Matter, in sum, is necessary to QUALITY and to quantity, and, therefore, to body. Enneads II,4,12

If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities and mass: for QUALITY, or mass, or any such entity, taken by itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an obscure existence: there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it lurk, discerned by none of the senses. Enneads II,4,12

Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or QUALITY present to all the elements in common? Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum. Enneads II,4,13

The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is neither base nor bulk? Again, if the QUALITY possesses determination, it is not Matter the undetermined; and anything without determination is not a QUALITY but is the substratum – the very Matter we are seeking. Enneads II,4,13

It may be suggested that perhaps this absence of QUALITY means simply that, of its own nature, it has no participation in any of the set and familiar properties, but takes QUALITY by this very non-participation, holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off from everything else, being as it were the negation of those others. Deprivation, we will be told, comports QUALITY: a blind man has the QUALITY of his lack of sight. If then – it will be urged – Matter exhibits such a negation, surely it has a QUALITY, all the more so, assuming any deprivation to be a QUALITY, in that here the deprivation is all comprehensive. Enneads II,4,13

Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a QUALITY in Matter? If this Alienism is difference-absolute (the abstract entity) it possesses no Quality: absolute Quality cannot be itself a qualified thing. Enneads II,4,13

Now if Matter possesses an identity – though only the identity of being indeterminate, unfixed and without QUALITY – how can we bring it so under two principles? Enneads II,4,14

Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order – like all that shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same principle – therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not merely the recipient of a nonessential QUALITY of Indefiniteness entering as an attribute. Enneads II,4,15

Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined be annulled by the entry of Determination, especially where this is no mere attribute? No doubt to introduce quantitative determination into an undetermined object would annul the original state; but in the particular case, the introduction of determination only confirms the original state, bringing it into actuality, into full effect, as sowing brings out the natural QUALITY of land or as a female organism impregnated by the male is not defeminized but becomes more decidedly of its sex; the thing becomes more emphatically itself. Enneads II,4,16

For in Matter we have no mere absence of means or of strength; it is utter destitution – of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of pattern, of Ideal principle, of QUALITY. This is surely ugliness, utter disgracefulness, unredeemed evil. Enneads II,4,16

And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be explained in the same way? Are they differing Realities centred in one Reality or gathered round Being – differences which constitute Realities distinct from each other within the common fact of Reality? This is sound enough; but it does not apply to all the qualities of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations of Reality – such as the QUALITY of two-footedness or four-footedness – but others are not such differentiations of Reality and, because they are not so, must be called qualities and nothing more. Enneads II,6,1

Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form of the thing it is a constitutive element and not a QUALITY; where it is a superficial appearance it is a QUALITY. Enneads II,6,1

And this is the starting-point of an error we constantly make: in our enquiries into things we let realities escape us and fasten on what is mere QUALITY. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the observation of certain qualities present; fire is a Reality (not a combination of material phenomena); the phenomena observed here and leading us to name fire call us away from the authentic thing; a QUALITY is erected into the very matter of definition – a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to things of the realm of sense which are in no case realities but accidents of Reality. Enneads II,6,1

Now in a Reality possessing a determined QUALITY, the Reality and the fact of existence precede the qualified Reality. Enneads II,6,2

We might define the burning as an Act springing from the Reason-Principle: then the warming and lighting and other effects of fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its QUALITY. Enneads II,6,2

Such completions of a Reality cannot be called qualities since they are its Acts emanating from the Reason-Principles and from the essential powers. A QUALITY is something persistently outside Reality; it cannot appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as QUALITY; its function is to bring in the something more after the Reality is established, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty, health, a certain shape. On this last, however, it may be remarked that triangularity and quadrangularity are not in themselves qualities, but there is QUALITY when a thing is triangular by having been brought to that shape; the QUALITY is not the triangularity but the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts and avocations. Enneads II,6,2

The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be classed not as a QUALITY but as an activity – the act of a power which can make white; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the Intellectual Realm should be known as activities; they are activities which to our minds take the appearance of QUALITY from the fact that, differing in character among themselves, each of them is a particularity which, so to speak, distinguishes those Realities from each other. Enneads II,6,3

By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of the specific nature of fire, may very well be no QUALITY in fire but an Idea-Form belonging to it, one of its activities, while being merely a Quality in other things than fire: as it is manifested in any warm object, it is not a mode of Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image, something that has gone forth from its own Reality – where it was an Act – and in the warm object is a QUALITY. Enneads II,6,3

When water runs through wool or when papyrus-pulp gives up its moisture why is not the moist content expressed to the very last drop or even, without question of outflow, how can we possibly think that in a mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact and that only the qualities are fused? The pulp is not merely in touch with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and through so that every particle of its matter is drenched in that QUALITY. Now if the matter is soaked all through with the QUALITY, then the water is everywhere in the pulp. Enneads II,7,2

“Not the water; the QUALITY of the water.” Enneads II,7,2

But then, where is the water? and (if only a QUALITY has entered) why is there a change of volume? The pulp has been expanded by the addition: that is to say it has received magnitude from the incoming substance but if it has received the magnitude, magnitude has been added; and a magnitude added has not been absorbed; therefore the combined matter must occupy two several places. And as the two mixing substances communicate QUALITY and receive matter in mutual give and take so they may give and take magnitude. Indeed when a QUALITY meets another QUALITY it suffers some change; it is mixed, and by that admixture it is no longer pure and therefore no longer itself but a blunter thing, whereas magnitude joining magnitude retains its full strength. Enneads II,7,2

But let it be understood how we came to say that body passing through and through another body must produce disintegration, while we make qualities pervade their substances without producing disintegration: the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is bodiless: it may, then, be supposed that as Matter pervades everything so the bodiless qualities associated with it – as long as they are few – have the power of penetration without disintegration. Anything solid would be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a solid has the precise QUALITY which forbids it to penetrate or in that the mere coexistence of too many qualities in Matter (constitutes density and so) produces the same inhibition. Enneads II,7,2

If on the other hand density is itself a QUALITY like what they call corporeity, then the cause will be that particular QUALITY. Enneads II,7,2

This would mean that the qualities of two substances do not bring about the mixing by merely being qualities but by being apt to mixture; nor does Matter refuse to enter into a mixing as Matter but as being associated with a QUALITY repugnant to mixture; and this all the more since it has no magnitude of its own but only does not reject magnitude. Enneads II,7,2

Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn together for vision and the light must be concentrated to suit the size of the pupil; besides, as we are placed farther and farther away from the material mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other QUALITY. Enneads II,8,1

Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a QUALITY to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength. Enneads II,9,18

Why should Reason elaborate yet another Reason, or Intelligence another Intelligence? An indwelling power of making things is in the character of a being not at all points as it should be but making, moving, by reason of some failure in QUALITY. Those whose nature is all blessedness have no more to do than to repose in themselves and be their being. Enneads III,2,1

But the evil-doers also have their punishment: first they pay in that very wolfishness, in the disaster to their human QUALITY: and next there is laid up for them the due of their Kind: living ill here, they will not get off by death; on every precedent through all the line there waits its sequent, reasonable and natural – worse to the bad, better to the good. Enneads III,2,8

But has it not, besides itself entering Matter, brought other beings down? Has it not for example brought Souls into Matter and, in adapting them to its creation, twisted them against their own nature and been the ruin of many of them? And can this be right? The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this Reason-Principle and that it has not adapted them to the creation by perverting them, but has set them in the place here to which their QUALITY entitles them. Enneads III,2,12

In all the changing, there is no change by chance: there is no taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its QUALITY; its QUALITY is the expression of its essential Being: and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one thing the desirable and the just – for if the good and the just are not produced there, where, then, have they their being? Enneads III,2,13

In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors add their own QUALITY, good or bad – for they have more to do than merely repeat the author’s words – in the truer drama which dramatic genius imitates in its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part assigned by the creator of the piece. Enneads III,2,17

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,2,17

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,2,17

Having attached all to this source, we turn to move down again in continuous division: we see the Unity fissuring, as it reaches out into Universality, and yet embracing all in one system so that with all its differentiation it is one multiple living thing – an organism in which each member executes the function of its own nature while it still has its being in that One Whole; fire burns; horse does horse work; men give, each the appropriate act of the peculiar personal QUALITY – and upon the several particular Kinds to which each belongs follow the acts, and the good or evil of the life. Enneads III,3,1

But what is the cause of this initial personality? This question resolves itself into two: are we to make the Creator, if Creator there is, the cause of the moral QUALITY of the individual or does the responsibility lie with the creature? Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility? After all, none is charged in the case of plants brought into being without the perceptive faculties; no one is blamed because animals are not all that men are – which would be like complaining that men are not all that gods are. Reason acquits plant and animal and, their maker; how can it complain because men do not stand above humanity? If the reproach simply means that Man might improve by bringing from his own stock something towards his betterment we must allow that the man failing in this is answerable for his own inferiority: but if the betterment must come not from within the man but from without, from his Author, it is folly to ask more than has been given, as foolish in the case of man as in plant and animal. Enneads III,3,3

In sum nothing can secure to a thing of process the QUALITY of the prior order, loftier than all that is product and amenable to no charge in regard to it: the wonder is, only, that it reaches and gives to the lower at all, and that the traces of its presence should be so noble. And if its outgiving is greater than the lower can appropriate, the debt is the heavier; all the blame must fall upon the unreceptive creature, and Providence be the more exalted. Enneads III,3,3

The QUALITY now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a former life; we may suppose that previous actions have made the Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior in radiance to that which ruled before; the Soul which later will shine out again is for the present at a feebler power. Enneads III,3,4

And any Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the Reason-Principle of Matter which therefore it is able to elaborate to its own purposes, either finding it consonant with itself or bestowing upon it the QUALITY which makes it so. The Reason-Principle of an ox does not occur except in connection with the Matter appropriate to the ox-Kind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which we read takes place; the Soul must lose its nature, the Reason-Principle be transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which once was Man. Enneads III,3,4

But has the Universe, then, no sensation? “It has no Sight,” we read, since it has no eyes, and obviously it has not ears, nostrils, or tongue. Then has it perhaps such a consciousness as we have of our own inner conditions? No: where all is the working out of one nature, there is nothing but still rest; there is not even enjoyment. Sensibility is present as the QUALITY of growth is, unrecognized. But the Nature of the World will be found treated elsewhere; what stands here is all that the question of the moment demands. Enneads III,4,4

But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force and, in the Soul, the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it? The Soul’s QUALITY exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life? Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but becomes the one or the other by force of act? But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious? The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the entire decision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted conditions to their own particular QUALITY. Enneads III,4,5

For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent in the Real-Being of all that authentically is – in the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking; and the QUALITY of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the Soul; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an emotion, will take its name from Love, the Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior to what lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular act directed towards a particular object; but it must not be confused with the Absolute Love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal Soul must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as being of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very offspring; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of the Gods. Enneads III,5,3

This indwelling love is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular Soul, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the QUALITY of its Being. Enneads III,5,4

Still this Love is of mixed QUALITY. On the one hand there is in it the lack which keeps it craving: on the other, it is not entirely destitute; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly nothing absolutely void of good would ever go seeking the good. Enneads III,5,10

The changes known as affections show even more clearly that where the bodily QUALITY is most pronounced susceptibility is at its intensest – earth more susceptible than other elements, and these others again more or less so in the degree of their corporeality: sever the other elements and, failing some preventive force, they join again; but earthy matter divided remains apart indefinitely. Things whose nature represents a diminishment have no power of recuperation after even a slight disturbance and they perish; thus what has most definitely become body, having most closely approximated to non-being lacks the strength to reknit its unity: the heavy and violent crash of body against body works destruction, and weak is powerful against weak, non-being against its like. Enneads III,6,6

It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be opposed in faculty, and in QUALITY to the forces that enter and act upon it. Enneads III,6,8

A further evidence is in our speaking of a fire being burned out, when it has passed over into another element; we do not say that the Matter has been burned out: in other words, modification affects what is subject to dissolution; the acceptance of modification is the path towards dissolution; susceptibility to modification and susceptibility to dissolution go necessarily together. But Matter can never be dissolved. What into? By what process? Still: Matter harbours heat, cold, qualities beyond all count; by these it is differentiated; it holds them as if they were of its very substance and they blend within it – since no QUALITY is found isolated to itself – Matter lies there as the meeting ground of all these qualities with their changes as they act and react in the blend: how, then, can it fail to be modified in keeping? The only escape would be to declare Matter utterly and for ever apart from the qualities it exhibits; but the very notion of Substance implies that any and every thing present in it has some action upon it. Enneads III,6,8

Mirrors and transparent objects, even more, offer a close parallel; they are quite unaffected by what is seen in or through them: material things are reflections, and the Matter on which they appear is further from being affected than is a mirror. Heat and cold are present in Matter, but the Matter itself suffers no change of temperature: growing hot and growing cold have to do only with QUALITY; a QUALITY enters and brings the impassible Substance under a new state – though, by the way, research into nature may show that cold is nothing positive but an absence, a mere negation. The qualities come together into Matter, but in most cases they can have no action upon each other; certainly there can be none between those of unlike scope: what effect, for example, could fragrance have on sweetness or the colour-QUALITY on the QUALITY of form, any QUALITY on another of some unrelated order? The illustration of the mirror may well indicate to us that a given substratum may contain something quite distinct from itself – even something standing to it as a direct contrary – and yet remain entirely unaffected by what is thus present to it or merged into it. Enneads III,6,9

Further: If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must acquire something by the incoming of the new state; it will either adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way different from what it was. Now upon this first incoming QUALITY suppose a second to supervene; the recipient is no longer Matter but a modification of Matter: this second QUALITY, perhaps, departs, but it has acted and therefore leaves something of itself after it; the substratum is still further altered. This process proceeding, the substratum ends by becoming something quite different from Matter; it becomes a thing settled in many modes and many shapes; at once it is debarred from being the all-recipient; it will have closed the entry against many incomers. In other words, the Matter is no longer there: Matter is destructible. Enneads III,6,10

Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata – which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms – Heat (the Principle) annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate QUALITY. Only that is affected which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of self-identity. Enneads III,6,19

So the appellation “Recipient and Nurse” is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its QUALITY as Matter but as being an Ideal-Form; for only the Idea is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile. Enneads III,6,19

Still; by the fact of representing the one as contained within the other, by making Eternity a predicate to the Intellectual Existents – “the Nature of the Exemplar,” we read, “is eternal” – we cancel the identification; Eternity becomes a separate thing, something surrounding that Nature or lying within it or present to it. And the majestic QUALITY of both does not prove them identical: it might be transmitted from the one to the other. So, too, Eternity and the Divine Nature envelop the same entities, yes; but not in the same way: the Divine may be thought of as enveloping parts, Eternity as embracing its content in an unbroken whole, with no implication of part, but merely from the fact that all eternal things are so by conforming to it. Enneads III,7,2

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,7,6

But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a compound of Form and Matter; there is no need for it to possess Matter, hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without QUALITY, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when brought under Reason: Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a Reason-Principle. Enneads III,8,2

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,8,5

This unity of an Essence is not like that of body, which is a unit by the mode of continuous extension, the mode of distinct parts each occupying its own space. Nor is it such a unity as we have dealt with in the case of QUALITY. Enneads IV,2,1

What can justify this assigning of parts to the soul, the distinguishing one part from another? What quantity, or what difference of QUALITY, can apply to a thing defined as a self-consistent whole of unbroken unity? Again, would perception be vested in that leading principle alone, or in the other phases as well? If a given experience bears only on that “leading principle,” it would not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism; if, on the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul – one not constituted for sensation – that phase cannot transmit any experience to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation. Enneads IV,2,2

We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies – toys, things of no great worth – and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their QUALITY is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world (under the soul but above the material) the entire shape (as well as the idea) comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose. Enneads IV,3,10

Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the divisible; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole consisting of parts, each part a self-standing thing having its own peculiar virtue. None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power, then this one same thing (the soul in body) may be at once indivisible and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its own divisible self with, in addition, the QUALITY that it derives from above itself. Enneads IV,3,19

But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes (are not of corporeal nature at all); there is no resemblance to seal impressions, no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust (as of the seal) nor (the acceptance) as in the wax: the process is entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense; and what kind of resistance (or other physical action) can be affirmed in matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or bodily QUALITY as a means? Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing never came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know. Enneads IV,3,26

Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory deals with images. Its differing QUALITY or degree from man to man, we would explain by difference or similarity in the strength of the individual powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily conditions present or absent, producing change and disorder or not – a point this, however, which need not detain us here. Enneads IV,3,29

The two have run into a unity in which, yet, one is the loftier: this loftier knows all; when it breaks from the union, it retains some of the experiences of its companion, but dismisses others; thus we accept the talk of our less valued associates, but, on a change of company, we remember little from the first set and more from those in whom we recognize a higher QUALITY. Enneads IV,3,31

The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is itself of a fine QUALITY, for there will always be some that are better from the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher. Enneads IV,3,32

A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said, it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition would be natural if the bodies with which those souls are vested in the celestial must reproduce the former appearance; supposing the spherical form (of the stars inhabited by souls in the mid-realm) means a change of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive QUALITY of personality: this is not fantastic; conditions changing need not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation, this too would mean recognition. Enneads IV,4,5

A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the QUALITY of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in them. Enneads IV,4,23

Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences – determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a reigning heat or cold – does that give us a reasonable explanation of envy, jealously, acts of violence? Or, if it does, what, at any rate, are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle blood, treasure-trove? An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from any corporeal QUALITY that could enter the body and soul of a living thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars, temple-strippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained. Enneads IV,4,31

All that forwards life or some other useful purpose is to be ascribed to the transmission characteristic of the All; it is something flowing from the major of an integral to its minor. Where we think we see the transmission of some force unfavourable to the production of living beings, the flaw must be found in the inability of the subject to take in what would serve it: for what happens does not happen upon a void; there is always specific form and QUALITY; anything that could be affected must have an underlying nature definite and characterized. The inevitable blendings, further, have their constructive effect, every element adding something contributory to the life. Then again some influence may come into play at the time when the forces of a beneficent nature are not acting: the co-ordination of the entire system of things does not always allow to each several entity everything that it needs: and further we ourselves add a great deal to what is transmitted to us. Enneads IV,4,38

For, in sum: Firstly, intentions are not to be considered as the operative causes; necessities inherent in the nature of things account for all that comes from the other realm; it is a matter of the inevitable relation of parts, and, besides, all is the sequence to the living existence of a unity. Secondly, there is the large contribution made by the individual. Thirdly, each several communication, good in itself, takes another QUALITY in the resultant combination. Fourthly, the life in the kosmos does not look to the individual but to the whole. Finally, there is Matter, the underlie, which being given one thing receives it as something else, and is unable to make the best of what it takes. Enneads IV,4,39

We have learned, further, something of our human standing; we know that we too accomplish within the All a work not confined to the activity and receptivity of body in relation to body; we know that we bring to it that higher nature of ours, linked as we are by affinities within us towards the answering affinities outside us; becoming by our soul and the conditions of our kind thus linked – or, better, being linked by Nature – with our next highest in the celestial or demonic realm, and thence onwards with those above the Celestials, we cannot fail to manifest our QUALITY. Still, we are not all able to offer the same gifts or to accept identically: if we do not possess good, we cannot bestow it; nor can we ever purvey any good thing to one that has no power of receiving good. Anyone that adds his evil to the total of things is known for what he is and, in accordance with his kind, is pressed down into the evil which he has made his own, and hence, upon death, goes to whatever region fits his QUALITY – and all this happens under the pull of natural forces. Enneads IV,4,45

In a living being of small scope the parts vary but slightly, and have but a faint individual consciousness, and, unless possibly in a few and for a short time, are not themselves alive. But in a living universe, of high expanse, where every entity has vast scope and many of the members have life, there must be wider movement and greater changes. We see the sun and the moon and the other stars shifting place and course in an ordered progression. It is therefore within reason that the souls, also, of the All should have their changes, not retaining unbrokenly the same QUALITY, but ranged in some analogy with their action and experience – some taking rank as head and some as foot in a disposition consonant with the Universal Being which has its degrees in better and less good. A soul, which neither chooses the highest that is here, nor has lent itself to the lowest, is one which has abandoned another, a purer, place, taking this sphere in free election. Enneads IV,4,45

But this is saying that the sympathetic QUALITY of the universe depends upon its being one living thing, and that our amenability to experience depends upon our belonging integrally to that unity; would it not follow that continuity is a condition of any perception of a remote object? The explanation is that continuity and its concomitant, the bridging substance, come into play because a living being must be a continuous thing, but that, none the less, the receiving of impression is not an essentially necessary result of continuity; if it were, everything would receive such impression from everything else, and if thing is affected by thing in various separate orders, there can be no further question of any universal need of intervening substance. Enneads IV,5,2

Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming, could it exist in the absence of its container? There is a distinction to be made: if it is a QUALITY, some QUALITY of some substance, then light, equally with other qualities, will need a body in which to lodge: if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising from something else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there be no neighbouring body but, if that is possible, a blank void which it will overleap and so appear on the further side: it is powerful, and may very well pass over unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall, nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes its light; there is no reason why they should draw the light from its source and speed it onwards. Enneads IV,5,6

Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity (disregarding the question of any constituent elements): they will tell us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a self-springing life – since matter is without QUALITY – but that life is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being (by hypothesis) outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body would simply force us to repeat our former analysis. Enneads IV,7,3

Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy and light. If it were material, its QUALITY – and the colour it must have – would produce one invariable effect and not the variety actually observed. Enneads IV,7,4

Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the added material must be either soul or soulless body: if soul, whence and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined (to the soul which by hypothesis is body); if soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up before? Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of our material mass? And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul? Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body, characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being; soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its QUALITY, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a QUALITY quite independent of quantity. Enneads IV,7,5

Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues – moral excellence (Sophrosyne), justice, courage and so forth? All these could be only some kind of rarefied body (pneuma), or blood in some form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that pneuma; moral QUALITY would be its happy blending; beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough with the idea of rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft around it: what could it care about a just distribution? Then consider the objects of the soul’s contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul’s contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux. Enneads IV,7,8

In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this school leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their efficiency is clear from certain reflections: It will be admitted that QUALITY and quantity are two different things, that body is always a thing of quantity but not always a thing of QUALITY: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied that QUALITY, being a different thing from quantity, is a different thing from body. Obviously QUALITY could not be body when it has not quantity as all body must; and, again, as we have said, body, any thing of mass, on being reduced to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but the QUALITY it possessed remains intact in every particle – for instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck – this shows that sweetness and all other qualities are not body. Enneads IV,7,8

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider of motion to all else: it moves by its own QUALITY, and every living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life that, being essentially innate, can never fail. Enneads IV,7,9

Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul’s method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no longer be charged with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been deprived of its natural standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the course of nature but must be its characteristic QUALITY, neither failing ever nor ever beginning. Enneads IV,8,2

In the Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made: there is the Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living organism contains potentially all the other forms; and there are the forms thus potentially included now realized as individuals. We may think of it as a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms of life; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living QUALITY: or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the great fire and the minor fires; yet all have the one common essence, that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from which the essence of the universal fire proceeds. Enneads IV,8,3

No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To its QUALITY of being intellective it adds the QUALITY by which it attains its particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as everything must that exists among real beings. Enneads IV,8,3

But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity – much as a multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or modification of body, we could not wonder that this QUALITY – this one thing from one source – should be present in many objects. The same reasoning would apply if soul were an effect (or manifestation) of the Conjoint. Enneads IV,9,4

It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to which it is the natural preliminary: the seeker is soul and it must start from a true notion of the nature and QUALITY by which soul may undertake the search; it must study itself in order to learn whether it has the faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the object proposed, whether in fact we ought to seek; for if the object is alien the search must be futile, while if there is relationship the solution of our problem is at once desirable and possible. Enneads V,1,1

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine QUALITY of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded. Enneads V,1,3

We must be more explicit: The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring, carrying onward much of its QUALITY, in other words that there be something in its likeness as the sun’s rays tell of the sun. Yet The One is not an Intellectual-Principle; how then does it engender an Intellectual-Principle? Simply by the fact that in its self-quest it has vision: this very seeing is the Intellectual-Principle. Any perception of the external indicates either sensation or intellection, sensation symbolized by a line, intellection by a circle… (corrupt passage). Enneads V,1,7

A being of this QUALITY, like the Intellectual-Principle, must be felt to be worthy of the all-pure: it could not derive from any other than from the firsfirst prinprinciple of all; as it comes into existence, all other beings must be simultaneously engendered – all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual realm. And it still remains pregnant with this offspring; for it has, so to speak, drawn all within itself again, holding them lest they fall away towards Matter to be “brought up in the House of Rhea” (in the realm of flux). This is the meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the (necessary and eternal) outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within itself, is Soul (the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind). Enneads V,1,7

Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of soul, but (above the life-principle) there is the soul perfected as containing Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the soul, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated – this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. We may not seek any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of all space: its distinct QUALITY, its separateness, its immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all of the bodily order. This is why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the soul around it from without – understand that phase of soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual – and of ourselves that the charioteer’s head reaches upwards towards the heights. Enneads V,1,10

Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent, is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent in very essence but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not (fully realised) Intellectual-Principle; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of the multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold QUALITY with which it has of its own act invested the simplex. Enneads V,3,11

How then does it produce what it does not contain? Certainly not at haphazard and certainly not by selection. How then? We have observed that anything that may spring from the One must be different from it. Differing, it is not One, since then it would be the Source. If unity has given place to duality, from that moment there is multiplicity; for here is variety side by side with identity, and this imports QUALITY and all the rest. Enneads V,3,15

All life belongs to it, life brilliant and perfect; thus all in it is at once life-principle and Intellectual-Principle, nothing in it aloof from either life or intellect: it is therefore self-sufficing and seeks nothing: and if it seeks nothing this is because it has in itself what, lacking, it must seek. It has, therefore, its Good within itself, either by being of that order – in what we have called its life and intellect – or in some other QUALITY or character going to produce these. Enneads V,3,16

Thus it is not a simplex; it is manifold; it exhibits a certain composite QUALITY – within the Intellectual or divine order, of course – as the principle that sees the manifold. It is, further, itself simultaneously object and agent of intellection and is on that count also a duality: and it possesses besides another object of intellection in the Order following upon itself. Enneads V,4,2

Thus we may not look for the Intellectual objects (the Ideas) outside of the Intellectual-Principle, treating them as impressions of reality upon it: we cannot strip it of truth and so make its objects unknowable and non-existent and in the end annul the Intellectual-Principle itself. We must provide for knowledge and for truth; we must secure reality; being must become knowable essentially and not merely in that knowledge of QUALITY which could give us a mere image or vestige of the reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, absorption. Enneads V,5,2

Thus we rob it of its very being as The Absolute Good if we ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or goodness. The only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no QUALITY or content there but to permit only the “It is” in which we pretend to no affirmation of non-existent attribute: there is an ignorant praise which, missing the true description, drags in qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy must guard against attaching to the Supreme what is later and lower: moving above all that order, it is the cause and source of all these, and is none of them. Enneads V,5,13

For, once more, the nature of the Good is not such as to make it all things or a thing among all: that would range it under the same classification with them all and it would differ, thus, only by its individual QUALITY, some specialty, some addition. At once it becomes not a unity but a duality; there is one common element not good and another element that is good; but a combination so made up of good and not good cannot be the purely good, the primarily good; the primarily good must be that principle in which the better element has more effectively participated and so attained its goodness. Any good thing has become so by communion; but that in which it has communion is not a thing among the things of the all; therefore the Good is not a thing of the All. Enneads V,5,13

Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. In the proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the soul and bringing to it a light from that greater light which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting upon the QUALITY of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself alone, and thus is not even to be called a Reason-Principle but is the creative source of the very first Reason-Principle which is the Beauty to which Soul serves as Matter. Enneads V,8,3

This prior, then, is the Intellectual-Principle, the veritable, abiding and not fluctuant since not taking intellectual QUALITY from outside itself. By what image thus, can we represent it? We have nowhere to go but to what is less. Only from itself can we take an image of it; that is, there can be no representation of it, except in the sense that we represent gold by some portion of gold – purified, either actually or mentally, if it be impure – insisting at the same time that this is not the total thing-gold, but merely the particular gold of a particular parcel. In the same way we learn in this matter from the purified Intellect in ourselves or, if you like, from the Gods and the glory of the Intellect in them. Enneads V,8,3

Of those looking upon that Being and its content, and able to see, all take something but not all the same vision always: intently gazing, one sees the fount and principle of Justice, another is filled with the sight of Moral Wisdom, the original of that QUALITY as found, sometimes at least, among men, copied by them in their degree from the divine virtue which, covering all the expanse, so to speak, of the Intellectual Realm is seen, last attainment of all, by those who have known already many splendid visions. Enneads V,8,10

Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original. Since then the All-Soul – to use the more familiar term – since Aphrodite herself is so beautiful, what name can we give to that other? If Soul is so lovely in its own right, of what QUALITY must that prior be? And since its being is derived, what must that power be from which the Soul takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent? We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly. Enneads V,8,13

This universe, characteristically participant in images, shows how the image differs from the authentic beings: against the variability of the one order, there stands the unchanging QUALITY of the other, self-situate, not needing space because having no magnitude, holding an existent intellective and self-sufficing. The body-kind seeks its endurance in another kind; the Intellectual-Principle, sustaining by its marvellous Being, the things which of themselves must fall, does not itself need to look for a staying ground. Enneads V,9,5

In that Intellectual Kosmos, where all is one total, every entity that can be singled out is an intellective essence and a participant in life: thus, identity and difference, movement and rest with the object resting or moving, essence and QUALITY, all have essential existence. For every real being must be in actuality not merely in potentiality and therefore the nature of each essence is inherent in it. Enneads V,9,10

The crafts, such as building and carpentry which give us Matter in wrought forms, may be said, in that they draw on pattern, to take their principles from that realm and from the thinking There: but in that they bring these down into contact with the sense-order, they are not wholly in the Intellectual: they are founded in man. So agriculture, dealing with material growths: so medicine watching over physical health; so the art which aims at corporeal strength and well-being: power and well-being mean something else There, the fearlessness and self-sufficing QUALITY of all that lives. Enneads V,9,11

Supposing we grant that all things known as substances are homogeneous as possessing something denied to the other genera, what precisely is this something, this individuality, this subject which is never a predicate, this thing not present in any thing as in a subject, this thing which does not owe its essential character to any other thing, as a QUALITY takes character from a body and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to motion and motion to the moved? The Second Substance is, it is true, a predicate. But predication in this case signifies a different relation from that just considered; it reveals the genus inherent in the subject and the subject’s essential character, whereas whiteness is predicated of a thing in the sense of being present in the thing. Enneads VI,1,3

But what will emerge from the relation of like to like? Nothing will emerge. Likeness is the inherence of qualitative identity; its entire content is the QUALITY present in the two objects. Enneads VI,1,6

From eQUALITY, similarly, nothing emerges. The relation merely presupposes the existence of a quantitative identity; – is nothing but our judgement comparing objects essentially independent and concluding, “This and that have the same magnitude, the same QUALITY; this has produced that; this is superior to that.” Enneads VI,1,6

Again, what meaning can sitting and standing have apart from sitter and stander? The term “habit” either implies a having, in which case it signifies possession, or else it arises from something had, and so denotes QUALITY; and similarly with disposition. Enneads VI,1,6

What then will be the common ground in habit, disposition, passive QUALITY, figure, shape? In light, thick and lean? If we hold this common ground to be a power adapting itself to the forms of habits, dispositions and physical capacities, a power which gives the possessor whatever capacities he has, we have no plausible explanation of incapacities. Besides, how are figure and the shape of a given thing to be regarded as a power? Moreover, at this, Being will have no power qua Being but only when Quality has been added to it; and the activities of those substances which are activities in the highest degree, will be traceable to Quality, although they are autonomous and owe their essential character to powers wholly their own! Enneads VI,1,10

Perhaps, however, qualities are conditioned by powers which are posterior to the substances as such (and so do not interfere with their essential activities). Boxing, for example, is not a power of man qua man; reasoning is: therefore reasoning, on this hypothesis, is not QUALITY but a natural possession of the mature human being; it therefore is called a QUALITY only by analogy. Thus, Quality is a power which adds the property of being qualia to substances already existent. Enneads VI,1,10

But how can a mere failure be a power? Doubtless the truth is that every QUALITY performs its own function independently of a standard; for in no case could it produce an effect outside of its power. Enneads VI,1,10

But then, how do we account for the powers? We may doubtless remark that even the natural boxer is so by being constituted in a particular way; similarly, with the man unable to box: to generalize, the QUALITY is a characteristic non-essential. Whatever is seen to apply alike to Being and to non-Being, as do heat and whiteness and colours generally, is either different from Being – is, for example, an Act of Being – or else is some secondary of Being, derived from it, contained in it, its image and likeness. Enneads VI,1,10

But triangularity is a QUALITY of that in which it is present; it is however no longer triangularity as such, but the triangularity present in that definite object and modified in proportion to its success in shaping that object. Enneads VI,1,10

But if these considerations are sound, why has Quality more than one species? What is the ground for distinguishing between habit and disposition, seeing that no differentia of Quality is involved in permanence and non-permanence? A disposition of any kind is sufficient to constitute a QUALITY; permanence is a mere external addition. It might however be urged that dispositions are but incomplete “forms” – if the term may pass – habits being complete ones. But incomplete, they are not qualities; if already qualities, the permanence is an external addition. Enneads VI,1,11

How do physical powers form a distinct species? If they are classed as qualities in virtue of being powers, power, we have seen, is not a necessary concomitant of qualities. If, however, we hold that the natural boxer owes his QUALITY to a particular disposition, power is something added and does not contribute to the QUALITY, since power is found in habits also. Enneads VI,1,11

Another point: why is natural ability to be distinguished from that acquired by learning? Surely, if both are qualities, they cannot be differentiae of Quality: gained by practice or given in nature, it is the same ability; the differentia will be external to Quality; it cannot be deduced from the Ideal Form of boxing. Whether some qualities as distinguished from others are derived from experience is immaterial; the source of the QUALITY makes no difference – none, I mean, pointing to variations and differences of Quality. Enneads VI,1,11

And what part is played by the individual form? If it constitutes the individual’s specific character, it is not a QUALITY; if, however, it is what makes an object beautiful or ugly after the specific form has been determined, then it involves a Reason-Principle. Enneads VI,1,11

Again, if “at Athens” means “is at Athens,” then the “is” as well as the place belongs to the predicate; but this cannot be right: we do not regard “is a QUALITY” as predicate, but “a QUALITY.” Enneads VI,1,14

We have to ask ourselves whether there are not certain Acts which without the addition of a time-element will be thought of as imperfect and therefore classed with motions. Take for instance living and life. The life of a definite person implies a certain adequate period, just as his happiness is no merely instantaneous thing. Life and happiness are, in other words, of the nature ascribed to Motion: both therefore must be treated as motions, and Motion must be regarded as a unity, a single genus; besides the quantity and QUALITY belonging to Substance we must take count of the motion manifested in it. Enneads VI,1,19

If the possession of three dimensions is given as the characteristic of body, then we are dealing simply with mathematical body. If resistance is added, we are no longer considering a unity: besides, resistance is a QUALITY or at least derived from Quality. Enneads VI,1,26

Most surprising of all is that, while they make sense-perception their guarantee of everything, they hold that the Real cannot be grasped by sensation; – for they have no right to assign to Matter even so much as resistance, since resistance is a QUALITY. If however they profess to grasp Reality by Intellect, is it not a strange Intellect which ranks Matter above itself, giving Reality to Matter and not to itself? And as their “Intellect” has, thus, no Real-Existence, how can it be trustworthy when it speaks of things higher than itself, things to which it has no affinity whatever? But an adequate treatment of this entity (Matter) and of substrates will be found elsewhere. Enneads VI,1,28

If we had to ascertain the nature of body and the place it holds in the universe, surely we should take some sample of body, say stone, and examine into what constituents it may be divided. There would be what we think of as the substrate of stone, its quantity – in this case, a magnitude; its QUALITY – for example, the colour of stone. As with stone, so with every other body: we should see that in this thing, body, there are three distinguishable characteristics – the pseudo-substance, the quantity, the QUALITY – though they all make one and are only logically trisected, the three being found to constitute the unit thing, body. If motion were equally inherent in its constitution, we should include this as well, and the four would form a unity, the single body depending upon them all for its unity and characteristic nature. Enneads VI,2,4

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,2,17

Does this imply that the nature of Being is not good? Not good, to begin with, in the sense in which The First is good, but in another sense of the word: moreover, Being does not possess its goodness as a QUALITY but as a constituent. Enneads VI,2,17

Being, thus, exhibits every shape and every QUALITY; it is not seen as a thing determined by some one particular QUALITY; there could not be one only, since the principle of Difference is there; and since Identity is equally there, it must be simultaneously one and many. And so Being is; such it always was: unity-with-plurality appears in all its species, as witness all the variations of magnitude, shape and QUALITY. Clearly nothing may legitimately be excluded (from Being), for the whole must be complete in the higher sphere which, otherwise, would not be the whole. Enneads VI,2,21

But Sensible Substance is never found apart from magnitude and QUALITY: how then do we proceed to separate these accidents? If we subtract them – magnitude, figure, colour, dryness, moistness – what is there left to be regarded as Substance itself? All the substances under consideration are, of course, qualified. Enneads VI,3,8

What then can this “part” be? Matter may be suggested. But are we actually to maintain that the particular sensible substance consists of a conglomeration of qualities and Matter, while Sensible Substance as a whole is merely the sum of these coagulations in the uniform Matter, each one separately forming a quale or a quantum or else a thing of many qualities? Is it true to say that everything whose absence leaves subsistence incomplete is a part of the particular substance, while all that is accidental to the substance already existent takes independent rank and is not submerged in the mixture which constitutes this so-called substance? I decline to allow that whatever combines in this way with anything else is Substance if it helps to produce a single mass having quantity and QUALITY, whereas taken by itself and divorced from this complementary function it is a QUALITY: not everything which composes the amalgam is Substance, but only the amalgam as a whole. Enneads VI,3,8

Again, why is not beauty classed as a relative? Beauty, unlike greatness, we regard as absolute and as a QUALITY; “more beautiful” is the relative. Yet even the term “beautiful” may be attached to something which in a given relation may appear ugly: the beauty of man, for example, is ugliness when compared with that of the gods; “the most beautiful of monkeys,” we may quote, “is ugly in comparison with any other type.” Nonetheless, a thing is beautiful in itself; as related to something else it is either more or less beautiful. Enneads VI,3,11

What, we may be asked, is the limit of this progression? What, we retort, is the limit of beauty, or of heat? Whatever limit you impose, there is always a “hotter”; yet “hotter” is accounted a relative, “hot” a pure QUALITY. Enneads VI,3,12

It may be urged that the triangle is essentially a particular shape. Then what prevents our ranking the sphere also as a QUALITY? To proceed on these lines would lead us to the conclusion that geometry is concerned not with magnitudes but with Quality. But this conclusion is untenable; geometry is the study of magnitudes. The differences of magnitudes do not eliminate the existence of magnitudes as such, any more than the differences of substances annihilate the substances themselves. Enneads VI,3,14

Again, when I find Quality bound up with Substance, I regard it as substantial QUALITY: I am not less, but far more, disposed to see in figures or shapes (qualitative) varieties of Quantity. Besides, if we are not to regard them as varieties of magnitude, to what genus are we to assign them? Suppose, then, that we allow differences of magnitude; we commit ourselves to a specific classification of the magnitudes so differentiated. Enneads VI,3,14

It remains to decide whether there can be any differentia derived from the genus to which the differentiated thing belongs, or whether it must of necessity belong to another genus? The former alternative would produce differentiae of things derived from the same genus as the differentiae themselves – for example, qualities of qualities. Virtue and vice are two states differing in QUALITY: the states are qualities, and their differentiae qualities – unless indeed it be maintained that the state undifferentiated is not a QUALITY, that the differentia creates the QUALITY. Enneads VI,3,18

But how are we to classify such terms as “not white”? If “not white” signifies some other colour, it is a QUALITY. But if it is merely a negation of an enumeration of things not white, it will be either a meaningless sound, or else a name or definition of something actual: if a sound, it is a kind of motion; if a name or definition, it is a relative, inasmuch as names and definitions are significant. But if not only the things enumerated are in some one genus, but also the propositions and terms in question must be each of them significative of some genus, then we shall assert that negative propositions and terms posit certain things within a restricted field and deny others. Perhaps, however, it would be better, in view of their composite nature, not to include the negations in the same genus as the affirmations. Enneads VI,3,19

Passivity, while it lasts, is not a QUALITY but a motion; when it is a past experience remaining in one’s possession, it is a QUALITY; if one ceases to possess the experience then regarded as a finished occurrence, one is considered to have been moved – in other words, to have been in Motion. But in none of these cases is it necessary to conceive of anything but Motion; the idea of time should be excluded; even present time has no right to be introduced. Enneads VI,3,19

It remains to consider whether blushing should be referred to Quality, even though the person blushing is not included in this category. The fact of becoming flushed is rightly not referred to Quality; for it involves passivity – in short, Motion. But if one has ceased to become flushed and is actually red, this is surely a case of Quality, which is independent of time. How indeed are we to define Quality but by the aspect which a substance presents? By predicating of a man redness, we clearly ascribe to him a QUALITY. Enneads VI,3,19

We shall accordingly maintain that states alone, and not dispositions, constitute qualities: thus, “hot” is a QUALITY but not “growing hot,” “ill” but not “turning ill.” Enneads VI,3,19

We have to ascertain whether there is not to every QUALITY a contrary. In the case of virtue and vice, even the mean appears to be contrary to the extremes. Enneads VI,3,20

But when we turn to colours, we do not find the intermediates so related. If we regard the intermediates as blendings of the extremes, we must not posit any contrariety other than that between black and white, but must show that all other colours are combinations of these two. Contrariety however demands that there be some one distinct QUALITY in the intermediates, though this QUALITY may be seen to arise from a combination. Enneads VI,3,20

Suppose that we say “great diversity” instead of “the greatest”: if “great” is equivalent to greater and implies a less, immediate contraries will again escape us; if, on the other hand, we mean strictly “great” and assume that every QUALITY shows a great divergence from every other, we must not suppose that the divergence can be measured by a comparative. Enneads VI,3,20

Thus, Motion is conditioned, not only by the objects in which it occurs, but also by its origins and its course, and it is a distinctive mark of Motion to be always qualified and to take its QUALITY from the moved. Enneads VI,3,23

But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed, then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before the All was in being, before there was any All? And who can accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all that absence of extension, extending over a universe? We may perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an accidental attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take magnitude even in the move of accident? We cannot think of soul being diffused as a QUALITY is, say sweetness or colour, for while these are actual states of the masses affected so that they show that QUALITY at every point, none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of body and known only as in body; such QUALITY is necessarily of a definite extension. Further, the colour at any point is independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply omnipresence. Enneads VI,4,1

A hand may very well control an entire mass, a long plank, or anything of that sort; the control is effective throughout and yet is not distributed, unit for unit, over the object of control: the power is felt to reach over the whole area, though the hand is only hand-long, not taking the extension of the mass it wields; lengthen the object and, provided that the total is within the strength, the power handles the new load with no need of distributing itself over the increased area. Now let us eliminate the corporeal mass of the hand, retaining the power it exerted: is not that power, the impartible, present integrally over the entire area of control? Or imagine a small luminous mass serving as centre to a transparent sphere, so that the light from within shows upon the entire outer surface, otherwise unlit: we surely agree that the inner core of light, intact and immobile, reaches over the entire outer extension; the single light of that small centre illuminates the whole field. The diffused light is not due to any bodily magnitude of that central point which illuminates not as body but as body lit, that is by another kind of power than corporeal QUALITY: let us then abstract the corporeal mass, retaining the light as power: we can no longer speak of the light in any particular spot; it is equally diffused within and throughout the entire sphere. We can no longer even name the spot it occupied so as to say whence it came or how it is present; we can but seek and wonder as the search shows us the light simultaneously present at each and every point in the sphere. So with the sunlight: looking to the corporeal mass you are able to name the source of the light shining through all the air, but what you see is one identical light in integral omnipresence. Consider too the refraction of light by which it is thrown away from the line of incidence; yet, direct or refracted, it is one and the same light. And supposing, as before, that the sun were simply an unembodied illuminant, the light would no longer be fixed to any one definite spot: having no starting point, no centre of origin, it would be an integral unity omnipresent. Enneads VI,4,7

Further, a vestigial cut off from its source disappears – for example, a reflected light – and in general an emanant loses its QUALITY once it is severed from the original which it reproduces: just so the powers derived from that source must vanish if they do not remain attached to it. Enneads VI,4,9

The soul, sprung from the divine, lay self-enclosed at peace, true to its own QUALITY; but its neighbour, in uproar through weakness, instable of its own nature and beaten upon from without, cries, at first to itself and afterwards upon the living total, spreading the disorder at large. Thus, at an assembly the Elders may sit in tranquil meditation, but an unruly populace, crying for food and casting up a host of grievances, will bring the whole gathering into ugly turmoil; when this sort of people hold their peace so that a word from a man of sense may reach them, some passable order is restored and the baser part ceases to prevail; otherwise the silence of the better allows the rabble to rule, the distracted assembly unable to take the word from above. Enneads VI,4,15

You see something which you pronounce to be a unity; that thing possesses also size, form, and a host of other characteristics you might name; size, bulk, sweetness, bitterness and other Ideas are actually present in the thing; it surely cannot be thought that, while every conceivable QUALITY has Real-Being, quantity (Number) has not and that while continuous quantity exists, discrete quantity does not and this though continuous quantity is measured by the discrete. No: as size by the presence of Magnitude, and Oneness by the presence of Unity, so with Duality and all the other numerical modes. Enneads VI,6,14

To ask how those forms of life come to be There is simply asking how that heaven came to be; it is asking whence comes life, whence the All-Life, whence the All-Soul, whence collective Intellect: and the answer is that There no indigence or impotence can exist but all must be teeming, seething, with life. All flows, so to speak, from one fount not to be thought of as one breath or warmth but rather as one QUALITY englobing and safeguarding all qualities – sweetness with fragrance, wine – QUALITY and the savours of everything that may be tasted, all colours seen, everything known to touch, all that ear may hear, all melodies, every rhythm. Enneads VI,7,12

But what is the common element in them? Derivation from the First is not enough to procure identical QUALITY; there must be some element held in common by the things derived: one source may produce many differing things as also one outgoing thing may take difference in various recipients: what enters into the First Act is different from what that Act transmits and there is difference, again, in the effect here. Nonetheless every item may be good in a degree of its own. To what, then, is the highest degree due? But first we must ask whether Life is a good, bare Life, or only the Life streaming Thence, very different from the Life known here? Once more, then, what constitutes the goodness of Life? The Life of The Good, or rather not its Life but that given forth from it. Enneads VI,7,18

Since we are not entitled to make desire the test by which to decide on the nature and QUALITY of the good, we may perhaps have recourse to judgement. Enneads VI,7,20

It is surely out of place to ask why a thing good in its own nature should be a good; we can hardly suppose it dissatisfied with its own goodness so that it must strain outside its essential QUALITY to the good which it effectually is. Enneads VI,7,27

But since Thence come the beauty and light in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. Intellectual-Principle was raised thus to that Supreme and remains with it, happy in that presence. Soul too, that soul which as possessing knowledge and vision was capable, clung to what it saw; and as its vision so its rapture; it saw and was stricken; but having in itself something of that principle it felt its kinship and was moved to longing like those stirred by the image of the beloved to desire of the veritable presence. Lovers here mould themselves to the beloved; they seek to increase their attraction of person and their likeness of mind; they are unwilling to fall short in moral QUALITY or in other graces lest they be distasteful to those possessing such merit – and only among such can true love be. In the same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. The soul which has never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love – perhaps unawares – it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter, befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could never venture into the mud of body to be soiled, annulled. Enneads VI,7,31

Are we, however, to make freedom and self-disposal exclusive to Intellectual-Principle as engaged in its characteristic Act, Intellectual-Principle unassociated, or do they belong also to soul acting under that guidance and performing act of virtue? If freedom is to be allowed to soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours? Because there is war, we perform some brave feat; how is that our free act since had there been no war it could not have been performed? So in all cases of fine conduct; there is always some impinging event leading out our QUALITY to show itself in this or that act. And suppose virtue itself given the choice whether to find occasion for its exercise – war evoking courage; wrong, so that it may establish justice and good order; poverty that it may show independence – or to remain inactive, everything going well, it would choose the peace of inaction, nothing calling for its intervention, just as a physician like Hippocrates would prefer no one to stand in need of his skill. Enneads VI,8,5

If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have untrammelled self-disposal? Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and reasoning? But in setting freedom in those preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal attributed to virtue as state or disposition. Are we to put it that virtue comes in to restore the disordered soul, taming passions and appetites? In what sense, at that, can we hold our goodness to be our own free act, our fine conduct to be uncompelled? In that we will and adopt, in that this entry of virtue prepares freedom and self-disposal, ending our slavery to the masters we have been obeying. If then virtue is, as it were, a second Intellectual-Principle, and heightens the soul to Intellectual QUALITY, then, once more, our freedom is found to lie not in act but in Intellectual-Principle immune from act. Enneads VI,8,5

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,8,9

Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the nature of a thing, its QUALITY, its cause or its essential being. In this case the being – in so far as we can use the word – is knowable only by its sequents: the question as to cause asks for a principle beyond, but the principle of all has no principle; the question as to QUALITY would be looking for an attribute in that which has none: the question as to nature shows only that we must ask nothing about it but merely take it into the mind if we may, with the knowledge gained that nothing can be permissibly connected with it. Enneads VI,8,11

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,8,11

Now if there is thus an Intellectual-Principle before all things, their founding principle, this cannot be a thing lying subject to chance – multiple, no doubt, but a concordance, ordered so to speak into oneness. Such a multiple – the co-ordination of all particulars and consisting of all the Reason-Principles of the universe gathered into the closest union – this cannot be a thing of chance, a thing “happening so to be.” It must be of a very different nature, of the very contrary nature, separated from the other by all the difference between reason and reasonless chance. And if the Source is precedent even to this, it must be continuous with this reasoned secondary so that the two be correspondent; the secondary must participate in the prior, be an expression of its will, be a power of it: that higher therefore (as above the ordering of reason) is without part or interval (implied by reasoned arrangement), is a one – all Reason-Principle, one number, a One greater than its product, more powerful, having no higher or better. Thus the Supreme can derive neither its being nor the QUALITY of its being. God Himself, therefore, is what He is, self-related, self-tending; otherwise He becomes outward-tending, other-seeking – who cannot but be wholly self-poised. Enneads VI,8,17

Generative of all, The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor QUALITY nor intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it is the self-defined, unique in form or, better, formless, existing before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are attachments of Being and make Being the manifold it is. Enneads VI,9,3

Neither can it have will to anything; it is a Beyond-Good, not even to itself a good but to such beings only as may be of QUALITY to have part with it. Nor has it Intellection; that would comport diversity: nor Movement; it is prior to Movement as to Intellection. Enneads VI,9,6

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,9,7

In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, or rather we are merged into that self in us which has the QUALITY of that order. It is a knowing of the self restored to its purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. In this seeing, we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there duality; by our holding away, the Supreme is set outside. This is why the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of the Supreme which is to be known only as one with ourselves. Enneads VI,9,10