THE SIX ENNEADS [71]
is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the observation of certain qualities present; fire is a Reality [not a combination of material phenomena]; the phenomena observed here and leading us to name fire call us away from the authentic thing; a quality is erected into the very matter of definition- a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to things of the realm of sense which are in no case realities but accidents of Reality. And this raises the question how Reality can ever spring from what are not Realities. It has been shown that a thing coming into being cannot be identical with its origins: it must here be added that nothing thus coming into being [no "thing of process"] can be a Reality. Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme of what we have called Reality from what is not Reality [i.e., from the pure Being which is above Reality]? The Reality there- possessing Authentic Being in the strictest sense, with the least admixture- is Reality by existing among the differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is affirmed in the sense that with the existence of the Supreme is included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of the Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution; the produced thing is deficient by the very addition, by being less simplex, by standing one step away from the Authentic. 2. But we must enquire into Quality in itself: to know its nature is certainly the way to settle our general question. The first point is to assure ourselves whether or not one and the same thing may be held to be sometimes a mere qualification and sometimes a constituent of Reality- not staying on the point that qualification could not be constitutive of a Reality but of a qualified Reality only. Now in a Reality possessing a determined quality, the Reality and the fact of existence precede the qualified Reality. What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality which precedes the qualified Reality? Its mere body, perhaps? If so, body being the Reality, fire is a warmed body; and the total thing is not the Reality; and the fire has warmth as a man might have a snub nose. Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness- all which certainly do seem to be qualities- and its resistance, there is left only its extension by three dimensions: in other words, its Matter is its Reality. But that cannot be held: surely the form is much more likely than the Matter to be the Reality. But is not the Form of Quality? No, the Form is not a Quality: it is a Reason-Principle. And the outcome of this Reason-Principle entering into the underlying Matter, what is that? Certainly not what is seen and burns, for that is the something in which these qualities inhere. We might define the burning as an Act springing from the Reason-Principle: then the warming and lighting and other effects of fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its quality. Such completions of a Reality cannot be called qualities since they are its Acts emanating from the Reason-Principles and from the essential powers. A quality is something persistently outside Reality; it cannot appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as quality; its function is to bring in the something more after the Reality is established, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty, health, a certain shape. On this last, however, it may be remarked that triangularity and quadrangularity are not in themselves qualities, but there is quality when a thing is triangular by having been brought to that shape; the quality is not the triangularity but the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts and avocations. Thus: Quality is a condition superadded to a Reality whose existence does not depend upon it, whether this something more be a later acquirement or an accompaniment from the first; it is something in whose absence the Reality would still be complete. It will sometimes come and go, sometimes be inextricably attached,