The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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sented according to context, by " Surface-Knowledge,” by ‘‘ Ordinary Mentation,” by Sense-Knowing or Sense- Knowledge, or the like.
This second phase of the human soul also possesses the three faculties known as Will. Intellectual-Imagination, and Intellectual-Memory. The Intellectual-Imagination and Intellectual-Memory, distinct from the lower Imagination and Memory, deal with the intellectual element of sensation, presenting sensations, as it were, to the higher faculty for judgment and for the uses of the semi-divine life of philosophic Man.
3. The last phase of the Soul, the Unreasoning-Soul, is the Principle of Animal-Life ; it constitutes, in conjunction with the bod}', the Animal as distinct from the Man : here for reasons of emotional connotation or clearness this phase of the soul conjoined with the body has been said to produce not ” The Animal ” but ” The Animate ” or ” The Animate-Entity.” This conjunction is also called bv Plotinus the ” Two-together,” usually translated here as the Couplement.
The faculties of this ” Unreasoning-Soul ” or of the ” Couplement ” are the Sensible (or sense-grasping) imagination and sensible Memory, the appetites rooted in the flesh, passivity or the faculty of sensation, and the vegetative, nutritive, and generative faculties.
TERMINOLOGY : MATTER AND MORALITY
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This last soul, or phase of the All-Soul, represents in man the very lowest “ strength ” of the Divinity except for the Matter which is organised by the All-Soul into the form of the body : this last soul, in other words, represents the bare fact of life, going as low as the life of the plant.
The word Soul used of man often conveys, in Plotinus’ practice, the idea of the highest in man, what we should be apt to call Spirit ; sometimes, where the motion is mainly of intellectual operation. Mind will be the nearest translation ; very often “ Life-Principle ” is the nearest.
Matter
As in Man before the organisation or shaping by the All-Soul, is the same as Matter everywhere else : there is a certain tendency to think of Matter as being “material,” e.g. in man as flesh or clay, in the world at large as some sort of powdery beginning or residue of things : this misconception must be carefully guarded out. “ Matter,” says Jules Simon, “ is rather a demand of thought than a reality of existence ” : this is perhaps to state the case rashly, but it is certainly nearer to the true conception than is the notion the word conveys to the uninstructed mind.
guarded out. “ Matter,” says Jules Simon, “ is rather a demand of thought than a reality of existence ” : this is perhaps to state the case rashly, but it is certainly nearer to the true conception than is the notion the word conveys to the uninstructed mind.
Matter is the last, lowest and least emanation of the creative power of the All-Soul, or rather it is a little lower than that even : it is, to speak roughly, the point at which the creative or generative power comes to a halt ; it is the Ultimate Possible, it is almost Non-BEiNG ; it would be Non-Being except that Absolute Non-Being is non-existent, impossible in a world emanating from the bounty of Being : often no doubt it is called Non-Being but this is not in strict definition but as a convenient expression of its utter, all-but infinite, remoteness from the Authentic-Existence to which, in the long line of descent, it owes its origin.
We are to think of it — as is indicated in the tract on Evil (I. 8) — as invisible, imperceptible to any sense, unknowable by any reach of the mind except by its negation of all that the mind can however feebly grasp, as utterly outside of the realm of form except in so far as feebly it stretches towards some determination in the universal pining of all things towards the Goodness and Wisdom from which however remotely all have sprung.
Evil
In so far as Evil exists, the root of evil is in Matter ; but Evil does not exist ; all that exists, in a half-existence, is the last effort of The Good, the point at which The Good ceases because, so to speak, endlessness has all but faded out to an end. If this seem too violent a paradox to be even mentioned amongst us, we must remember that it is to some degree merely metaphorical, like so much in Plotinus : it is the almost desperate effort to express a combined idea that seems to be instinctive in the mind of mind, the idea that Good is all-reaching and yet that it has degrees, that an Infinitely powerful Wisdom exists and operates and casts an infinite splendour on all its works while we ourselves can see, or think we see, its failures or the last and feeblest rays of its light.
Morality
The existence, or half-existence, of Matter brings about the necessity of morality ; The Divine perfection is above morality, is “ unmoral ” ; the purely m.aterial is below morality ;
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PLOTINUS
morality is for man ; man — being divine at his topmost pitch and ‘‘ human ” at the mean, and brute below that and merely vegetative below that and merely Matter in the lowest range of his nature — man, if he is to reach is below morality ;
p. 124
PLOTINUS
morality is for man ; man — being divine at his topmost pitch and ‘‘ human ” at the mean, and brute below that and merely vegetative below that and merely Matter in the lowest range of his nature — man, if he is to reach his good, the desired of every being, must “ what in him is dark illumine, what is low raise and support,” if he is to rise to the height of his great argument, become what his highest is, attain his eternally destined Term.
The Term and the Way
His Way is indicated in many sumptuous passages of the Enneads — it is coldly charted for him in the tractate on Dialectic, I. 3. The Term is more richly described in the famous sixth tract of the same First Ennead ; the main need, the cry, of man’s nature is to become actually, as he is always potentially. Divine : all his faculties, images each of its next highest, culminate in the Intellectual-Principle or Intellective-Principle, the Intuitional or True-knowing Faculty ; and his duty, or rather his happiness, his blessedness, his deepest inner choice, is to labour his entire being into identification with this, the Divine in him : through this inner Divine, in an ecstasy away from all the lower, and first from all that links him to Matter, he may even in this life attain to the " possession ” of the God-head in an ineffable act of identification, becoming Uniate, one with God, actually God, and foretasting the blessedness of the final Return after which he is for all the space of eternity to be with the God-head, to be Divine, or to be God.
MINOR POINTS OF TERMINOLOGY
Authentic-Existent, -Existents, -Existence represent what is usually conveyed by the English philosophical term Real-Being. This choice was made, mainly, on considerations of literary convenience : an original writer can so play with his sentence-construction as to avoid the awkward clash between the Noun and Participle ; a translator works more freely when there is no possibility of this clash.
It happens, moreover, that the adopted term is in itself better, at least for Plotinian uses ; Real-Being carries some undesirable suggestion of the purely abstract ; “ The Authentic-Existent ” comports something of the notion of Person or Individuality in an august sense and, so, is often though not by any means always, nearer to the Plotinian notion. The need of some such departure from the customary term was suggested by Mr. Meade’s use of the emphatic “ That which is ” for the same notion : Mr.