Plotinus

“ THE GOOD AS SUPREME NEITHER NEEDS NOR POSSESSES INTELLECTION.
No doubt Intelligence is beautiful; it is the most beautiful of things, since it is illuminated by a pure light, since it shines with a pure splendor, and contains the intelligible beings of which our world, in spite of its beauty, is but an adumbration and image. The intelligible world is located in a region resplendent with clearness, where is nothing either obscure or indefinite, where, within itself, it enjoys a blissful life. ”

“ But as the universal Soul produces the universal form, and as all things are therein co-ordinated, the work is beautiful because it is realized without trouble or obstacle. In the universe there are temples for the divinities, houses for men, and other objects adapted to the needs of other beings. What indeed could the Soul create if not what she has the power to create? As fire warms, as snow cools, the soul acts now within herself, and then outside of herself, and on other objects. The action which inanimate beings elicit from themselves slumbers, as it were, within them ”

“ As many living beings are seen to grow from the earth, why would it itself not be a living being? Being besides a great living being, and a considerable part of the world, why should the earth not possess intelligence, and be a divinity? Since we consider every star as a living being, why would we not similarly consider the earth, which is a part of the universal living being? It would, indeed, be impossible to admit that it was exteriorly contained by a foreign soul, and that interiorly it would have no soul, as if it were the only being incapable of having an individual soul. ”

“ MEMORY IS IMPOSSIBLE TO THESE SOULS, FOR TO THEM THERE IS NO TIME, BUT ONE SINGLE DAY.
Will they not even remember that they performed their revolution yesterday, or the year before, that they lived yesterday, and since have lived a long while? They still live continuously; now, what remains the same, is one. To try to distinguish yesterday and last year in the movement of the stars, is to do like a man who would divide into several parts the movement which forms one step, who would wish to reduce unity to multiplicity. ”

“ She is never forced to go further, but everywhere she descends towards bodies and penetrates into them, according to her nature. Besides, she never separates from herself, though present in finger or in foot. Not otherwise is it with the universe: wherever the Soul penetrates, she ever remains indivisible, as when she penetrates into the different parts of a plant. Then, if you cut a certain part, the principle which communicates life to it remains present both in the plant and in the part detached therefrom. The body of the universe is single, and the Soul is everywhere in her unity. ”

“ Light everywhere meets light. Every being contains within itself the entire intelligible world, and also beholds it entire in any particular being. All things there are located everywhere. Every thing there is all, and all is each thing; infinite splendor radiates around. Everything is great, for there even the small is great. This world has its sun and its stars; each star is a sun, and all suns are stars. Each of them, while shining with its own due splendor, reflects the light of the others. ”

“ It would be incredible that one series of beings in the universe should obey its order, while another series should be subject to chance or caprice. If everything happen through causes and natural consequences, in conformity with a single "reason," and to a single order, the smallest things must form part of that order, and agree with it. Injustice practiced against somebody else is an injustice for him who commits it, and must attract a punishment to him; but by the place which it holds in the universal order, it is not an injustice, even for him who suffers it. ”

“ If it was its beauty that exerted the power of arousing emotion, why then would this beautiful object move one man, while the other object would move another, if there be no potency in the difference of figure or appearance? It would be unreasonable to admit that colors have a characteristic influence and action, yet deny the same power to figures or appearances. It would, besides, be absurd, to admit the existence of something, but to refuse it all potency. Every being, because of his mere existence, must "act" or "suffer." ”

“ He must appear above the contemplating Intelligence. Thus, Intelligence must remain immovable in contemplation, concentrated and absorbed in the spectacle of pure beauty which elevates and invigorates it. Then Intelligence feels that it is more beautiful and more brilliant, merely because it has approached the First. The latter does not come, as might be thought; He comes without really coming, in the proper sense of the word; He appears without coming from any place, because He is already present above all things before Intelligence approaches Him. ”

“ Let us imagine that in the sense-world every being should remain as it is, confusing itself with the others in the unity of the whole, to the extent of its ability; so that all that we see is lost in this unity. Imagine a transparent sphere exterior to the spectator, by looking through which one might see all that it contains, first the sun and the other stars together, then the sea, the earth, and all living beings. ”

“ By her contemplative action, by her ardent desire to learn and to discover, by the fruitfulness of her knowledge, and her resulting need to produce, the Soul, her totality having become an object of contemplation, gave birth to some other object; just as science, on fructifying, by instruction begets a lesser science in the soul of the young disciple who possesses the images of all things, but only in the state of obscure theories, of feeble speculations, which are incapable of self-sufficiency. ”

“ We find an image of this unity of Wisdom in the assemblies and meetings of men, where all those present seem to help in making up a single Wisdom. It seems that each one, isolated from the others, would be powerless to find wisdom; but when the same person is in a meeting, where all the minds agree together, in applying themselves to a single object, he would produce, or rather discover, Wisdom. What indeed hinders different minds from being united within one same and single Intelligence? Although Intelligence be common to us and to other men, we do not notice this community. ”

“ It will be asked, But how can the earth feel? We shall answer in turn, How can stars feel? It is not the flesh that feels; a soul is not dependent for feeling on a body; but the body is dependent on the soul for self-preservation. As the soul possesses judgment, she should be able to judge the passions of the body whenever she applies her attention thereto. ”

“ To destroy the last vestiges of honor, they destroy temperance by joking at it; they attack justice, whether natural, or acquired by reason or exercise; in one word, they annihilate everything that could lead to virtue. Nothing remains but to seek out pleasure, to profess selfishness, to renounce all social relations with men, to think only of one's personal interest, unless indeed one's own innate disposition be good enough to resist their pernicious doctrines. Nothing that we regard as good is by them esteemed, for they seek entirely different objects. ”

“ The last thing which then appears is the beauty that shines in its entirety in the essences (that is, beings) , as well as in those who participate therein. In the intelligible world everything glows, and beautifies itself by shedding splendor on those who gaze at it. Thus men who have climbed a high mountain on arriving at the summit suddenly shine with the golden color reflected by the ground whereon they stand. Now the color that bathes the intelligible world is the beauty that blooms within its flower; or rather there everything is color, everything is beauty, in its most intimate depths ”

“ On the other hand, when there is dissonance, they could not play the same parts as the personnel of a choric ballet, who dance and sing in harmony, though not all of them fill the same functions; though one sings while the remainder are silent; and though each sings his own part; for it does not suffice that they all sing in tune, they must each properly sing his own part. In the soul we therefore have harmony when each part fulfils its functions. Still each must have its own virtue before the existence of a harmony ”

“ Now, is there nothing to hinder the sweet or the fragrant body from perishing, without affecting the existence of the sweetness and fragrance? Could they subsist in other bodies without being felt, because the bodies which participate in the qualities, are such as not to allow the qualities they possess to be felt? What would hinder the unaffected existence of the light after the destruction of the body it colored, if it merely ceased to be reflected, unless one's mind should see that those qualities subsist in no subject? ”

“ OMNISCIENT INTUITION MAKES MEMORY AND REASONING SUPERFLUOUS.
Therefore, if the governing Power of the world seems to resemble those who learn, it will be necessary to attribute to it reasoning, reflection, and memory, so that it may compare the past with the present or the future. But if, on the contrary, its knowledge be such as to have nothing more to learn, and to remain in a perfectly stable condition, it evidently possesses wisdom by itself. If it know future things—a privilege that could not be denied it under penalty of absurdity—why would it not also know how they are to occur? ”

“ We must never forget that men have forgotten the Principle which from the beginning until this day has excited their desires and wishes. Indeed all things aspire to the first Principle, tend thither by a natural necessity, and seem to divine that they could not exist without Him. The notion of the beautiful is given only to souls that are awake, and that already possess some knowledge; at sight of Him they are simultaneously dazed with His sublimity, and spurred on by love.270 From His very origin, on the contrary, the Good excites in us an innate desire ”

“ If sympathy can go as far as making one lyre respond to the harmonies of another, so much the more must this sympathy be the law of the universe, where reigns one single harmony, although its register contains contraries, as well as similar and analogous parts. The things which harm men, like anger, which, together with the bile, relate to the liver, were not created for the purpose of harming men. It is as if a person, in the act of taking fire from a hearth accidentally wounded another. ”

“ We must further observe that it is not the same beauty that is seen in the parts and in the whole, in individuals and in the universe; that there are beauties great enough in sense-objects and in individuals, for instance, in the guardians, to lead us to admire their creator, and to prove to us that they indeed are works of his. In this way we may attain a conception of the unspeakable beauty of the universal Soul, if we do not attach ourselves to sense-objects, and if, without scorning them, we know how to rise to intelligible entities. ”

“ How could one thing subsist in another if the principle, from which this other thing is derived, did not have an existence that was independent, and prior to the rest? What is simple cannot derive anything from any other source; but what is manifold, or at least indicates plurality, is of derivative (nature) . The Good may be compared to light, Intelligence to the sun, and the Soul to the moon that derives her light from the sun. The Soul's intelligence is only borrowed, which intellectualizes her by coloring her with its light. On the contrary, Intelligence, in itself, possesses its own light ”

“ In contradiction to those who claim that there are men who possess a beautiful body and an ugly soul, I insist that such never existed, and that it was a mistake to consider them beautiful. If such men were ever seen, their interior ugliness was accidental, and also their soul was, by nature, beautiful; for we often meet here below obstacles which hinder us from reaching our goal. But the universe cannot by any obstacle be hindered from possessing interior beauty in the same way that it possesses exterior beauty. ”

“ Let us now examine to what beings sensation belongs, and whereby it operates. Let us see whether sensation can take place even without organs. Of what use to the earth could sensation be? For it does not serve the earth as means of knowledge; the knowledge which consists in wisdom suffices for the beings to whom sensation is of no use. This consideration might however be denied, for the knowledge of sense-objects offers, besides utility, some of the charms of the Muses. Such is, for example, the knowledge of the sun and the other stars, whose contemplation itself is agreeable. ”

“ Here it is not necessary that there be two limits; matter and reason are strangers to each other by difference of nature, and by the difference between their natures that makes any mixture of them impossible. The cause that each remains in itself is that what enters into matter does not possess it, any more than matter possesses what enters into it. That is how opinion and imagination do not mingle in our soul,75 and each remains what it was, without entailing or leaving anything, because no mingling can occur. ”

“ Intelligible entities, indeed, though they form a manifold, nevertheless, form an unity. On the other hand, though they form an unity, yet by virtue of their infinite nature they also form a manifold. They are the multitude in unity, and unity in multitude; they all subsist together. They direct their actualization towards the whole, with the whole, and it is still with the whole, that they apply themselves to the part. ”

“ Thus when a house happens to fall, it buries anybody below it, whoever he may happen to be; or again, whether some regular movement drives on some one thing, or even several things, it breaks or crushes anything that happens to lie in its path. These accidents which seem unjust, are not evils for those who suffer them, if you consider how they take their place within the legitimate order of the universe ”

“ Why would not all things conspire together to unity, in the intelligible world? There, indeed, no one thing hinders another by impenetrability, any more than the conception that you have of a notion or of a proposition in no wise hinders the one that I have in myself, any more than different notions mutually hinder each other in the same soul. To the objection that such a union could not take place for (separate) beings, an affirmative answer may be given, but only if one dare to suppose that veritable beings are corporeal masses. ”

“ CONSCIOUSNESS IS UNITARY THOUGH CONTAINING THINKER, OBJECT AND THOUGHT.
Nor should we admit the existence of several intelligences, merely because we distinguish a thinker from a consciousness of the thinker. Though there be a difference between thinking, and thinking that one thinks, these two nevertheless constitute a single intuitive consciousness of its actualizations. It would be ridiculous to deny such a consciousness to veritable Intelligence. It is therefore the same Intelligence that thinks, and that thinks that it thinks. ”