THE SIX ENNEADS [134]
if what enters must be an Ideal-Principle how could it set Matter aflame? But what if it is a pattern or condition? No: the object set aflame is so in virtue of the combination of Matter and condition. But how can this follow on the conjunction when no unity has been produced by the two? Even if such a unity had been produced, it would be a unity of things not mutually sharing experiences but acting upon each other. And the question would then arise whether each was effective upon the other or whether the sole action was not that of one (the form) preventing the other [the Matter] from slipping away? But when any material thing is severed, must not the Matter be divided with it? Surely the bodily modification and other experience that have accompanied the sundering, must have occurred, identically, within the Matter? This reasoning would force the destructibility of Matter upon us: "the body is dissolved; then the Matter is dissolved." We would have to allow Matter to be a thing of quantity, a magnitude. But since it is not a magnitude it could not have the experiences that belong to magnitude and, on the larger scale, since it is not body it cannot know the experiences of body. In fact those that declare Matter subject to modification may as well declare it body right out. 13. Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that Matter tends to slip away from its form [the Idea]. Can we conceive it stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else envelops it? And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases rebels and sometimes not. For if once it makes away of its own will, why should it not always escape? If it is fixed despite itself, it must be enveloped by some Ideal-Form for good and all. This, however, leaves still the question why a given portion of Matter does not remain constant to any one given form: the reason lies mainly in the fact that the Ideas are constantly passing into it. In what sense, then, is it said to elude form? By very nature and for ever? But does not this precisely mean that it never ceases to be itself, in other words that its one form is an invincible formlessness? In no other sense has Plato's dictum any value to those that invoke it. Matter [we read] is "the receptacle and nurse of all generation." Now if Matter is such a receptacle and nurse, all generation is distinct from it; and since all the changeable lies in the realm of generation, Matter, existing before all generation, must exist before all change. "Receptacle" and "nurse"; then it "retains its identity; it is not subject to modification. Similarly if it is" [as again we read] "the ground on which individual things appear and disappear," and so, too, if it is a "place, a base." Where Plato describes and identifies it as "a ground to the ideas" he is not attributing any state to it; he is probing after its distinctive manner of being. And what is that? This which we think of as a Nature-Kind cannot be included among Existents but must utterly rebel from the Essence of Real Beings and be therefore wholly something other than they- for they are Reason-Principles and possess Authentic Existence- it must inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to the point of being permanently closed against them and, more, of rejecting close participation in any image of them. Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took any Idea to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it would cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming into it and going out from it, itself must be unmoved and immune in all the come and go. The entrant Idea will enter as an image, the untrue entering the untruth. But, at least, in a true entry? No: How could there be a true entry into that which, by being falsity, is banned from ever touching truth? Is this then a pseudo-entry into a pseudo-entity- something merely brought near, as faces enter