The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

e inner-peace, equally impossible ; impossible, too, if the good of life be to live in accordance with the purpose of nature.

2.

Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to all living things.

By sensation can be meant, only, perception of state, and the state of well-being must be a Good in itself quite apart from the perception : to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without knowledge : there is good in the appropriate state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality — for it must be in itself desirable.

This Good exists, then ; is present ; that in which it is present has well-being without more ado : what need then to ask for sensation into the bargain ?

Perhaps, however, the theory is that the Good of any state consists not in the condition itself but in the knowledge and perception of it.

But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient life. And so it will be possessed by all that feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two constituents are needed to make up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given state felt : but how can it be maintained that the bringing together of two neutrals can produce the Good ?

They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of Good and that such a condition constitutes well-being on the discernment of that present good ; but then they invite the question whether the well-being comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or whether there must further be the double recognition that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.

If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher faculty ; and well-being is vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent to discern that pleasur e is the Good.

Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the

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PLOTINUS

faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure’s value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state ; it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection : pleasure is a state : the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is.

S

faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure’s value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state ; it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection : pleasure is a state : the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order ?

No : those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.

Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of Reason ?

But they must tell us why it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a living being : —

“ When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass’ the primal needs of nature ; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain ? ”

If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants : Reason becomes a servant ; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue.

If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect thing it is.

For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such planning and providing : its perfection will be something quite different, something of quite another class : Reason cannot be itself one of those first needs of nature ; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that order : it must be nobler than any and all of such things : otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so highly.

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HAPPINESS

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Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.

What then is happiness ? Let us try basing it upon Life.

they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.

What then is happiness ? Let us try basing it upon Life.

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Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by nature receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness were inherent in the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of happiness could always take root would be simply life.

Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not really making it depend upon life at all : they admit that this reasoning faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property (not the subject of a property) : the subject, to them, must be the Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the basis of the happiness : so that they are making it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life — not, of course, a species formally opposite but, in our terminology, standing as an “ earlier ” to a “ later ” in the one Kind.

Now in common use this word “ Life " embraces many forms which shade down from primal to secondary and so on, all massed under the common term — life of plant and life of animal — each phase brighter or dimmer than its next : and so it evidently must be with the Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of thing, so every Good must always be the image of a higher Good.

If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives fully.

And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme Good can be

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PLOTINUS

no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought in from without, a life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.