Reason

But if Soul (in man) and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of its own which REASON manifests. Enneads I,1,

REASON, then, does not permit us to assign all the affections to the Couplement. Enneads I,1,

There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of REASON is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of REASON that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord. Enneads I,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,

Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of REASON? But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make REASON an essential to the happiness in a living being: “When you insist on REASON, is it because REASON is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?” Enneads I,4,

If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: REASON becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue. Enneads I,4,

For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite different, something of quite another class: REASON cannot be itself one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be nobler than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so highly. Enneads I,4,

But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus: It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also REASON and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life. Enneads I,4,

When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, REASON and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination. Enneads I,4,

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of REASON and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by REASON, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form. Enneads I,6,

The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and REASON, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty. Enneads I,6,

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

Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that (inferior) soul, given forth (not directly from God but) from the divine beings in the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way of that inferior soul that we are associated with the body (which therefore will not be persistent); for the higher soul which constitutes the We is the principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also of our existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine REASON in support of the existence. Enneads: II I

The truth may be resumed in this way: There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is interwoven throughout the entire universe: another phase possesses sensation, while yet another includes the REASON which is concerned with the objects of sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul and giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital. Enneads II,2,

The ensouled fall into two classes. The one kind has a motion of its own, but haphazard like that of horses between the shafts but before their driver sets the course; they are set right by the whip. In the Living-Being possessed of REASON, the nature-principle includes the driver; where the driver is intelligent, it takes in the main a straight path to a set end. But both classes are members of the All and co-operate towards the general purpose. Enneads II,3,

But these REASON-Principles, contained in the Soul, are they Thoughts? And if so, by what process does the Soul create in accordance with these Thoughts? It is upon Matter that this act of the REASON is exercised; and what acts physically is not an intellectual operation or a vision, but a power modifying matter, not conscious of it but merely acting upon it: the REASON-Principle, in other words, acts much like a force producing a figure or pattern upon water – that of a circle, suppose, where the formation of the ring is conditioned by something distinct from that force itself. Enneads II,3,

Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and (through them) to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine REASON, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form. Enneads II,4,

All knowledge comes by REASON and the Intellectual Act; in this case REASON conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure: therefore the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with the alien reason. Enneads II,4,

With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which REASON rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing. Enneads II,4,

But this argument seems to make no difference between the indefinite object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none? In any object in which REASON and Matter co-exist we distinguish between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate subject: but where Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not present; for it is a REASON-Principle and could not lodge in the indeterminate object without at once annulling the indeterminateness. Enneads II,4,

Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its natural opposition to REASON-Principle. REASON is REASON and nothing else; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to REASON, is Indeterminateness and nothing else. Enneads II,4,

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

It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic Existences; it has even failed to come up with the things to which a spurious existence can be attributed – for it is not even a phantasm of REASON as these are – how is it possible to include it under any mode of Being? And if it falls under no mode of Being, what can it actually be? Enneads: II V.

And if it is a REASON-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all the qualities. If this REASON-Principle is to be no mere principle of definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable REASON constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body: thus the body will be Matter associated with an indwelling REASON-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded with that other Principle in man – treated elsewhere – which dwells in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual Principle. Enneads: II VII.

To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the REASON-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its REASON from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the REASON-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection. Enneads: II VIII.

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,

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

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

The Intellectual Sphere (the Divine) alone is REASON, and there can never be another Sphere that is REASON and nothing else; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be REASON: yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine REASON; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence. Enneads III,2,

But there are degrees of participation: here no more than Existence, elsewhere Life; and, in Life, sometimes mainly that of Sensation, higher again that of REASON, finally Life in all its fullness. We have no right to demand equal powers in the unequal: the finger is not to be asked to see; there is the eye for that; a finger has its own business – to be finger and have finger power. Enneads III,2,

The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are inevitable, since things here are derived, brought into existence because the Divine REASON which contains all of them in the upper Heavens – how could they come here unless they were There? – must outflow over the whole extent of Matter. Enneads III,2,

This is not to accept the idea, sometimes urged, that order is an outcome of disorder and law of lawlessness, as if evil were a necessary preliminary to their existence or their manifestation: on the contrary order is the original and enters this sphere as imposed from without: it is because order, law and reason exist that there can be disorder; breach of law and unreason exist because REASON exists – not that these better things are directly the causes of the bad but simply that what ought to absorb the Best is prevented by its own nature, or by some accident, or by foreign interference. An entity which must look outside itself for a law, may be foiled of its purpose by either an internal or an external cause; there will be some flaw in its own nature, or it will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm follows, unintended, upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have freedom of motion under their own will sometimes take the right turn, sometimes the wrong. Enneads III,2,

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic REASON – whose control nothing anywhere eludes – employs that ending to the beginning of something new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction, loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers – poverty and sickness, for example – and as for vice, even this brings something to the general service: it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast of the evil under which wrong-doers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the REASON of the Kosmos employs it to good ends; and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms. Enneads III,2,

A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the Secondary, and since this Universe contains body, we must allow for some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the Divine REASON. Enneads III,2,

Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the finest type of the human being as known here, we would certainly not demand that he prove identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect; we would think it enough in the Creator to have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve and bone under REASON as to give grace to these corporeal elements and to have made it possible for REASON to have contact with Matter. Enneads III,2,

There remains the other phase of the question – the distribution of evil to the opposite classes of men: the good go bare while the wicked are rich: all that human need demands, the least deserving have in abundance; it is they that rule; peoples and states are at their disposal. Would not all this imply that the divine power does not reach to earth? That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that REASON rules in the lower things: animals and plants have their share in REASON, Soul and Life. Enneads III,2,

Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that everything is as good as anything can be? No: the REASON-Principle is the sovereign, making all: it wills things as they are and, in its reasonable act, it produces even what we know as evil: it cannot desire all to be good: an artist would not make an animal all eyes; and in the same way, the REASON-Principle would not make all divine; it makes Gods but also celestial spirits, the intermediate order, then men, then the animals; all is graded succession, and this in no spirit of grudging but in the expression of a REASON teeming with intellectual variety. Enneads III,2,

The animals devour each other: men attack each other: all is war without rest, without truce: this gives new force to the question how REASON can be author of the plan and how all can be declared well done. Enneads III,2,

This new difficulty is not met by the former answer; that all stands as well as the nature of things allows; that the blame for their condition falls on Matter dragging them down; that, given the plan as we know it, evil cannot be eliminated and should not be; that the Matter making its presence felt is still not supreme but remains an element taken in from outside to contribute to a definite total, or rather to be itself brought to order by REASON. Enneads III,2,

The Divine REASON is the beginning and the end; all that comes into being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit war of man and beast? This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others? Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return in some new form? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the personages in a play; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new role. The actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of living beings one into another? Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed: that way would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime. Enneads III,2,

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

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

But 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,

This does not, however, stand outside of Providence or of the REASON of the All; the Over-World cannot be dependent upon the World of Sense. The higher shines down upon the lower, and this illumination is Providence in its highest aspect: The REASON-Principle has two phases, one which creates the things of process and another which links them with the higher beings: these higher beings constitute the over-providence on which depends that lower providence which is the secondary REASON-Principle inseparably united with its primal: the two – the Major and Minor Providence – acting together produce the universal woof, the one all-comprehensive Providence. Enneads III,3,

This, then, is a union of REASON with something that is not REASON but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated: the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not self-sufficient, but unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving and the self-sufficient REASON. This offspring is a REASON-Principle but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration ill-defined, unreasoned, unlimited – it can never be sated as long as it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love, then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the REASON-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad; it is without resource in itself; even winning its end, it is poor again. Enneads III,5,

A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the REASON-Principle within him; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine Intellect upon the Divine Soul, which it has penetrated. What could the Garden of Zeus indicate but the images of his Being and the splendours of his glory? And what could these divine splendours and beauties be but the Ideas streaming from him? These REASON-Principles – this Poros who is the lavishness, the abundance of Beauty – are at one and are made manifest; this is the Nectar-drunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than what the god-nature essentially demands; and this is the REASON pouring down from the divine Mind. Enneads III,5,

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor: the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack of shape and of REASON in that which must aspire towards the Good, and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the striving (with attainment) will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the presentment of Matter to the incoming power. Enneads III,5,

But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it is thus immune from the beginning? Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts to an affection and REASON seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the well-being of the Soul which by the mere absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present. Enneads III,6,

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

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,

REASON tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out, the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its constituents going its own way, one part working against another, perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are no longer presided over by the reconciling soul. Enneads IV,7,

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the REASON within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign (traceable to Matter) and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task. Enneads: V I

Thus by what we call the Number and the Dyad of that higher realm, we mean REASON Principles and the Intellectual-Principle: but while the Dyad is, as regards that sphere, undetermined – representing, as it were, the underly (or Matter) of The One – the later Number (or Quantity) – that which rises from the Dyad (Intellectual-Principle) and The One – is not Matter to the later existents but is their forming-Idea, for all of them take shape, so to speak, from the ideas rising within this. The determination of the Dyad is brought about partly from its object – The One – and partly from itself, as is the case with all vision in the act of sight: intellection (the Act of the Dyad) is vision occupied upon The One. Enneads: V I

REASON recognising it as such a nature, you may not hope to see it with mortal eyes, nor in any way that would be imagined by those who make sense the test of reality and so annul the supremely real. For what passes for the most truly existent is most truly non-existent – the thing of extension least real of all – while this unseen First is the source and principle of Being and sovereign over Reality. Enneads V,5,

But this would mean that after all there are not as many REASON Principles as separate beings? As many as there are of differing beings, differing by something more than a mere failure in complete reproduction of their Idea. Enneads V,7,

Since all this is impossible, then, before any particular can be thought of as a unit, there must exist a unity bare, unrelated by very essence. If in that realm also there must be a unity apart from anything that can be called one thing, why should there not exist another unity as well? Each particular, considered in itself, would be a manifold of monads, totalling to a collective unity. If however Nature produces continuously – or rather has produced once for all – not halting at the first production but bringing a sort of continuous unity into being, then it produces the minor numbers by the sheer fact of setting an early limit to its advance: outgoing to a greater extent – not in the sense of moving from point to point but in its inner changes – it would produce the larger numbers; to each number so emerging it would attach the due quantities and the appropriate thing, knowing that without this adaptation to Number the thing could not exist or would be a stray, something outside, at once, of both Number and REASON. Enneads VI,6,

Are we to determine the good by the respective values of things? This is to make Idea and REASON-Principle the test: all very well; but arrived at these, what explanation have we to give as to why Idea and REASON-Principle themselves are good? In the lower, we recognise goodness – in its less perfect form – by comparison with what is poorer still; we are without a standard There where no evil exists, the Bests holding the field alone. REASON demands to know what constitutes goodness; those principles are good in their own nature and we are left in perplexity because cause and fact are identical: and even though we should state a cause, the doubt still remains until our reason claims its rights There. But we need not abandon the search; another path may lead to the light. Enneads VI,7,

What then does it effect out of its greatness? It has produced Intellectual-Principle, it has produced Life, the souls which Intellectual-Principle sends forth and everything else that partakes of REASON, of Intellectual-Principle or of Life. Source and spring of so much, how describe its goodness and greatness? But what does it effect now? Even now it is preserver of what it produced; by it the Intellectual Beings have their Intellection and the living their life; it breathes Intellect in breathes Life in and, where life is impossible, existence. Enneads VI,7,

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