The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

t of those known as the Fates, to Clotho the Spinner, must be due the unity and as it were interweaving of ' all that exists : Lachesis (the Apportioner) presides over the Lots : to Atropos (the Inflexible) must necessarily belong the conduct of mundane events.

Of men, some enter into life as fragments of the All, bound to that which is external to themselves : they are victims of a sort of fascination, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves : but others mastering all this — straining, so to speak, by the head towards the Higher, to what is outside even the Soul— preserve still the nobility and the ancient privilege of the Soul’s essential being.

For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a thing whose nature is just a sum of impressions from outside — as if it, alone, of all that exists, had no native character.

No : much more than all else, the Soul, possessing the Idea which belongs to a Principle, must have as its native wealth many powers serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an Essential-Existent and with this Existence must go desire and act and the tendency towards some good.

While body and soul stand one combined thing, there is a joint nature, a definite entity having definite functions and employments ; but as soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept apart, its very

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PLOTINUS

own : it ceases to take the body’s concerns to itself : it has vision now : body and soul stand widely apart.

i6.

The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the Living-Being is.

On all this there has been a conflict of teaching : the matter must be examined later on from quite other considerations than occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul.

One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in succession — man followed by horse and other animals domestic or wild : fire and earth, though, first of all — that it watches these creations acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing sequences ; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures.

led web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing sequences ; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each other according to their definite natures.

Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about, since its first creations have set up the entire enchainment.

No doubt the Reason-Principle (conveyed by the Soul) covers all the action and experience of this realm : nothing happens, even here, by any form of haphazard ; all follows a necessary order.

Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the Reason- Principles ?

To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action ; they exist and they know ; or better, the Soul, which contains the engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought to pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably ensue : the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total.

II. 3. 1 6]

ARE THE STARS CAUSES?

p. 175

All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration : men, for instance, are not as they were of old ; by dint of interval and of the inevitable law, the Reason-Principles (constituting man) have ceded something to the characteristics of the Matter.

But : —

The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works : this is its life, and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence — like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc.

If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable we are obliged to think that the Reason-Principles themselves foreknew or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.

But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the Reason- Principles, though (we ought to be saved from this by reflecting that) the arts and their guiding principle do not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the work of art.

And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.

Still, by the side of the better there exists also what is less good.

e do not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the work of art.

And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing contrary to nature, nothing evil.

Still, by the side of the better there exists also what is less good.

Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may co-operate ; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe : all living-beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly ; the less good are potentially present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves ; the Soul’s power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason- Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good.

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PLOTINUS

Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the better ; so that out of the total of things — modified by Soul on the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound as in the Reason- Principles — there is, in the end, a Unity.

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But these Reason-Principles, contained in the Soul, are they
Thoughts ?

And if so, by what process does the Soul create in accordance with these Thoughts ?

It is upon Matter that this act of the Reason is exercised ; and what acts physically is not an intellectual operation or a vision, but a power modifying matter, not conscious of it but merely acting upon it : the Reason-Principle, in other words, acts much like a force producing a figure or pattern upon water — that of a circle, suppose, where the formation of the ring is conditioned by something distinct from that force itself (i.e. by the existence and nature of the water).

If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul (that which conveys the Reason- Principles) must act (not directly but) by manipulating the other Soul, that which is united with Matter and has the generative function.

But is this handling the result of calculation ?

Calculation implies reference. Reference, then, to something outside or to something contained within itself ? If to its own content, there is no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act of creation ; creation is the operation of that phase of the Soul which contains Ideal- Principles ; for that is its stronger puissance, its creative part.