substance

And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought from without, a life needing no foreign SUBSTANCE called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good. Enneads I,4,

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,

Supposing we accept this view and hold that, while things below the moon’s orb have merely type-persistence, the celestial realm and all its several members possess individual eternity; it remains to show how this strict permanence of the individual identity – the actual item eternally unchangeable – can belong to what is certainly corporeal, seeing that bodily SUBSTANCE is characteristically a thing of flux. Enneads: II I

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

We have authority for this where we read: “At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light”: he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm: this light is a corporeal SUBSTANCE but from it there shines forth that other “light” which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the veritable “incandescent body.” Plato’s word earthy is commonly taken in too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay. Enneads: II I

And it is that loftier light – falling variously upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion – that gives them their characteristic differences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just such light constitutes also the still higher heavenly bodies which, however, like clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting transparency of their material SUBSTANCE and also by their very distance. Enneads: II I

Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible? Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions no power to force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different from body left to itself; the bodily SUBSTANCE of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference. Enneads: II I

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 I

Perhaps the identity in SUBSTANCE with differentiation in reason will be defended on the ground that Privation does not point to something present but precisely to an absence, to something absent, to the negation or lack of Real-being: the case would be like that of the affirmation of non-existence, where there is no real predication but simply a denial. Enneads II,4,

Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must we not envisage Being as the SUBSTANCE stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others – Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference – so that these are the specific constituents of Reality? The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement, and so on are separate constituents. Enneads: II VI.

In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very SUBSTANCE of the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing more, (not constituting but simply) giving some particular character to the real thing; in this second case the qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which – whether in soul or body – merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing. Enneads: II VI.

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts? The difference is that these (“Quality-Activities”) in the Supreme do not indicate the very nature of the Reality (as do the corresponding Activities here) nor do they indicate variations of SUBSTANCE or of (essential) character; they merely indicate what we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still be Activity. Enneads: II VI.

Their view is plausible because it rejects the notion of total admixture and because it recognizes that the masses of the mixing bodies must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap, if, that is to say, each SUBSTANCE must be divided within itself through and through for complete interpenetration with the other. Their theory is confirmed by the cases in which two mixed SUBSTANCEs occupy a greater space than either singly, especially a space equal to the conjoined extent of each: for, as they point out, in an absolute interpenetration the infusion of the one into the other would leave the occupied space exactly what it was before and, where the space occupied is not increased by the juxtaposition, they explain that some expulsion of air has made room for the incoming SUBSTANCE. They ask further, how a minor quantity of one SUBSTANCE can be spread out so as to interpenetrate a major quantity of another. In fact they have a multitude of arguments. Enneads: II VII.

When there is an increase in the space occupied, nothing refutes the explanation – however unsatisfying – that this is a necessary consequence of two bodies bringing to a common stock their magnitude equally with their other attributes: size is as permanent as any other property; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities there results a new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new magnitude; the blending gives us a magnitude representing each of the two. But at this point the others will answer, “If you mean that SUBSTANCE lies side by side with SUBSTANCE and mass with mass, each carrying its quantum of magnitude, you are at one with us: if there were complete transfusion, one SUBSTANCE sinking its original magnitude in the other, we would have no longer the case of two lines joined end to end by their terminal points and thus producing an increased extension; we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore, no increase.” Enneads: II VII.

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 VII.

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

How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the elements? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or an intermediate SUBSTANCE, something dry or wet or intermediate. Enneads: II VIII.

Similarly in the case of the universal system; if all that performs act and is subject to experience constitutes one SUBSTANCE, if one thing does not really produce another thing under causes leading back continuously one to another, then it is not a truth that all happens by causes, there is nothing but a rigid unity. We are no “We”: nothing is our act; our thought is not ours; our decisions are the reasoning of something outside ourselves; we are no more agents than our feet are kickers when we use them to kick with. Enneads: III I

That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being from outside itself: this is no case of a self-originating SUBSTANCE being annihilated by an external; it rose on the ruin of something else, and thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing strange; and for every fire quenched, another is kindled. Enneads III,2,

“Our way of speaking” – for myths, if they are to serve their purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the unbegotten and discriminate where all is one SUBSTANCE; the truth is conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to bring all together again. Enneads III,5,

In the same way when we call Life a movement we have no idea of a changing SUBSTANCE; the naturally appropriate act of each member of the living thing makes up the Life, which is, therefore, not a shifting thing. Enneads III,6,

To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealing-wax; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in SUBSTANCE and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the Soul – as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness are importations into body – but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries. Enneads III,6,

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,

In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a “presence” which acts by changing the object – for good or for ill – as we see in the case of bodies, especially where there is life. But there is also a “presence” which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the Soul. Then there is the case represented by the stamping of a design upon wax, where the “presence” of the added pattern causes no modification in the SUBSTANCE nor does its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example of Light whose presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object illuminated. A stone becoming cold does not change its nature in the process; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a drawing for being coloured. Enneads III,6,

Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing changing must remain within its constitutive Idea so that the alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential thing; the changing object must retain this fundamental permanence, and the permanent SUBSTANCE cannot be the member of it which accepts modification. Enneads III,6,

But the reason is that the fundamental nature of Matter can take no increase by anything entering it, and no decrease by any withdrawal: what from the beginning it was, it remains. It is not like those things whose lack is merely that of arrangement and order which can be supplied without change of SUBSTANCE as when we dress or decorate something bare or ugly. Enneads III,6,

But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature, the base original must be transmuted: it can leave ugliness for beauty only by a change of SUBSTANCE. Matter, then, thus brought to order must lose its own nature in the supreme degree unless its baseness is an accidental: if it is base in the sense of being Baseness the Absolute, it could never participate in order, and, if evil in the sense of being Evil the Absolute, it could never participate in good. Enneads III,6,

It is, of course, impossible that an outside thing belonging in any degree to Real-Being – whose Nature is to engender Real-Beings – should utterly fail of participation in Reality: but here we have something perplexing; we are dealing with utter Non-Being, absolutely without part in Reality; what is this participation by the non-participant, and how does mere neighbouring confer anything on that which by its own nature is precluded from any association? The answer is that all that impinges upon this Non-Being is flung back as from a repelling SUBSTANCE; we may think of an Echo returned from a repercussive plane surface; it is precisely because of the lack of retention that the phenomenon is supposed to belong to that particular place and even to arise there. Enneads III,6,

To the thing which does not enjoy Magnitude in the sense of having mass-extension in its own SUBSTANCE and parts, the only possibility is that it present some partial semblance of Magnitude, such as being continuous, not here and there and everywhere, that its parts be related within it and ungapped. An adequate reflection of a great mass cannot be produced in a small space – mere size prevents – but the greater, pursuing the hope of that full self-presentment, makes progress towards it and brings about a nearer approach to adequate mirroring in the parallel from which it can never withhold its radiation: thus it confers Magnitude upon that (= Matter) which has none and cannot even muster up the appearance of having any, and the visible resultant exhibits the Magnitude of mass. Enneads III,6,

And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it; each of the Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue of unlimited force; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is pre-eminently the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its own SUBSTANCE. Enneads III,7,

Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that these two constitute one SUBSTANCE – though, in a unity, admitting that distinction, of the intellectual act (as against passivity), without which there can be no question of an Intellectual-Principle and an Intellectual Object: what is meant is not that the contemplatory Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it contains the Intellectual Realm within itself. Enneads III,8,

But, on the other hand, that first utterly indivisible Kind must be accompanied by a subsequent Essence, engendered by it and holding indivisibility from it but, in virtue of the necessary outgo from source, tending firmly towards the contrary, the wholly partible; this secondary Essence will take an intermediate Place between the first SUBSTANCE, the undivided, and that which is divisible in material things and resides in them. Its presence, however, will differ in one respect from that of colour and quantity; these, no doubt, are present identically and entire throughout diverse material masses, but each several manifestation of them is as distinct from every other as the mass is from the mass. Enneads IV,2,

A possible solution may be offered: The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls – the All-Soul, with the others – issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical SUBSTANCE. Enneads IV,3,

Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain (non-material) conditions; it is to that modified SUBSTANCE that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity. Enneads IV,4,

Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands clenched or spread; the colour is no such accidental but is more like, for example, sweetness: when a material SUBSTANCE breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other SUBSTANCE, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception. Enneads IV,4,

It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur only through the medium of some bodily SUBSTANCE, since in the absence of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere. Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap. Enneads IV,5,

Admitting, then, that some contact with an object is necessary for knowing it, the question of a medium falls to the ground in the case of things identified by any form of touch; but in the case of sight – we leave hearing over for the present – we are still in doubt; is there need of some bodily SUBSTANCE between the eye and the illumined object? No: such an intervening material may be a favouring circumstance, but essentially it adds nothing to seeing power. ! Enneads IV,5,

Dense bodies, such as clay, actually prevent sight; the less material the intervening SUBSTANCE is, the more clearly we see; the intervening SUBSTANCE, then, is a hindrance, or, if not that, at least not a help. Enneads IV,5,

The whole matter seems to bring us back to that sympathy of which we have treated. If a certain thing is of a nature to be sympathetically affected by another in virtue of some similitude between them, then anything intervening, not sharing in that similitude, will not be affected, or at least not similarly. If this be so, anything naturally disposed to be affected will take the impression more vividly in the absence of intervening SUBSTANCE, even of some SUBSTANCE capable, itself, of being affected. Enneads IV,5,

If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the light leading progressively to the illumined object, then, by the very hypothesis, one intervening SUBSTANCE, the light, is indispensable: but if the illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent operating certain changes, some such change might very well impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium; this all the more, since as things are the intervening SUBSTANCE, which actually does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of contact with the eye (and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision). Enneads IV,5,

Those who have made vision a forth-going act (and not an in-coming from the object) need not postulate an intervening SUBSTANCE – unless, indeed, to provide against the ray from the eye failing on its path – but this is a ray of light and light flies straight. Those who make vision depend upon resistance are obliged to postulate an intervening SUBSTANCE. Enneads IV,5,

So, too, those that explain vision by sympathy must recognize that an intervening SUBSTANCE will be a hindrance as tending to check or block or enfeeble that sympathy; this theory, especially, requires the admission that any intervenient, and particularly one of kindred nature, must blunt the perception by itself absorbing part of the activity. Apply fire to a body continuous through and through, and no doubt the core will be less affected than the surface: but where we are dealing with the sympathetic parts of one living being, there will scarcely be less sensation because of the intervening SUBSTANCE, or, if there should be, the degree of sensation will still be proportionate to the nature of the separate part, with the intervenient acting merely as a certain limitation; this, though, will not be the case where the element introduced is of a kind to overleap the bridge. Enneads IV,5,

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,

If our perception is to depend upon previous impressions made upon the air, then we have no direct knowledge of the object of vision, but know it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are aware of warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the warmed intervening air. That is a matter of contact; but sight is not produced by contact: the application of an object to the eye would not produce sight; what is required is the illumination of the intervening medium; for the air in itself is a dark SUBSTANCE: If it were not for this dark SUBSTANCE there would probably be no reason for the existence of light: the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires that it be overcome by light. Perhaps also the reason why an object brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a double obscuration, its own and that of the air. Enneads IV,5,

We may hold one thing certain: the impossibility of vision without an intervening SUBSTANCE does not depend upon that absence in itself: the sole reason is that, with the absence, there would be an end to the sympathy reigning in the living whole and relating the parts to each other in an existent unity. Enneads IV,5,

Any modification of the air SUBSTANCE would necessarily be corporeal: there must be such an impression as is made upon sealing wax. But this would require that each part of the object of vision be impressed on some corresponding portion of the intervenient: the intervenient, however, in actual contact with the eye would be just that portion whose dimensions the pupil is capable of receiving. But as a matter of fact the entire object appears before the pupil; and it is seen entire by all within that air space for a great extent, in front, sideways, close at hand, from the back, as long as the line of vision is not blocked. This shows that any given portion of the air contains the object of vision, in face view so to speak, and, at once, we are confronted by no merely corporeal phenomena; the facts are explicable only as depending upon the greater laws, the spiritual, of a living being one and self-sensitive. Enneads IV,5,

But if the determinant is the air, and the impression is simply of air-movements, what accounts for the differences among voices and other sounds? The sound of bronze against bronze is different from that of bronze against some other SUBSTANCE: and so on; the air and its vibration remain the one thing, yet the difference in sounds is much more than a matter of greater or less intensity. Enneads IV,5,

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,

Light is not an accidental to something else, requiring therefore to be lodged in a base; nor is it a modification, demanding a base in which the modification occurs: if this were so, it would vanish when the object or SUBSTANCE disappeared; but it does not; it strikes onward; so, too (requiring neither air nor object) it would always have its movement. Enneads IV,5,

Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when anything – the human body, for instance – comes in its path to be affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it to modify: surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of whatever luminary source there be (i.e., light, affecting things, may be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other). Certainly light is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that it is no longer the brilliant reality: as reasonable to talk of some SUBSTANCE being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter. Enneads IV,5,

If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new SUBSTANCE must be investigated in the same way or by some more suitable method. Enneads IV,7,

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

If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it is the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal? Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be found in the chattel mean and mortal: what possesses these must be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and of identical SUBSTANCE. Enneads IV,7,

To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look: or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual SUBSTANCE, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of the divine. Enneads IV,7,

Either life is Essential Reality, and therefore self-living – the very thing we have been seeking – and undeniably immortal: or it, too, is a compound and must be traced back through all the constituents until an immortal SUBSTANCE is reached, something deriving movement from itself, and therefore debarred from accepting death. Enneads IV,7,

May not it change and so come to destruction? No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying SUBSTANCE: and that could not happen to anything except a compound. Enneads IV,7,

Then (by the nature of body) the many souls could result only from the splitting up of that entity, each an entirely different SUBSTANCE: if this body-soul be uniform in kind, each of the resultant souls must be of the one kind; they will all carry the one Form undividedly and will differ only in their volumes. Now, if their being souls depended upon their volumes they would be distinct; but if it is ideal-form that makes them souls, then all are, in virtue of this Idea, one. Enneads IV,8,

The Dyad is a secondary; deriving from unity, it finds in unity the determinant needed by its native indetermination: once there is any determination, there is Number, in the sense, of course, of the real (the archetypal) Number. And the soul is such a number or quantity. For the Primals are not masses or magnitudes; all of that gross order is later, real only to the sense-thought; even in seed the effective reality is not the moist SUBSTANCE but the unseen – that is to say Number (as the determinant of individual being) and the Reason-Principle (of the product to be). Enneads: V I

What happened then? What are we to conceive as rising in the neighbourhood of that immobility? It must be a circumradiation – produced from the Supreme but from the Supreme unaltering – and may be compared to the brilliant light encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from that unchanging SUBSTANCE. Enneads: V I

If we are told that they are self-standing entities – the distinct beings Justice and Good – then (supposing them to be outside) the Intellectual Realm will not be a unity nor be included in any unity: all is sundered individuality. Where, then, are they and what spatial distinction keeps them apart? How does the Intellectual-Principle come to meet with them as it travels round; what keeps each true to its character; what gives them enduring identity; what conceivable shape or character can they have? They are being presented to us as some collection of figures, in gold or some other material SUBSTANCE, the work of some unknown sculptor or graver: but at once the Intellectual-Principle which contemplates them becomes sense-perception; and there still remains the question how one of them comes to be Justice and another something else. Enneads V,5,

Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it is not, itself, in a universe or in any place – what place was there before the universe came to be? – its linked members form and occupy the whole. But Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily SUBSTANCE is not a place to the Soul; Soul is contained in Intellectual-Principle and is the container of body. The Intellectual-Principle in turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First? This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things nor directly within them; there is nothing containing it; it contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way, that towards it all things have their being, all dependent upon it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness according to its fuller possession of authentic being. Enneads V,5,

And so of the differences among children of the same parents: it is a matter of varying dominance: either the offspring – whether it so appears or not – has been mainly determined by, now, the male, now, the female or, while each principle has given itself entire and lies there within, yet it effectively moulds one portion of the bodily SUBSTANCE rather than another. Enneads V,7,

This conclusion must not however prevent our seeking in the actual SUBSTANCE of the Sensible world an element held in common by Matter, by Form and by their Composite, all of which are designated as SUBSTANCEs, though it is not maintained that they are Substance in an equal degree; Form is usually held to be Substance in a higher degree than Matter, and rightly so, in spite of those who would have Matter to be the more truly real. Enneads: VI I

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 I

The differences distinguishing SUBSTANCEs from each other are called qualities only by analogy; they are, more strictly, Acts and Reason-Principles, or parts of Reason-Principles, and though they may appear merely to qualify the SUBSTANCE, they in fact indicate its essence. Enneads: VI I

But it is not necessary that all qualities involve a Reason-Principle; it suffices that over and above the various kinds of disposition there exist a common element distinct from Substance, and it is what comes after the SUBSTANCE that constitutes Quality in an object. Enneads: VI I

Act moreover incontestably manifests itself in Substance, as was found to be the case with Quality: it is connected with Substance as being a form of motion. But Motion is a distinct genus: for, seeing that Quality is a distinct attribute of Substance, and Quality a distinct attribute, and Relative takes its being from the relation of one SUBSTANCE to another, there can be no reason why Motion, also an attribute of Substance, should not also constitute a distinct genus. Enneads: VI I

For these and many other reasons we must abstain from positing a single genus, and especially because neither Being nor Substance can be the predicate of any given thing. If we do predicate Being, it is only as an accidental attribute; just as when we predicate whiteness of a SUBSTANCE, we are not predicating the Absolute Whiteness. Enneads VI,2,

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

Things of nature tend by their very nature to coalesce with each other and also to unify each within itself; their movement is not away from but towards each other and inwards upon themselves. Souls, moreover, seem to desire always to pass into a unity over and above the unity of their own SUBSTANCE. Unity in fact confronts them on two sides: their origin and their goal alike are unity; from unity they have arisen, and towards unity they strive. Unity is thus identical with Goodness (is the universal standard of perfection); for no being ever came into existence without possessing, from that very moment, an irresistible tendency towards unity. Enneads VI,2,

Now in the case of composite SUBSTANCEs – those constituted from diverse elements – number and qualities provide a means of differentiation: the qualities may be detached from the common core around which they are found to group themselves. But in the primary genera there is no distinction to be drawn between simples and composites; the difference is between simples and those entities which complete not a particular SUBSTANCE but Substance as such. A particular SUBSTANCE may very well receive completion from Quality, for though it already has Substance before the accession of Quality, its particular character is external to Substance. But in Substance itself all the elements are substantial. Enneads VI,2,

Nevertheless, we ventured to assert elsewhere that while the complements of Substance are only by analogy called qualities, yet accessions of external origin and subsequent to Substance are really qualities; that, further, the properties which inhere in SUBSTANCEs are their activities (Acts), while those which are subsequent are merely modifications (or Passions): we now affirm that the attributes of the particular SUBSTANCE are never complementary to Substance (as such); an accession of Substance does not come to the SUBSTANCE of man qua man; he is, on the contrary, Substance in a higher degree before he arrives at differentiation, just as he is already “living being” before he passes into the rational species. Enneads VI,2,

But perhaps we may think Substance validly defined as that which is not predicated of anything else. White and black are predicated of an object having one or other of these qualities; double presupposes something distinct from itself – we refer not to the half, but to the length of wood of which doubleness is affirmed. father qua father is a predicate; knowledge is predicated of the subject in whom the knowledge exists; space is the limit of something, time the measure of something. Fire, on the other hand, is predicated of nothing; wood as such is predicated of nothing; and so with man, Socrates, and the composite SUBSTANCE in general. Enneads VI,3,

It follows that the fact of “not being present in a subject (or substrate) is not universally true of Substance, unless presence in a subject be stipulated as not including the case of the part present in the whole or of one thing combining with another to form a distinct unity; a thing will not be present as in a subject in that with which it co-operates in the information of a composite SUBSTANCE. Form, therefore, is not present in Matter as in a subject, nor is Man so present in Socrates, since Man is part of Socrates. Enneads VI,3,

It may be objected that non-presence in a subject is not peculiar to Substance, inasmuch as the differentia of a SUBSTANCE is no more present in a subject than the SUBSTANCE itself; but this objection results from taking a part of the whole SUBSTANCE, such as “two-footed” in our example, and asserting that this part is not present in a subject: if we take, not “two-footed” which is merely an aspect of Substance, but “two-footedness” by which we signify not Substance but Quality, we shall find that this “two-footedness” is indeed present in a subject. Enneads VI,3,

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,

May the truth be this: that similarity is predicable of Quantity only in so far as Quantity possesses (qualitative) differences? But as a general rule differences are grouped with that of which they are differences, especially when the difference is a difference of that thing alone. If in one case the difference completes the SUBSTANCE and not in another, we inevitably class it with that which it completes, and only consider it as independent when it is not complementary: when we say “completes the SUBSTANCE,” we refer not to Subtance as such but to the differentiated SUBSTANCE; the particular object is to be thought of as receiving an accession which is non-substantial. Enneads VI,3,

But we refrain from assigning Soul to Sensible Substance, on the ground that we have already referred to Quality (which is Sensible) those affections of Soul which are related to body. On the contrary, Soul, conceived apart from affection and Reason-Principle, we have restored to its origin, leaving in the lower realm no SUBSTANCE which is in any sense Intellectual. Enneads VI,3,

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,

With regard to the relative, we have maintained that Relation belongs to one object as compared with another, that the two objects coexist simultaneously, and that Relation is found wherever a SUBSTANCE is in such a condition as to produce it; not that the SUBSTANCE is a relative, except in so far as it constitutes part of a whole – a hand, for example, or head or cause or principle or element. Enneads VI,3,

This does not mean that Man Absolute, or any Absolute, or the Universe in the sense of a Whole, is absorbed by multiplicity; on the contrary, the multiplicity is absorbed by the Absolute, or rather is bound up with it. There is a difference between the mode in which a colour may be absorbed by a SUBSTANCE entire and that in which the soul of the individual is identically present in every part of the body: it is in this latter mode that Being is omnipresent. Enneads VI,5,

What then is the veritable nature of Number? Is it an accompaniment upon each SUBSTANCE, something seen in the things as in a man we see one man, in a being one being and in the total of presentations the total of number? But how explain the dyad and triad? How comes the total to be unitary and any particular number to be brought under unity? The theory offers a multiplicity of units, and no number is reducible to unity but the simple “one.” It might be suggested that a dyad is that thing – or rather what is observed upon that thing – which has two powers combined, a compound thing related to a unity: or numbers might be what the Pythagoreans seem to hold them in their symbolic system in which Justice, for example, is a Tetrad: but this is rather to add the number, a number of manifold unity like the decad, to the multiplicity of the thing which yet is one thing. Now it is not so that we treat the ten things; we bring them together and apply the figure ten to the several items. Or rather in that case we say ten, but when the several items form a unity we say decad. This would apply in the Intellectual as in the sensible. Enneads VI,6,

But if Number thus preceded the Beings, then it is not included among them? The truth is that it existed within the Authentic Being but not as applying to it, for Being was still unparted; the potentiality of Number existed and so produced the division within Being, put in travail with multiplicity; Number must be either the SUBSTANCE of Being or its Activity; the Life-Form as such and the Intellectual-Principle must be Number. Clearly Being is to be, thought of as Number Collective, while the Beings are Number unfolded: the Intellectual-Principle is Number moving within itself, while the Living-Form is Number container of the universe. Even Being is the outcome of the Unity, and, since the prior is unity, the secondary must be Number. Enneads VI,6,

It is impossible to name or conceive anything not making one or two or some number; equally impossible that the thing should not exist without which nothing can possibly be named or conceived; impossible to deny the reality of that whose existence is a necessary condition of naming or affirming anything; what is a first need, universally, to the formation of every concept and every proposition must exist before reasoning and thinking; only as an existent can it be cited to account for the stirring of thought. If Unity is necessary to the substantial existence of all that really is – and nothing exists which is not one – Unity must precede Reality and be its author. It is therefore, an existent Unity, not an existent that develops Unity; considered as Being-with-Unity it would be a manifold, whereas in the pure Unity there is no Being save in so far as Unity attends to producing it. As regards the word “This,” it is nat a bare word; it affirms an indicated existence without using the name, it tells of a certain presence, whether a SUBSTANCE or some other existent; any This must be significant; it is no attitude of the mind applying itself to a non-existent; the This shows a thing present, as much as if we used the strict name of the object. Enneads VI,6,

This is a first activity and the SUBSTANCE it produces is Essential Being; it is an image, but of an original so great that the very copy stands a reality. If instead of moving outward it remained with the First, it would be no more than some appurtenance of that First, not a self-standing existent. Enneads VI,7,