Online Book Reader

Home Category

THE SIX ENNEADS [296]

By Root 2753 0
offspring of intellect Must be There. It must be observed that the Ideas will be of universals; not of Socrates but of Man: though as to man we may enquire whether the individual may not also have place There. Under the heading of individuality there is to be considered the repetition of the same feature from man to man, the simian type, for example, and the aquiline: the aquiline and the simian must be taken to be differences in the Idea of Man as there are different types of the animal: but Matter also has its effect in bringing about the degree of aquilinity. Similarly with difference of complexion, determined partly by the Reason-Principle, partly by Matter and by diversity of place. 13. It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an Absolute-Soul differing from Soul and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. It must be stated at the outset that we cannot take all that is here to be image of archetype, or Soul to be an image of Absolute-Soul: one soul, doubtless, ranks higher than another, but here too, though perhaps not as identified with this realm, is the Absolute-Soul. Every soul, authentically a soul, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the Supreme, as in the sense-world, but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. For those Beings are not set apart in some defined place; wherever there is a soul that has risen from body, there too these are: the world of sense is one- where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. Whatever the freed soul attains to here, that it is There. Thus, if by the content of the sense-world we mean simply the visible objects, then the Supreme contains not only what is in the realm of sense but more: if in the content of the kosmos we mean to include Soul and the Soul-things, then all is here that is There. 14. There is, thus, a Nature comprehending in the Intellectual all that exists, and this Principle must be the source of all. But how, seeing that the veritable source must be a unity, simplex utterly? The mode by which from the unity arises the multiple, how all this universe comes to be, why the Intellectual-Principle is all and whence it springs, these matters demand another approach. But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea- whether there is an Idea of filth and mud- it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the Soul which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these. But all this will be more clearly brought out, when we turn to the problem of the production of multiplicity from unity. Compounds, we shall see- as owing existence to hazard and not to the Intellectual-Principle, having been fused into objects of sense by their own impulse- are not to be included under Ideas. The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul's inability to bring some other thing to being- something in the order of nature, which, else, it would- but producing where it may. In the matter of the arts and crafts, all that are to be traced to the needs of human nature are laid up in the Absolute Man. And before the particular Soul there is another Soul, a universal, and, before that, an Absolute-Soul, which is the Life existing in the Intellectual-Principle before Soul came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life in the Divine] the Absolute-Soul. THE SIXTH ENNEAD.

FIRST TRACTATE.

ON THE KINDS OF BEING- (1).

1. Philosophy at a very early stage investigated the number and character of the Existents. Various
Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader