The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

career or, if they were not, then neither is the immediate grouping. And notice further that physical likeness to the parents — the Astrologers hold — is of purely domestic origin : this implies that ugliness and beauty are so caused and not by astral movements.

Again, there must at one and the same time be a widespread coming to birth — men, and the most varied forms of animal life at the same moment — and these should all be under the one destiny since the one pattern rules at the moment ; how explain that identical star-groupings give here the human form, there the animal ?

6.

But in fact everything follows its own Kind ; the birth is a horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from the Human Kind ; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being :

p. 8

PLOTINUS

allow the stars a wide material action upon the bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical constitution ; still does such action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems quite independent of material elements, a man taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of these pursuits ? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings, bestowing wickedness ? And what of a doctrine that makes them wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are being carried to a position beneath the earth — as if a decline from our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure around the earth.

Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in goodness as they see this one or another of the company in various aspects, and that in their happier position they are benignant to us and, less pleasantly situated, turn maleficent. We can but believe that their circuit is for the protection of the entirety of things while they furnish the incidental service of being letters on which the augur, acquainted with that alphabet, may look and read the future from their pattern — arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a soaring bird tells of some lofty event.

7-

It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-Principle alleged to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon — a Principle which, acting through seminal (operatively productive) Reason- Forms — Logoi Spermatikoi — elaborates all that exists and happens.

weave everything with everything else, to make things into a chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon — a Principle which, acting through seminal (operatively productive) Reason- Forms — Logoi Spermatikoi — elaborates all that exists and happens.

The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or — supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act — within ourselves.

But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity : all the causative forces enter into the system, and so every several phenomenon rises necessarily ; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power

III. 1.8]

FATE

p. 9

to check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one general cause leave us no resource but to go where they drive. All our ideas will be determined by a chain of previous causes ; our doings will be determined by those ideas ; personal action becomes a mere word. That we are the agents does not save our freedom when our action is prescribed by those causes ; we have precisely what belongs to everything that lives, to infants guided by blind impulses, to lunatics ; all these act ; why, even fire acts ; there is act in everything that follows the plan of its being, servilely.

No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate : unable to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations of our action.

8.

What can this other cause be ; one standing above those treated of ; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury ?

Soul : we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the Soul of the individual : this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause : for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign ; it would hold rank in a series.

not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause : for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign ; it would hold rank in a series.

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes (or, by chance-causes) : there will therefore be a compromise ; the action of the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler Soul will have the greater power ; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. The

p. 10

PLOTINUS

soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings ; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence.

9-

We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is brought about by this compromise between evil and accidental circumstance ; what room was there for anything else than the thing that is ? Given all the causes, all must happen beyond aye or nay — that is, all the external and whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit — therefore when the Soul has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary ; so, too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of action.

But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Principle, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as our doing, for they have no other source ; they are the issue of the unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus.

10.

To sum the results of our argument : — All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by causes ; but the causation is of two Kinds ; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to other causes, those of the environment.